Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qObdS-bhRM
I believe that we are already at the early stages if not in World War II. It just doesn't look like the wars of the past. And people should understand what is at stake, which is we are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away, or even one AI generated viral video from nuclear annihilation. Is there anything at all you're doing to prepare? I'm leaving the United States by 2026. But is there anywhere on this map that is safe in a war? So my understanding is that there's actually three safe zones. You are right. There's Hawaii. No, because there are so many targets in Hawaii and same with all of Europe, but there's one tiny little place right there. So, where do we find ourselves in terms of conflict and warfare? Now, it's getting worse. And in the past, it was whoever had the strongest military. Now, you can destabilize a government or a society using a server farm and 20 people sitting in a room thousands of miles away. And another real problem we have right now is that the different political parties inside the United States are so intent on taking down the other side. They do it at the national security peril. So now Russia or China can play people off against one another and cause division. Angie, what do you think happens next? Well, I think World War II is going to be shaped by what we call proxy war, where a wealthy nation state funds, trains, and arms conflict in a less wealthy state to decrease the capability of your primary target. They're using that nation to do the work for them. Exactly. Right. That's already happening. Then what's the probability of nuclear war? So here's a terrifying detail that the public does not know. So wow. Listen to my regular listeners. I know you don't like it when I ask you to subscribe at the start of these conversations. I don't like saying I don't like it being in there. None of us like it. It's frustrating. Do you know what's also frustrating? It's also
frustrating when I go into the back end of the YouTube channel and I see that 56% of you that listen frequently to this podcast haven't yet subscribed and so many of you don't even know that you haven't subscribed because I see in the comment section you say to me, you go, "I didn't even realize I didn't subscribe." And that actually fuels the show. It's basically like you're making a donation to the show. So that's why I ask all the time because it enables us to build and build and build and build and we're going for the long term here. So, all I'd ask you is if you've seen this show before and you like it, help me, help my team here. Hit the subscribe button and we'll continue to build this show for you. That's my promise. Thank you to all of you guys that do subscribe. Means the world to me. Let's get on with the show. [Music] I invited you all here today because I intuitively feel like the world is changing before our eyes. And I think so many of us if we're on social media or reading newspapers can feel a sort of tension growing in society that is hard to understand if you're not an expert or you're not connected to these subjects in some way. I looked at some stats before this conversation that kind of support this feeling that I've intuitively had and it shows that conflict zones across the world have increased by 66% in the last 3 years. In December 2024, the American think tank Atlantic Council asked about 400 global strategists about their thoughts about what's going on in the world. And 65% think that China will evade invade Taiwan by force within 10 years. About 40% think there'll be a world war in the next 10 years. About 50% think nuclear weapons will be used in the next 10 years. And about 45% think Russia and NATO will fight directly. When we look at sort of spending and what's happening there, there's been a huge jump in military spending. There's now 300,000 NATO troops around the world that are on 30-day high alert readiness. 59 states um have erupted in war since 2023, which is the greatest number logged in any year since 1946. And world military spending is up by about 10% year-over-year, which is the highest sum ever recorded by SIPAR,
making it a full decade of uninterrupted growth in military spending. Things feel tense, and every time I turn on the news, I have a mild sense of anxiety. So, I've gathered you three here today to help me as a muggle, as a normal person that doesn't have an understanding, pass through what's going on and hopefully what we can do about this. Benjamin, to start with you, introductions. What's your context and what's the perspective experience you bring to this conversation? I was born in Iran in 1977. I came to the United States as a refugee under a program that President Carter allowed for Iranians fleeing religious and political persecution. and my family came here on that basis. And I basically spent the next 40 some odd years trying to understand why I come from a part of the world that seems to be in sort of continuous conflict and turmoil and exactly what can be understood about the forces that brought me here. I'm incredibly grateful to be here and what can be done to basically change or at least better understand it to pave a way for change and progress in the future. What age did you leave Iran and what was the environment like when you left? I was just under three years old and it was a few months after so the sha had left in December of 79 and then um we we left a few months after that around March. Humeni had just arrived from Paris on a flight in in February, basically taking control. And there was still a lot of anarchy and chaos as to exactly what the new regime would look like, what the government would look like. But we began, my parents began to see that there were some, you know, there were there were definitely mass arrests. There were protests. There were things that were happening that look like those who were loyal to the monarchy would be targeted, which is my family was a monarchist. Annie, same question to you. What what is the experience context that you bring to this conversation? I am an author uh a journalist and I write about war and weapons, US national security and secrets and I'm interested in looking at the very sort of minutia of weapons and weapons systems and the people who use them. I've written seven books and all of them deal with war and weapons and all of them deal with the
Pentagon and the CIA specifically. So all of my sources come from those organizations, the military and the intelligence community. And your last book we talked about last time you came on to this show. What is your last book about? And what what sort of journey did you go on to gather the information for that? So my most recent book is called Nuclear War, a scenario. And in that book, I take the reader from nuclear launch to nuclear winter, which happens in a period of 72 minutes. And I interview presidential adviserss, secretaries of defense, nuclear subforce commander, etc., etc. People who are very close to the chain of command, people who have rehearsed making these decisions if they need to be made. And what I learned terrified me. And from what I the book has been out for over a year now, still in hardback. People are reading it in 28 countries around the world. This is a serious edge of peril topic and I think we're here to talk about that because no no time in my life I think have we been closer to thinking about this reality than right now. Andrew, there's a few subjects and words that Annie mentioned there that also cross over in your story. One of them being nuclear war uh and nuclear weapons. what is your context and how do you what is the sort of experience and perspective you bring to this? What's your experience? Yeah, I am a former clandestine CIA intelligence officer. Uh also a uh decorated wartime veteran from the United States Air Force during our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Um I've lived in this world that uh that we're talking about, this world of conflict, the world of nuclear threats, the world of developing nations and uh political and military force as a tool to shape democracy, to shape diplomacy. Um, and I'm very excited to get into this topic because I think there are certain areas here that are misunderstood, areas that are overdramatized, and then areas that are not being spoken about that are very relevant and very compelling. Wasn't there a period of your life where you were underground and part of that
sort of nuclear chain of command that Annie described? Absolutely. That's where my career started actually was with the uh ICBM, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Forces of the United States Air Force. Uh overseeing Minute Man 3 missiles in Montana uh armed with 10 nuclear warheads each uh understanding the military doctrine, the strategies, the policies for how to execute. So you were you were underground with a physical nuclear key, correct? Around around my neck. And there are uh even as we have this conversation now, there are hundreds of US soldiers, hundreds of of Russian soldiers that are in very similar positions. And they're not they're not much older than uh than a high school graduate right now. Many people think we're on the cusp of World War II, but I think you've said in the past that you actually think World War II has already begun in some context. Yeah, correct. I believe that we are already at the early stages, if not in World War II. The problem is that people seem to think that World War II is going to emulate World War II. The deployment of nuclear technology and nuclear weapons now would look completely different than the deployment of nuclear weapons looked than World War II, if only because we have nine nuclear capable countries right now. Not to mention the fact that we have a completely different information landscape. We have a completely different political landscape. We have a whole different uh landscape for alliances and for treaties. The world is very, very different than it was when World War II broke out. So, you think we're in World War II now or the early innings of that? And I think World War II is going to be shaped by what we call proxy war. What is proxy warfare? Proxy warfare is when a wealthy nation state uh funds and trains and arms conflict in a less wealthy state uh where there's usually some sort of civil disturbance or civil fight that's already happening. Much of what we've seen in the last 10 years is is proxy warfare. Libya, Syria, Yemen, people argue that what we saw even Afghanistan, Iraq, where the US was involved was
proxy warfare. Israel and Iran is model proxy warfare. Uh Russia and Ukraine are also models for proxy warfare. So there's someone else funding it and they're using that nation to do the the work for them essentially. Exactly. Right. You use a intermediate nation that's still developing to decrease the capability of your primary target while you yourself conserve your own troops, your own weapons, and your own civilians against harm. Benjamin, what's your take on that in terms of us being at the start of the precipice of a of a world war and it looking like a sort of a different um different set of weapons, a different way that we'll fight each other and the internet and digital warfare being a part of that. I don't think since the the beginning of the Cold War, let's say let's go back to 1947 or 48, I don't think we've stopped fighting. I just think we're fighting wars of different kinds. I think this idea of kinetic warfare is less frequent especially among the major powers. So um Israel and Iran as an example of one of the last few gasps of kinetic warfare. But if we look at the United States and China, United States and Russia, the European powers, NATO, it's less kinetic than it is more through um use of information, through technology, through cyber warfare. What's so kinetic is when I refer to kinetic I mean using actual physical memes bombs missiles tanks um soldiers that type of thing and it's less now and it's more now moving towards other forms where it you can now destabilize a government or a system of government or a society using a server farm and 20 people sitting in a room thousands of miles away and you don't necessarily need weapons to do that. um where information becomes weaponized where digital tools become weaponized and that's far different than anything we saw in the 20th century. So I think that the rise of the internet in the late you know beginning late 1990s through the 2000s we've seen now this become industrialized at scale and I think the threat comes now from the ability of reg of countries and regimes to destabilize and interfere with others in a way that they simply couldn't do years ago and now you don't even need to fund it massively to do that. It's basically warfare on the cheap.
Mhm. Before we started recording, I expressed to you that there's a certain tension in the world right now. Yeah. Where's where's that coming from and why in your perspective? One of the things that's been evident to us, especially since the the 2016 elections here in the United States is this idea that we live in a post-truth society. And with so much information available to everybody on every platform, through every means and channel, there is now no monopoly on objective truth or fact. And so with that comes the ability to distort, to propagandize, to mislead, to misinform. And people do this to aggregate power, to bring power to themselves. And so when we live in a world where everyone thinks they know everything or they are afraid that they don't know enough, you have a constant state of tension and anxiety and people are uncertain about their place in society. There's a, you know, a wealth gap comes into play. And with that, you feel like there's threats or perceived threats or conspiracies around every corner. And this is why I think lies and misinformation and conspiracy theories take hold in times like this when people are anxious, frightened, uncertain about their place in society, about what's coming next. And that puts us in a very tense state and very clever people can take advantage of that and manipulate to their benefit. So that I think explains why we feel this tension that we do. The tension is clearly resulting in real changes because those stats I read out at the start where there's more nations in conflict now. there's more military funding. Um, more people think we're on the verge of of something pretty catastrophic than any time in the last couple of decades. That information that which is causing attention is then having a downstream impact which is conflict is breaking out. I'd say it's upstream. Um, you have polarization happening within societies especially in western societies where there is no monopoly on the truth or news or information. you have the fragmentation of let's say major news sources. Traditionally, you have a few very respected trusted sources and authorities or figureheads that people would turn to. We don't have that
anymore. It's now been diluted to the point that it is almost meaningless. And so, you see the social media has contributed to this. And so with that, these these with these divisions, these schisms in society have made major industrial powers like the United States, like let's say the Europeans more vulnerable to manipulation than ever before. So now if you're a adversary like Russia or China, Iran, North Korea, you can take advantage of the ability to tap into this polarization and play people off against one another, cause division, and that allow and that destabilizes democratic societies. And then that in turn enables these countries like Russia and China and others to have more leverage and more influence in the developing world. In the past it was whoever had the strongest military. Now you don't necessarily need the strongest military to do it. You just need to have the strongest um information army and the willingness to do the dirty things that Western societies don't do anymore, but they used to. I want to interrupt because I think there's an order of operations here that we're getting at that isn't clear. I would argue that that ignorance starts the foundation for the polarization that is then capitalized on through this information warfare landscape. So I I say that because I think it's important for us to understand that your your statistics are relevant and correct. Those statistics don't come first, they come after. The ignorance kind of comes first. the the the willing blindness to what's happening in the world, the willingness to just focus in on what your tasks are or what entertains you and let the rest of the world kind of do whatever it's going to do. It's that choice first that then leads to other countries finding an opportunity to manipulate the masses that are no longer informed as to what's happening outside of their world. I don't want to speak for you, but that's that's kind of how CIA handles clandestine operations when it comes to information security operations is understanding we're not trying to make an audience ignorant. We're finding an ignorant audience and then giving them messaging to get them to take action. The difference is, so I would maintain
we've always been ignorant. The difference is now you can actually do something with that ignorance and manipulate it at scale that you couldn't before. So ignorance has always been with us, but before at least people knew where they could go to find what they perceived to be a trusted source. So now that source is gone. That messaging is gone. That skill is gone. I have I have a different take entirely which and I focus on narrative. So I'm really interested in who tells the story and who gets to control the story. And what I watch happening a lot is that the story is controlled for a while and then it gets hijacked over and it's someone else's story. So, it's kind of it's like the end of the spectrum of what you're both saying and you have the agency working really hard to grab it back. You've got the White House saying we need to get our stakeholder press, you know, and it's this. So, you're running essentially like a kinetic war, a proxy war, and an information war at the same time. And I think that the information is what is what drives most of this conflict, which is why it's so interesting to me to speak to diplomats the only people not at this table, right? That are like because then that's only where I see the hope of kind of like take it down because there's an ease that needs to happen when you can move the people from trust to paranoia. I love that you mentioned diplomacy and diplomats. So I I teach courses on diplomacy and one of the things I've seen emerge in the last few years is this dichotomy between private diplomacy, which is what we were used to when we studied the Cold War and postcold war conflicts and now we have public diplomacy. almost all diplomacy take take the um Iran Israel war the 12- day war as as Trump calls it how much of that war was conducted via social media this is now so you have this public-f facing diplomacy where you have during wartime leaders their representatives their proxies conveying messaging both to their enemies to their allies and to a supposedly neutral audience all through social media right so it is not no so much the nuclear age but the age of the algorithm and how that amplifies diplomacy in a way that never ever existed. And so this is I think this
lends to that dilution uh that then others can take advantage of because at the end of the day if you want to threaten a country or you want to garner support, how you articulate that via social media, whether you use all caps, whether you use images, memes, all of these things play into how effective that is. And you see that most on Tik Tok and when after the um October 2023 um uh Hamas attacks against Israel, the information warfare between the two sides and how it played out on college campuses. I was at a, you know, a big one where um a lot of that was taking place at UCLA and how that played out on social media and even among high school kids who I talk to and their understanding of conflict is now shaped by what Tik Tok, which is partially controlled by the um the Chinese government feeds them and chooses to feed them and amplify. So, here's a specific example which might be helpful to what you're saying with the 12-day war recently. I think the White House wanted that to just be a bombing run. You can correct me if I'm wrong. Just a bombing run. we're going to go, you know, we're so power. It was about power. It was about precision. Take it out. And it was the press that wrote, "America enters the war." Yeah. And that is a major headline. And that probably made the White House deeply upset because they don't want to be they don't want to be seen as entering into a war. And so I think another real problem we have right now with all of this tension ratcheting up is how angry and I'm just talking about America now. The political sides are at one another that to my eye because I'm an a-olitical writer. No one has any idea what my politics are. I write about war and weapons neutrally. But I can observe and it seems to me like the different waring political parties inside the United States are so intent on taking down the other side. They do they do it from my eye at the national security peril. In other words, a a a headline against Trump is better for them than US national security or world security. I'm curious what you Well, I think we're all saying something that's that's uh derivations of the same thing, versions of the same thing, right? There's a massive information warfare landscape happening. And it is that fog of war
that we look through that gives us that tension about what's actually happening at the ground level. If you think about conflict as being what what humans will do to each other, there's layers on top of that that create this this distortion of what you can expect. And there's so much activity in the information landscape that it's very distorted what could actually happen. We have a term at CIA and when we talk about uh when we talk about covert influence activities to shape information, we talk about volume and speed, which gets right back to your point about Tik Tok and social media. We've always engaged in information warfare, but the volume and the speed was much less and much slower because you had to fly [ __ ] pamphlets and drop them out of airplanes and hope that the people reading it were reading the right dialect of Arabic or Spanish. You had to hope and then once there was a rainstorm, all of your pamphlets are done. And if you're trying to make it look like they're not coming from America, they're trying There's all sorts of other layers to that. Well, now an algorithm that you don't even control Yes. is contributing to that. And then you've got creators, content creators all over the place that have no no added value to the content they're creating who are just clipping, cutting and and putting things together and then further being amplified, right? So the volume of information is massive and the speed at which it disseminates is huge and the algorithm can dictate whether you see it or don't see it at all. So, while I appreciate your point of view that there's this tension and there's this growing concern, I honestly think that your your opinion on that is because you're informed and intelligent and there are huge groups of people who are completely oblivious to where we actually are on a a sliding scale of approaching conflict. Where are we? I think that's what we're really here to discuss. I would argue that we are not entering a phase of less conflict. we are going to enter a phase 5 to 10 years of more conflict, increasing conflict, a willingness to engage in more kinetic conflict to use your term. I don't think that we're showing the various uh global power competitors of the world that it
will not be tolerated. I think we're showing the global power competitors of the world that violence, kinetic attacks, cyber warfare, weapons development is going to be accepted. My wish is that America could overcome her tribal anger, you know, to to that a lot of Americans have toward one another that are in different political parties because I feel like America is a leader in terms of security and safety or can be and should be and that all of this amplification of the rhetoric is is deeply dividing. The fancy word is divisive, but it's just dividing. And that if there's any place that one's enemies or adversaries or call them what you will is can take advantage of that it is right there. Is that wishful thinking for me to say uh I am a very wishful thinking person. I mean I write about the grimmst darkest subjects imaginable you know with a smile on my face because I just am naturally uh I'm naturally optimistic. I'm the mother of two you know collegeage boys. Of course I'm going to be optimistic. Andrew was just saying that he thinks there's going to be more conflict going forward. We have nine nations now that have these nuclear weapons that some might argue creates stability, but some might argue that it only takes one individual. And you said there's what, six nations hosting those nuclear weapons. I don't know. Sometimes I think I think gosh, you only need one miscommunication or one mistake from one person who is, I don't know, not doing too well mentally or having a bad day. That's kind of how I think about it. And I'm like probabilistically if you just stretch it out some point that's going to happen. Some point that's going to happen. Well, you're absolutely right and that is why I mean it'll be interesting if we maybe talk about Iran just from the you know specifics about what happened and you know why that's is or is not important because I just having looked at nuclear weapons so microscopically recently I believe that that existential threat the global catastrophic risk of a nuclear you know of a flame that starts that movement toward a nuclear nuclear use is a sort of line that must never be crossed. And so while all war is terrible, there is always a solution on
the other side of the war. The war peace can be made, but not with nuclear. And so that, you know, I look at things right now through that lens, which is how I saw the most recent bombing. You mentioned uh Andrew talked about Israel and Iran being a proxy war. So that kind of piqued my interest. Um I I almost reflexively want to disagree, but I want to hear more about why you think so, so I can better understand proxy conflict from that angle. Yeah. Well, the way I see it, um Israel is ratcheting up its aggression against proxies that Iran has been using to to threaten it for decades, right? But Israel is also dependent on American weapons to do that. It's also dependent on American intelligence to do that. It's dependent on American support financially and economically. So it needs America to wage its conflict moving forward. If America were to say, "Israel, we don't support you," then Israel would take a different approach without a doubt. So the funding, the support, the intelligence flow, the economic support coming from the United States is what empowers Israel to prosecute its conflict. Without that support, Israel would take a different approach to the conflict. But then proxy would imply that Israel is acting as an agent or at the behest of the United States. So the United States rather than getting involved directly with Iran up until last week operates through another entity. That's the misunderstanding about proxy war. You're looking first for some sort of conflict that already exists. The conflict between Israel and Iran already exists. The proxy then the the the proxy relationship happens when an outsider, a third party, comes in and exacerbates the conflict by putting more fuel on an existing fire. It's not that that Israel is the agent of of the United States. It's that Israel's already wants to prosecute some sort of conflict. We come in and we're essentially the fuel to help exacerbate that fight. So, who's the proxy in this conflict? Israel. Okay. Israel's the proxy for the United States who wants to diminish Iran in the same way that Israel wants to diminish Iran. This specific conflict is so fascinating
because every [ __ ] buddy wants Israel to degrade Iran. Saudi Arabia wants that. The United States wants that. All of the European Union wants that. Israel wants that. Everybody wants to see a degraded Iran. So, Israel, especially after what it's been doing in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel's desperate for anything it can do to win back favor for the Abraham Accords as a democratic country. You name it, it's looking for an option. And Iran is a very convenient option for them to build back relationships that they've killed along with the the attacks in Gaza. If the reasons are different, does that still make one a proxy of the other? So Iran's uh Israel's objections to Iran and it's it's the reason it sees Iran as a adversary might differ from the United States and there's a ven diagram. There's some overlap but there's also a tremendous amount that doesn't overlap. Same thing with the Saudis, the Gulf States, other regional states that see Iran as a threat. They see it for different reasons. Does that still, and I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just trying to understand, does that still make them a proxy if their motives are different? I would say yes, because it's not about the parts of the ven diagram that don't overlap. It's about the parts that do. It's about the convenience of Israeli citizens dying, Israeli soldiers dying, Israeli weapons being spent. That's the benefit of a proxy conflict. It's not American citizens who are at risk. It's not American soldiers who are dying. It's not American weapons that are being spent. We get to build our surplus. And if anything, we get to build extra and sell it to Israel, which is benefiting our economy. So this is the the uncomfortable truth behind proxy war is it it's all the benefits of a wartime environment without any of the risks. But then what also happens and you can look at Vietnam as a great example is the proxy wars that are supposed to be low cost for the United States end up blowing up into being a disaster for the United States. So I think of Vietnam I think classic proxy war. Right. Right. Kruef gave that speech I think 1963 whenever it was about wars of national liberation and that they would be fought in what was
then called the third world Vietnam being a classic case there I see absolutely right first you had the French you know in French Indochina and then the United States bailing the French out arguably the French were maybe a proxy for US interests they were part of that firewall that were keeping the dominoes from falling but again I'm struggling to I'm trying to understand the Israel United States proxy angle here um and That's a unique definition of proxy, I guess. Okay, so you butt in with an example. You tell me if this is right or wrong. Yeah. So, in a weird way, the Iraq war was a proxy war for the same reason. The Iraq war the 2000 which the George Bush and Dick Cheneyy's Iraq war, right, were trying to weaken Iran. You think the Iraq war was an attempt to weaken Iran? I mean, you you pipe in here, but that's how it started. That was the original intention. And the deep tragic irony is what we have now which is Iran is running Iran. Why does the United States want to weaken Iran? The Iran the United States the United States because what happened to your family in 197 but why but but why does what's the beef the US has with Iran? I mean for 400 and something days in 1979 and we will not let that go until that is you know how is that how what is what does justice look like? I'm not saying that's Yeah. No, but I'm saying why why are we at war with Iran or not at war, but why are we at conflict with Iran? I mean, I think there's a lot of different a lot of different valid answers for that, but where I would take this, especially to keep it um really accessible to the lay person, right, is that the United States wants zero competition for being this the single superpower in the world. It wants no competition for that. It wants to remain the single superpower everywhere because being the single superpower gives your civilians gives your population uh security but it also means that you have the lion's share of all the resources in the world and basic economics teaches us that all economics is based on resources.
So Iran's goals to create a Shia state to create a Shia crescent of power and influence across the Middle East is in stark contrast to what would benefit the United States. What the United States wants is to maintain a Sunni majority because that's where the oil is coming from is majority for United States. Sunni wealthy collegi states even though Iran's the second largest not for the United States. Yeah. Not for the United States. But it was right during the United States greatest period of prosperity there. It was a bipolar world. So unipolarity is something we've had since the you know since the '90s onward. And yes there's been tremendous success but arguably unipolarity has been destabilizing. What's unipolarity? where you have one world power basically dominating which has kind of been the case since the end of the cold war and now we've seen a rise of other sort of polls maybe with China being one but you had during the entirety of the cold war was a bipolar structure you had the Soviets you had the US and they were dictating everything else on the chessboard that was the globe right in front of us and arguably since the end of the cold war the unipolar system has not been very stable you could say that I think the stats you cited the number of conflicts have almost increased um since that time what is what what's the take away from that from what do you guys think I mean this is where I think academics and reality butt heads okay because academically I agree with you okay and on principle I agree with you the world could be better if it was multipolar if we had a strong Europe and we had a strong country in China and we had a strong or a country in in Asia and we had a strong United States and and if we could find a way to cooperate effectively and collaborate without conflict. I mean, academically, all of that sounds wonderful. Well, I don't pretend that it's going to be friendly or cooperative. I think you can have multipolar where you still have adversaries.
Yeah. But the are the idea is that you're saying that countries seek to be unipolar. They seek to be global hedgeimens because that gives them what? No. No. Countries don't do that. Once you are once you are a nearper competitor, then you have no other option in the reality of it except to be the most powerful. This is why there's only one Olympic gold winner for any competition, for any specific Olympics. You can't have a tie, right? It's the reason why if there is a game that ends in a tie, it goes into overtime because you have to have a winner. That's like it's it's human nature. I have to know what my threat level is against you. So, one of us has to be dominant and one of us has to not be as it has to be second to our dominance. And we can have dominance in different areas, right? That's why when I'm a guest in your home, I follow your rules. when you're a guest in my home, you follow my rules. There's an element of that that's all just built into our our DNA as human beings. But what the United States has is it has global hedgeimony. It has all the benefits of the world's wealthiest economy, the strongest currency, the the lead on technology. We've diversified our workforce so that we don't have to rely on manufacturing. We have we literally make money off of ideas in the United States. Whereas a place like China is doomed to try to have human beings who do things with their fingers to make money. So when you have that level of power, you become very focused on keeping that power. Talk to any wealthy person out there and they'll tell you the same thing. But war is a zero- sum game. The Olympics are a zero- sum game. Diplomacy implies that others can win. Not everyone can win equally, but multiple winners can emerge or multiple losers can emerge. We can all kind of share a spot in the podium. two people can stand in the gold section. You know, you can split it. You can have a team sport, right? Where everyone's getting gold on that team if they win. Uh how is that is that consistent with what culture? This is where culture starts to lay in. Yeah. And I would say that the United States is a zero sum culture. I would say too.
Okay. I don't think it's pretty, man. But I think it's the facts. I also think it's interesting when I hear you guys talk. It's like you can imagine what it's like in the White House. Imagine the president, he's having some of his adviserss tell him exactly this, like, you know, the the kind of big we must dominate. And then you have his military adviserss wanting specifics having to do with what their intentions are in their lane. And so I think it's what's interesting for you know the lay men which which I certainly am on some level is that when you begin the more information you get you know this is like on the other side of that information is actually a great thing for all of us you can begin to understand the context. Okay wow that's you know Andrew said that and that that makes sense now. So I think then you start to see as an individual the world makes more sense to you. It's less threatening like what is going on? Oh my god, World War III is around the corner. But the president of the United States lives in his own or, you know, silo and has so much incredible power. This just the longer I report on all of this, the more I am amazed at how powerful the president of the United States is. And if we look at the current president, how much more power is being absorbed there. And the the idea of them being in their own silo. I mean, no pun intended, but pun intended. Absolutely. I mean traditional traditional political focused policydriven presidents they try to find a way to reduce the silo effect. The current president has done the opposite. He's increased the insulation against expertise from people who have forged careers uh being becoming experts in their field. Instead, he's surrounded himself with voices that are that are more interested in who knows media intentions, future uh future political benefits, but they're not necessarily coming from an informed expertise like what we've seen in previous presidents. And that's where I think you use the word context. Absolutely. I think that's that's that's perfect to capture it. It's the context. So, you know, content is what the three of us are discussing here. uh content context is what the cameras are recording what editing is
done afterwards and then what gets disseminated beyond there that is you know in in in a broader uh scope that is the algorithm that is social media that is basically restricting the context to whatever it the owners of that content feel it needs to be and that I think also contributes to this sort of unipolar zero sum mindset and uh because only one algorithm can win you can't have competing algorithms we're trying to have competing algorithms with with with China and they're winning. Um I a few um two years ago I designed a war game simulation for a group of retired military officials and we had some prominent ex we had governors, senators, national security staff uh role playinging um White House situation room and one of the things that was interesting was my job I I designed this game. It was meant to be what if a second January 6th happened but this time the insurrection comes from within the military. you have defections from the military, National Guard bases, isolated bases, right? Could the Pentagon be prepared for something like that? What would that look like? And I had the White House was staffed with this incredible social media team that was meant to sort of signal to the American people and to the the president and to everyone else what's happening. And I had four people playing the Red Cell. The red cell consisted of basically trolls, provocators who aren't necessarily committed to overthrowing but just wanted to, you know, to to just wanted sort of the action. It's like borrowing what what Heath Ledger said is the Joker. Some people just want to watch the world burn, right? Or to He didn't say that, but it was from Batman, right? And the havoc that two or three people in a bar were able to simulate or to create versus an entire White House apparatus staffed with experienced people. These are people who who were on actual White House comms teams who had the training. We had military folks who had worked in defense intelligence and you had two or three trolls in their 20s who some were veterans who were able to absolutely cause havoc. And so that is the that because the algorithm and I designed the algorithm to amplify their stuff and it and it and the White House could not
keep up. That's fascinating. That's terrifying. That is terrifying. That is where I think the warfare and you know the idea of World War II and conflict that is how you get to zero sum that is how you get to who emerges with the gold medal. I think so to back to your point the context who controls that silo who controls the mic who controls the aperture is going to matter more. One of the things Donald Trump has shown us is how much of an economy of attention we really are in. And just like having the most money makes you wealthy in a fiscal economy, having the most attention makes you very wealthy in an attention economy. And here's a man who even when he wasn't president was in the headlines every day. So it's I think that the unpredictability of what he's going to do moving forward doesn't bring us closer to peace. It doesn't bring us closer to uh proper communications. It's I you mentioned you know are we one miscommunication away. If we are then we are in a very dire place because there is a lot of miscommunication happening. Well, I've read the stories through history of miscommunications nearly resulting in nuclear war or some missile being launched. I mean, Anna, you've studied quite a few of those moments through history. I was listening to one the other day. I think it was a story of um a Russian nuclear commander who who saw something on the radar and he thought the US was striking and for whatever reason he decided to assume that it wasn't and reported back to his his uh sort of overlords that it wasn't a nuclear strike and didn't press the button. But everything on his radar told him that the US had launched multiple missiles. Are you familiar with that particular story? Y what is that story? He's called the man who stole the man who saved the world. It was 1983 and he was in a bunker in Russia. Their sort of equivalent of we have a similar uh a radar, you know, a system that's looking at satellite tracking satellite activity. And it was perceived that America had launched missiles from the Midwest, ICBMs, and the, you know, you're absolutely
right. I mean, you told the story perfectly. He decided not to raise the the threat up the chain of command, which would have put the entire Soviet nuclear command and control on, you know, massive alert. He just didn't do it. And it was interesting because he, you know, was sort of really bered later by Russian command and control, but he got the moniker, the man who saved the world. There's a documentary about him that's definitely worth watching. And your point is what Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Gutirez said recently, which is we are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation or even one AI generated viral video that goes, you know, that the wrong person gets the wrong idea from. Imagine the Cuban missile crisis, how close we came. And imagine if you had generative AI content that made it look like the Soviets had deployed or fired a missile or anything to that effect. We saw during this Iran Israel conflict, I mean, how many videos on on X I saw that showed devastation in Tel Aviv or devastation in downtown Tan. I mean they were obviously fabricated and AI generated but the extent to which these things were recirculated and spread and that I saw sources who I would normally trust sort of um amplified these not knowing until someone else pointed out wait a minute that's you know from a video game or that's generative AI and imagine if our decision makers didn't have redundancies or self or fail safes in place to be able to identify that this is what that is and they acted on a misread or something that they thought was real. That's that's what concerns me. Are our intelligence forces more sophisticated than that? Presumably, they're not on Twitter or something looking at videos. Well, they are. They are there as well. And that's that's a type of intelligence called open source intelligence. Uh I but the short answer is yes. Our intelligence infrastructure is far more sophisticated than that. The the intelligence infrastructure for all of the all of the for the majority of the nine nuclear capable countries are very very effective. France is very effective. The UK is very effective. the
US is very effective. Even China's MSS is very, very effective. So, sophisticated intelligence services are looking for corroborating evidence before they make an intelligence estimate. There is a challenge though, and we're seeing it especially in the United States where the the chief executive just disagrees, right, independently, unilaterally, with what his intelligence estimate is. What you mean? You saw two examples in the last few weeks, right? First you saw um Tulsi Gabbard who's the director of national intelligence and a position that didn't exist until the failure of 9/11. That DNI position was born from the fact that we needed to have more coordination across intelligence services. And she came out and she gave an estimate that Iran was not imminently capable of creating a nuclear weapon, a weaponized nuclear device. Right. And how would she know? Because she's the director of national intelligence. All intelligence. Thank you. I'm It's It's obvious to me. I understand. It's not always obvious to everyone else, but all of the intelligence services feed up. They feed up intelligence that's been vetted, corroborated, validated up through a reporting system that goes to the director of national intelligence whose job it is to advise the president on the current status of of the most quality intelligence that we have. the president as the chief executive uh is the one person who the intelligence services work for at the pleasure of the president but his primary mouthpiece for current intelligence is supposed to be the DNI. So when Tulsi Gabbard says we have no reason to believe the Iran is imminently ready to prepare to create a nuclear weapon. The president is supposed to say thank you DNI and then that becomes the information that he has. Instead he disagreed with her and then he said that's not the tr that's not really what's happening. Not just disagreed. shut her out. Correct. Shut her out. Out of Senate briefings, intelligence briefings, she's been marginalized and then she changed her opinion and came back and and I want to hear your disagreement. But then the second example I have is after the bombing raid
uh of the three sites in Iran, the uh DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is charged with collecting military intelligence from foreign targets, came back and said that we we may not have reached total obliteration, Mr. President. And again, he disagreed. and he's like, "That's completely wrong. Total obliteration." I have a a it's not a disagreement, but it's more like a different POV on all of this, which has to do with narrative, which I'm very interested in of how because the more people I interview at all these different levels, I begin to realize that we all are working from the same set of human conditions, you know, bias and and sort of like and really my favorite one is the horse in the race. you know, you have a horse in the race of how you think and the way in which you see the world. And I know as I get older, what I try to do personally is I try to notice where I am wrong and instead of being defensive about it, be like, I was wrong about that. That's interesting because then you can kind of evolve in your thinking and have a bigger poo view. But I perceive Tulsi Gabbert t making those decisions from the lens in which she sees the world and her platform is very specific. You you could almost have discerned that she was going to have that opinion. At least in my opinion she was a known commodity before she became DNI. So this is the feeling. I think what you're saying is we knew yes she was she she always saw the regimes in that part of the world from a certain framework and her conclusion followed her biases biases her presuppos exactly and they're just their pri priors is a great word because because we all have them there's nothing wrong with this per se it's just that because I would take a totally different look at any of this if I was the DNI and would be like Mr. president. It's not as much about these things that everyone's arguing about did we because let's face it, no one's going to know until time passes the damage that was really done there. Period. Full stop. You you know that and we all know that. And so what you have to say and again as a historian I would
say what's the best example of why we should bomb this facility and the best example would be North Korea because Clinton all what so North Korea once upon a time did not have 50 nuclear warheads and the ICBMs to get them to the United States to take out the United States which is what I write there's my bias my lens my point of view but I have studied this and so it's interesting to me that Clinton was going to bomb bomb North Korea when they were in precisely the same situation that Iran is now not yet having a nuclear bomb and North Korea promised that they wouldn't enrich the uranium and this is in 1983 and Clinton was preparing a military strike and it was complex because a lot of people in Seoul were going to die in South Korea and then Jimmy Carter stepped in and said I will go negotiate the peace with the current dictator's father and he did and everything was honky dory Except for North Korea had their hands behind their back and their fingers crossed and they were lying because that is what dictators do who don't like America being the nuclear superpower and being able to threaten them. And if I was the DNI, I would say, "Mr. President, this is the best example of probably what is going on." That's my bias rather than saying, you know, so I'm but I'm interested in how the tribal parts of America, which I find just as dangerous as nuclear weapons. Not quite, but um that's what I'm interested in. And then everybody jumps on the story that which is also true. The story you tell is true. But what is your take on North Korea, the bomb, Tulsi Gabbard? If anything, North Korea is the I mean, I never thought in my adult life I would say this. It's the shining example of why nuclear of why countries pursuing nuclear capabilities will continue to pursue nuclear capabilities because here is a broken backwards poor [ __ ] despicable regime that we don't touch. No one will touch them because they've got nuclear weapons. They have nuclear weapons. And now they and now that now that we have literally bombed a sovereign nation as the United States, we have sent in we we ran a bombing raid of a country that was sovereign its own borders with no no which is why Clinton wouldn't do it in the because of my god that was unheard
of. You don't do that. And now that we have done that to incur and prevent a country from getting a nuclear capability that's our stated intent. Now, our state intent may be celebrated in most parts of this map, but to the Iranian people and to the people who are trying to climb up the social ladder through technology, the message they got is our our borders are not going to be respected unless we have something like a weapon, a nuclear weapon that will keep people away. So, now they have even more incentive to develop a nuclear weapon than they've ever had. Correct. Or and or sorry to cut or they might go a different direction. It might say, "Look at what a 30-year policy pursuit of funding a nuclear program brought upon us. It brought upon us death and ruin." North Korea is a shining example of a failed state. The only reason that it hasn't basically toppled is because the oppressive nature of the regime against its own people and against the outside world. Who wants to be North Korea? Iran does not want to be North Korea. It is a priious state of all priest states isolated beyond belief and a miserable place by all um you know senses to want to live and exist unless you're part of the ruling hierarchy. So I would argue the Iranian people will look at this the people mind you not people are very different than people are different from the regime. The regime is about survive so they're going to emulate North Korea except that 100% except that all they're going to do is sew the seeds to their own downfall internally because yes nuclear weapons will shield you from the outside world. They will not protect you from within. Iranians are not North Koreans. That is where, you know, they have demonstrated a willingness to to die for rebellion. I'm not saying this generation is ready to do that, but you know, the only reason I'm in this country sitting here is because there was thousands of people that were willing to do that. They will do that again presumably. So great, build your walls, isolate yourself from the world, protect yourself from the US, but you're not going to protect yourself from civil conflict and civil strife and tribalism. that will persist and it will
amplify uh because you know oppression I think this is one of the great lines from the um andor show uh first season right oppression requires constant effort and that constant effort is bound to break at some point it is a lot of work to keep your domestic population repressed that is not sustainable in the long run history has shown that you can keep others out but you can't but except for North Korea North Korea is the the only exception and the reason is because they've got terrifying they've got they've got a huge patron willing to prop them up but for China oh China but for China and to a lesser extent Russia where would North Korea be Iran doesn't have a savior hasn't had a savior and it's not going to it's not going to be Russia do that I don't know that that's the case because right now there's an incentive across the eastern block to support Iran right now China China and Russia and North Korea who were already become becoming diplomatically and economically tied to Iran before this have all the more reason to do so now. Except none of them stepped forward in ways that mattered in the last 3 weeks to to to do something that we know of. Yeah. Well, you did. Putin gave a very disconcerting speech in St. Petersburg on June 20th where he talked about the Russian scientists helping out Iran and that I found to be very an echo of a kind of a threat along the lines. Correct. Don't don't make the mistake of thinking that there hasn't been support given just because we don't know about support given. There's quiet diplomatic channels. There's secret intelligence channels. I don't disagree. There's just foreign language channels. I don't disagree. I just don't think Iran is the hill that the Russians or Chinese will die on. No, for sure it's not. That's that's what I'm saying. At the end of the day, there is no NATO article 5 equivalent where any of these countries in the Eastern block will come to the defense of Iran's sovereignty.
They simply won't. And now we go back to the conversation about proxy war because Iran becomes a very convenient proxy for Russia and for China. But nothing is more important than Iran not having a nuclear weapon. Muhammad bin Salman himself said if Iran gets the weapon, we will also we Saudi Arabia will get a nuclear weapon. And that's a huge I think that's a fantastic a fantastic parallel to why the world doesn't want Iran to be nuclear capable because a nuclear capable Iran would force the Sunni uh Khi states to develop nuclear weapons as well. And that's nuclear World War II right there. Or or you don't even need to be nuclear capable. Just be nuclear threshold. That's enough. That's what Iran what if every country in the region became nuclear threshold? What does that mean? They're on the verge of weaponization, but they're not quite there. So in other words um uranium enrichment. So when you when you find uranium in the raw it's it's very low enriched like 2 to 3% of it is pure. You enrich it you put it in centrifuges you separate the parts you want from the parts you don't. You purify it up to 20% can be used for energy or for medical uses. That's what the nuclear non-prololiferation treaty allows every country except those who didn't sign it and the the five great powers. Right. everyone else. You can have energy enrichment, uranium enrichment up to that 20% threshold. Iran went beyond that. Went up to 60%. When you go beyond 20, you're entering into weapons territory. Weapons territory, you have to get to the 90% range, right? Clean weapons. Clean weapons. But anything between 20 to 90 gets you a dirty bomb, a radioactive dirty bomb. Um, and so Iran went there and said, "Well, we're not quite at the 90 weapon 90% weaponization yet, but why?" But they exceeded 20. Every other country could arguably do the same thing. They could say, "We're not going to build a bomb, but we're going to come very close where if we feel that we need to do it in a matter of weeks, days, months, we could quickly do it if we think there's a threat." That's a threshold. Do you think Trump was right to bomb
Iran? Do I think he was right to bomb Iran? Um, I think diplomacy with Iran has been exhausted with this leadership. Can you explain that to me from because I'm really keen to just understand where this conflict with Iran has originated from. So Iran up through 1979 it had a it had various monarchies. The Pathi monarchy that came into power in the 1920s was was the last dominant one and it had built at least through the cold war a close relationship with the west specifically the United States. Iran served as one of the two pillars of US power in the Middle East. The Saudis being the other. This is before Israel became important to the United States national security uh system. And so Iran and the Saudis represented really a projection of US power in the Middle East. With the revolution of 79 that went away. We supported the sha and and the the you tell it. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. So the United States and the sha the king of Iran were extremely close. I mean this peaked under Richard Nixon and Kissinger's time and um as a result uh the sha became very very wealthy looked to rapidly modernize the country but what he didn't do Iran experienced tremendous economic growth but not political growth to match it. So what happens when a country becomes wealthy and becomes more modernized becomes more European which is what the sha was trying to do the people wanted other things that Europe had. They wanted free elections. They wanted free press. They wanted freedom of assembly. Right? They they wanted democracy to go with their dishwashers. The thing is is the Shaw said, "I will give you all of the trappings of modernity, highrises, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, dishwashers, electric appliances. But this democracy that you want, that's pushing it too far." So you had this rapid economic growth, this uneven political growth, and there the seeds of revolution were planted. people were unhappy and they said, "Wait a minute. Why can't we have the other things to go with this this this growth?" So, the revolution happened. There's a bunch of different forces coming into play, not just the Islamist, but the Islamists were the ones that
dominated at the end. And they cleared everyone out. They killed them basically marginalized them. And they have three pillars they stand on, three like if you want to call it their their mission statement. Number one is independence from the West. The this Iranian regime believes no more dependence on the West like the Sha did. Number two is the destruction of Israel or hostility to Israel. That is fundamental. Why? Because they see Israel as an outpost of American power and arguably not colonialism, but they see Israel as a projection of US power. They also see in their attempt to go to pillar number three, which is exporting the revolution to other Muslim Shia countries, they see Israel as getting in the way because it represents this non-Muslim entity in an otherwise Islamic part of the world. So it's inconsistent with their their their goal of expanding the Islamic revolution. You can't do that when Israel is literally in the way. So it has to go or it has to be diminished. And they've said that. Oh yeah. This is this is Humeni, the founder of the republic. The these these are his three his his three principles. So you have these three principles. You take any one of them away, the whole edifice, the whole thing falls down. It's like a tripod. Break one of its legs, it's got it doesn't have enough to stand on. So diplomacy with the US means ending hostilities with the West and it means acknowledging Israel in some way. This government cannot do that. Otherwise, it loses all credibility. It it spent 40 plus years saying these are the things we stand for. If they all of a sudden abandon those principles, they're going to have no credibility with the public. Then why why why should they still be in power? It's not because the public wants hostility with Iran and Israel. The public wants relations. But this government is saying, "We oppress you. we terrorize you all because we're keeping you safe and we're adhering to these three principles. And that's 40 years of brainwashing as well. Absolutely. Of indoctrination. So diplomacy had reached its end. To answer your question, a long answer to a good question. Was Trump right to bomb it?
Trump had reached the limits of diplomacy. And with Iran being a nuclear threshold state and with Israel after the 2023 Hamas attacks realizing it could no longer tolerate this degree of a threshold Iran, the time to act, the pressure was there. So I think um and the opportunity of the way it had weakened the defense systems, the proxies, their true proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, right? So I think there was a window of opportunity and there's Iran simply was not going to abandon its nuclear program on its own. Diplomacy was not going to get us there. They don't want to. It gives them too much leverage and it's never going to abandon its nuclear program. I've learned to not say never anymore in in in but with a regime change I think that's a different story. But in the existing regime they will the regime will keep um itself in power that's my point about nor you know that's the analogy to North Korea. We can that you we all kind of agree on is that you know their perception is if we have a nuclear weapon then the west really can't mess with us. And and you mentioned something else I liked. You said that you know you I think when you were saying if in the role of the DNI or the president you get information you were wrong. Okay. You have to reassess. Our leaders and this goes back to sort of the topic of this this book I'm working on. Our male leaders especially suffer from cognitive dissonance. Right. Cognitive dissonance is when you have a set of beliefs and you get information that is inconsistent with how with your beliefs that makes all humans incredibly uncomfortable. All right. What do you do with that? Well, there's multiple ways that we psychologically try to neutralize that. One of them is you change your view. You say, "You know what? I was wrong." This is the correct way to see things. Most people won't do that. That's embarrassing. Most men won't do that. Most men in positions of power absolutely won't do that. If they admit that they're wrong, then what does that what does that say? Right? So, instead, they double down. They reinforce. They become stubborn. And they end up then in order to justify that have to act aggressively. So we suffer from
basically men I'm right problem I told you so exactly so you have to reinforce your false belief because if you don't it means you were wrong and if you're Donald Trump if you're Kame if you're Benjamin Netanyahu and you were wrong how bad does that look you're you're out your credibility is gone in this culture that we're in right so that leads to the other problem the cognitive dissonance that that these world leaders can't seem to handle you think we were right to strike like Iran. I think that we did the right thing at the wrong time. And and I will say that because the president of the United States is the president of the United States. He's he's earned the seat. We wanted him there. We voted for it. He gets to do whatever he wants. But considering the politics between Israel and Iran at the time, considering the at least at the very least inconsistent intelligence that we have about the actual status of the weapons that Iran was developing. And then uh the the political position inside the United States being where it was with failed tariffs, being where it was with uh an inability to negotiate peace in Gaza, an inability to negotiate peace uh in Ukraine, where it was, if it was the right thing to do, we we certainly seem to have done it prematurely along with preemptively. When would have been a better time? And I'm not I'm not a proponent of war. I'm just wondering, there is never a good time. When would have been a better time? I mean, if you want to if you want to speak like a parent, then you're right. There's never a good time, right? But, um, first of all, I think a limited bombing run, that's that's not how you eradicate that's not how you totally obliterate a country's nuclear capability. You have to commit to either multiple bombing bombing runs, you have to coordinate attacks. Um, and in this particular instance, Israel made an offer to the United States and said, "Hey, we would like for you to come in and use your bunker buster bomb, this technology that only you have, but if you don't, we have other options." I would have loved to have been like, "Let's see those other options. Let's see how far you can take
this on your own because you're the one, Israel, that has an existential threat from Iran. You're the one who's dealing with and had phenomenal success with the proxies in your area in your region. And we are the country that currently can continue to say that we don't violate sovereign borders for now, right? We we obviously invade Iraq. We invade Afghanistan. We've had our history with this and and we've had our history of breaking international law and we we always have the option to stop, you know, bombing across borders. But instead of waiting, instead of letting Israel kind of exhaust all of their options, we went in. And why? And did we go in because it was in our best interest or did we go in because it was somebody else's ven diagram bigger benefit and our ven diagram smaller benefit? I have a theory about that. But first, I want to ask you a question about your subject, you know, matter expertise, which is when you said, "Let's see let's see Israel play out some of the other options because and I'm talking about the covert action that they had planned because boy was did you I mean the leaked tapes that were on the Washington Post, Israel's covert action teams, that was pretty stunning to me." Absolutely. And I think it's best if you explain maybe what we're talking about because the we're as close to your I'm as close to you as the vein on your neck. Absolutely. So, one of the things that we're seeing in the headlines now and in the near future for sure is going to continue to be this this ousting this collection of suspected spies within Iran because now Iran Iran has been a Swiss cheese of spies of MSAD agents uh informants for MSAD inside of Iran for MSAD. MSAD is the uh is the Israeli external intelligence collection service. Their version of the CIA. Okay. So, the Israeli CIA Israeli CIA. Correct. One of the major differences between MSAD and CIA is that MSAD is essentially exclusively focused on one major enemy to Israel and that's Iran. So a 100 almost 100% of their effort goes into protecting against this one existential threat where the United States CIA is collecting on everybody. Right? So with that kind of intelligence focus plus the budget that Israel has
plus its partnerships with the West and the technology that it can collect from the West, it it has a far superior intelligence advantage over Iran. So cutting in for a second here, these are the trigger we're talking about what we were talking about earlier with groundbre. These are trigger pullers. These are covert action operators that go in and kill people. We have multiple types of infiltrations inside Israel or inside Iran. But to uh to the point that she's making um the the covert action arm of MSAD inside Iran is massive. That's how they were able to go in across borders and launch drones. They're finding now thousands of prefabricated drones inside Tan that were being built by by assets of MSAD that were being controlled by AI within Thran. So that Israel could essentially at a press of a button fly hundreds of homemade drones built inside the capital of Iran like fabricated inside Iran. So this by Iranians by Iranians. Yeah. So this and the level of deception and sort of paranoia that comes with all of this territory is shocking and stunning and correct and and Iran has suspected this for a long time has known that it exists but maybe never to what extent because it wasn't a a imminent threat. it wasn't an eminent concern and then it became it became one with this run with this uh series of activities against Iran. I was reading about the pages the other day and I had no idea. I'd kind of seen something on my feed but I thought I'd I'd research it and essentially Israel had managed to get the Iranian forces to wear pages that they had manufactured with bombs inside them and then they exploded exploded all the pages. I mean, even more impressive than that, they didn't get anybody to wear a pager. They found the model and type of pager. They found the supply chain. They found the fabricator for that. And then they infiltrated infiltrated the fabricator to make sure that they input those explosive devices into the same make and model that was going to end up in the hands of Hezbollah. And then that was in Lebanon by the way. Oh yeah, that was okay. Lebanon. Yeah. But that's a proxy army of Iran. The
other thing I want to point out is Western intelligence, the CIA especially, completely missed 1979. It's one of its biggest biggest failures in the modern era. Um, the United States and other Western agencies, even Israel, are notoriously ineffective when it comes to, I think, fully understanding what's happening in Iran. What the Israelis accomplished with their Mossad agents is remarkable. But in terms of the sentiment, the mood on the street and the people's appetite for this group or that entity for whatever reason, maybe you can shed light on this. I am trying to understand why the United States has such a poor history of understanding going all the way back to the 53 coup, a classic case. Even MI6 doesn't get it right. How is it that they're so bad at this there, but they can seem to do it everywhere else? You can't expect any intelligence organiz You can't expect any professional intelligence organization to be right 100% of the time. Intelligence is this is something that people often misunderstand, right? Intelligence isn't when you know something to be true. When you know something to be true, it's a fact. Even if it's a secret that you know to be true, it's a fact. Intelligence is your estimation, your guess of what you don't know because if you knew it, it would be a fact. How does something like October 7th happen when there is so much intelligence in the region and there's these MSAD forces, there's the CIA. How does was it hundreds of people stormed the border of Israel and did this brutal attack presumably they had intel that that was going to happen? Correct. I mean the the the findings since the the day of the attack have shown that there were multiple reports there were multiple operators and officers who escalated this problem. The one of the downsides of democracy is that when you have a bureaucracy that has kind of has channels of command and and people have to agree and and collaborate and validate each other's information, everything moves much slower. So what uh and anybody can contribute to this, but um for October 7th, the IDF was in charge of border patrol, border security. The IDF meaning the Israeli Defense Force, which is a
military unit. They were in charge of the the location where the attack happened and they saw evidence of rehearsals and practice attacks and they saw an an escalation of conflict and they reported up through the bureaucratic chain of command but somewhere in that chain of command somebody saw it differently. Yeah, exactly. And then Shinbet which is the essentially the FBI equivalent uh in Israel internal security internal security never got the complete accurate memo from IDF. And then MSAD's information on what may or may not be happening was was obviously never uh part of the finished intelligence that did make it up to the policy makers. So there were pl there was evidence that was only really identified postfact which is exactly what happened with 911 too. There was information that was only identified after the effects. And I think it's also the good old cliche you know hindsight is 2020 applies in all of these situations whether it's Pearl Harbor or 911. I mean, intelligence failures are what change the trajectory of history. But if you do interview a lot of CIA people, as I do, I often hear this, and it may or may not be true, which is, Annie, no one ever hears all the attacks we stopped. And then I say, well, tell me about them. They're still classified. You know, so I mean that's why narrative is so interesting to me because uh first of all it it feels personal because you can relate to it. Even if we can't relate to being in the White House, we can certainly relate to being stubborn about not wanting to change our opinion or, you know, putting together a certain set of facts and saying we all probably do this in our own home. Oh, this, therefore, or that. And then we're wrong. I've built companies from scratch and backed many more. And there's a blind spot that I keep seeing in early stage founders. They spend very little time thinking about HR. And it's not because they're reckless or they don't care. It's because they're obsessed with building their companies. And I can't fault them for that. At that stage, you're thinking about the product. How to attract new customers, how to grow
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The I does not stand for Iran. It stands for Islamic. In other words, they are protecting what happened in 79. They are not interested in the country. That's what the army does. The army protects the country. The IRGC protects the movement. And so the IRGC is the most powerful entity in Iran. and what who their next generation of leaders or next level of leaders that rise up, what their views are. Are they willing to cooperate with the rest? Are they going to double down on nuclear enrichment? Are they going to take things underground? Are they going to kick out the IAEA permanently? Are they going to pull out of the NPT? We don't know the answer to these questions. And what's the public unrest going to be like? Can somebody emerge? Because you cannot have resistance without a movement led by, you know, a figurehead of some kind. And this regime has been incredibly good. In the last few days, they've executed three or four potential people who they think could emerge as as I didn't know that they killed three or four people. About three, I think. Three. Three for sure. There's a fourth. I'm waiting to get confirmation. Yeah. People that they're that they're afraid of who could use this period of instability and um uh and um deregulation to ferment rebellion and insurrection. It's the last thing. And that's where I'm going to butt in here, and you're going to correct me if I'm wrong, but if we were in a different presidency and a different era, like you know, this is where the CIA would be in Iran and would be fermenting change because that is ultimately what the American goal is, which is absolutely should not be doing ever. It did it in 53, but I didn't say it should or shouldn't. I'm just saying it would have meaning not not should or shouldn't from a moral perspective. It just simply doesn't. This is it doesn't work. For this to have legitimacy for decades to come, it has to be organic, homegrown, freerange, you know, grass. It can sometimes hide itself so dramatically that it's not even known it's there. Iran is not want Iran is and again I say this as a as a very proud Persian. Iran is different
than I think other theaters of conflict where the CIA has operated. You know, Iranian civilization and nationhood goes back thousands of years. It's very different. It does not take wealth. It's not like Iraq, which is a fabricated state. Didn't exist until 1917, 1918 after the Sykes Pico agreement or, you know, the modern Middle East is very different. So, you want the medal in the Middle East, fine. But Turkey, Egypt, Iran, these are nations that have existed for thousands of years. That's a game that the United States intelligence agencies, and I would add, MI6, the UK hasn't figured it out either. Andrew, what do you think happens next in this region? Are we going to reach peace? Are they going to form an alliance with the US? So, I I'm I'm smart enough not to not to debate um because I am largely ignorant on the political divisions and internal politics of Iran and I know that CIA has very little idea of what's going on in Iran most of the time also. And and I I am suspicious that a big part of why we went in at all was because Netanyahu in Israel said, "Here's the intelligence that we have." It's a very common game in the world of intelligence. If you have 80%, if you have 100% of of knowledge, you're only going to share 20%. And you're going to share the 20% that benefits you. Do you think that's potentially what happened? I absolutely think that's So you think Netanyahu in Israel could have given selective intelligence to the United States to provoke them to get involved? That's it. It only makes sense. It's what a professional intelligence service would do. It's it it's exactly what the United States does. And you don't think the US knows that though that they're only getting titrated amounts of information? No. I I think I think even if they did know that Netanyahu understands the the Trump mentality of of horse racing. That's Yeah. Right. And and there's the world of intelligence is a nasty nasty game. We call it a gentleman's game, but it's not at all. It's a it's a game of of twisting people's distortions and cognitive dissonance and playing into biases and politics and and it's a nasty
nasty game. So, what happens next? What what I think we need to be prepared for is that nuclear weapons are now becoming less likely to be used. I think the traditional World War II nuclear weapon, the ICBM that's targeting a civilian population, that is less likely to be used. that is possibly full-on unlikely to be used. But a dirty bomb, what's that? A dirty bomb being a 60% enriched uranium deposit that's triggered through some kind of explosive device that's dropped off in a car trunk or dropped off in a suitcase that it doesn't have a weapon system, but it just radiates the air. You drive a truck in and you just explode a a you know, it became it causes like a like a radiation cloud to hover above a city or a small area, right? What about that's what terrorists would have What about tactical nukes? And tactical nukes, I think, are also something that we're very likely to see. Since the end of World War II, what we've seen is an increased investment not in intercontinental ballistic missile warfare, but in tactical nuclear warfare. Tactical nuclear warfare are warheads that are as small as 50 pounds. And those can sit on the end of a short distance rocket, a medium-range rocket. Uh they can I mean they can be put in a backpack and put on a put on a um a drone for all intents and purposes. And those tactical nukes have a very small contained explosion, but it's still a nuclear explosion. And the reason the tactical nukes are so valuable is because now you can use them against military targets. So what we I have a I have to totally I got to take like can be used against should never be said. Right. So that's my line in the sand. Tactical nuclear weapons are not are no longer in the US arsenal for precisely that reason because they cannot be used because the escalation to strategic weapon nuclear weapons which is one continent to the next big systems big delivery systems is inevitable. But keep going. You're saying it's a slippery slope. It's a it's not a slippery it's it's a dividing line. You can't even enter into the slope. It's like if you get pushed off a
cliff there's no going back. It's not a slope. It's a cliff in in my understanding of nuclear war games and everyone at the Pentagon knows that no matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in total annihilation. Which is why America no longer has tactical nuclear weapons in its arsenal. We used to we used to have small nukes that you could put in a backpack and jump out of a of an aircraft and I know people who rehearsed that during the Cold War. You can definitively say the US has none in its arsenal or none that we know of? No, no, no, we don't. Now you can det you could say that the ones on bombers because we have a certain kind of one nuclear weapon that that is on a that can be flown in and it can be d its size can be dialed down and that makes it tactical. Why have we got nuclear bombs then at all if if we can ever use them? That's the saying we can't have tactical nuclear bombs because if we have we would never use them and if we did the world's over basically. So why do we have nuclear bombs? Because the same principle applies. We do have nuclear bombs. We might as well have the tactical one. Absolutely. No. And I do believe that's one of the wise the wise moves of the US nuclear command and control because the tactical ones will lead to the big ones. A thousand% not even 100%. But if that's true, then why have the big ones? Well, that's the bigger question. But our position on why we have nuclear weapons is one word. It's called deterrence. we are going to deter you from using your nuclear weapons against us because we have an arsenal and you have an arsenal. It's this bizarre catch22 paradox of why we can't get rid of nuclear weapons. We're now seeing we're seeing where reality and policy butads because Annie's right. The policies on this are clear as mud, but they are stated and restated over and over again in order to get the American populace, the American people to be able to stomach the fact that we have all these nuclear weapons. Right? The fact that we put our nuclear weapons in five other countries around the world, right? Belgium is sitting there holding our
nukes. Italy is holding our nukes, making them a target and giving them a nuclear weapon in their own border, which they can't use, which they cannot use without the president of the United States authorizing it. So, it's very precarious. But who who would be able to use it if they wanted to? So, here's the every weapon is different. Every weapon is different. And and I I say this because the truth of nuclear weapons is far scarier than the average person understands, which is a big part of why I believe like you, they will never get used at a strategic level because because the people who actually handle the weapons, the people that you're talking to, they understand the devastating consequences of these weapons, but the lay person gets very very confused sometimes. So, a a small warhead, let's just say 30 kilotons of of explosive power, right, which is still twice what we dropped on Hiroshima. A small warhead does an immense amount of damage. It annihilates 10 square miles, let's say, of of whatever it wherever it explodes. If it's a surface explosion, if it's an altitude explosion, it doesn't destroy really anything. It leaves an EMP footprint that destroy that that shortcircuits wiring, right? And that can be a huge EMP. Thank you. An EMP uh pulse that destroys everything beneath it. What is an EMP? An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse. It's a it's a um electrical discharge that comes from a nuclear detonation or other sources that uh infiltrates through technology, wiring, etc., etc., and it shorts it or burns out the wiring. So, think of like a massive surge. Like a massive power surge. Yeah. Or you can you can detonate them underground underwater to create natural effects. You can create earthquakes. You can create tsunamis. You can create vapor bubbles that are just destructive. So there's lots of different ways that you can use a weapon. But the thing that concerns me is that because the US policy is so black and white as it's fed to the American population, it's that much more inviting for one of these other countries to use a nuclear weapon in a specific way to create uh chaos to
create um a lack of clear acquisition. For example, if a small Russian nuke which lives in Bellarus because Russia puts their nukes in Barus finds its way into Tel finds its way into Kiev and explodes in the back of a truck. Who do you blame? Does the US blame Russia? Does the US blame Barus? Does Russia take responsibility for it? Does does Europe say that it's an attack from the Russians? What do you say? Because now you just had a nuke go off and the world's confused. And the same thing happens if if China uses a tactical nuke to destroy in the ocean in the South China Seas. If China uses a tactical nuke to blow up five Filipino ships, what is that? It was a small nuclear device that was used in a latoral situation that was only attacking, you know, military forces that were that were quote unquote violating some sort of uh free free space. What do you do there? Do you That's not when you launched ICBMs. So what do you do? What happens there, Annie? That's the nightmare situation. I mean, attribution or rather nonattribution of a nuclear weapon figuring out where it came from. Yes. When you don't because if a strategic nuclear weapon is launched, an ICBM, we the United States knows precisely where it came from because we see it from our satellite systems in space in the first second after launch. So that is the fundamental of deterrence. Not only can you not launch at us, but we will know in one second and we will be back at you before yours even get to us. That's how that works. But what Andrew is saying is deeply troubling. And another reason to our conversation about why Iran should not have the bomb or anyone for that matter. It's dangerous enough that you have nine nuclear armed nations um who could as you say you know someone could in Barus could wind up with something that's incredibly dangerous but you do not want anyone else into this mix including non-state actors which which would be Hezbollah Hamas the Houthis if you're Israel the concern is not so much that Iran will use it but Iran will provide it to a non-state entity that is not bound by any international law or rules of warfare and Iran can claim deniability that and that's why President Trump bombed
for that's that's why so imagine imagine Israel is one of the nine one of the nine nuclear capable countries imagine this MSAD that is absolutely capable of incurring across Iranian borders smuggle in a 50 lb tactical nuke and they take it and they put it inside one of the testing ranges or they put it inside one of the facilities inside Iran and then they put it on a time detonator and 13 hours later it goes off. There's a nuclear explosion underground in Iran in an Iranian facility that we in this simulation we know it's triggered by Israeli covert action but the whole world sees an explosion go off in Iran. So now the president wonders did they just run a nuclear test? Iran raises their hand and say we did not run a nuclear test. Somebody put a nuclear weapon in our territory. Who believes who? Right? What does Saudi Arabia believe? [ __ ] Iran has nuclear capability. We're nuclear threshold. Boom. Let's get it going. Japan nuclear threshold. They start get their program going. And how bad does it look for Iran if it admits that Israeli commandos or agents made their way into one of the most top secret facilities right under their nose. Right. So I have a I have a curiosity which you might know possible theory. Some sick curiosities. I we we should share a drink. No, this is this is like a terrifying one is that after October 7th, President Biden went to Israel himself. He did not send Blinken. Remember that? This was in our That was a big deal. That was a big deal. This is in ours. This was not a man who was, you know, out playing football. Okay. He goes to the heart of the battle zone. Why? My theory is that he said to Netanyahu, "There's one line you may not cross. And if you cross it, we are not friends anymore, ever again." And that's the nuclear line. That is my theory. No one's ever Whenever I've asked anyone, they just don't have an answer. Their lips get very
get pursed. Get very pursed and no one says anything, which leads me to believe that is precisely what happened. There's so much going on around this map that sits in front of us that is it all seems to be happening at once with, you know, Russia and Ukraine and you've got China and with Taiwan. You've now got the Middle East going off with Iran and Israel and everything happening in Gaza. It doesn't feel like this is going to go the other way. It doesn't feel like this is going to retract anytime soon. It's funny because when Trump got elected, he promised to like end these wars and under his reign, it seems like there's more wars popping up. And actually a lot of this causes cover and distraction for other people to start, you know, invading countries that they they've got a problem with. And we talked a little bit about international law being violated and new precedences being set in terms of what you can do. We're now at a point where it's kind of okay to bomb a sovereign country. It's kind of okay just to roll across the border and just take what you want. So I think that's where my concern starts. And I'm looking over at the other side of the map here with Russia and Ukraine and I'm asking myself, how does that end? you know, Putin can't just roll out of there because then why why did he ever roll in? I mean, it doesn't look like Ukraine are going to hand are going to allow him to take a part of their country. That war is going to carry on. And then you got China and Taiwan where the tension has increased. And I think I read that there's been more murmurss of conflict or invasion going on with China in recent times, which would probably be now would be a great time. If you're China and you want to take Taiwan, now would be a pretty good time to do it. Trump is busy. Not just busy. There's a military test happening in Taiwan in the next few days where they're practicing or pre prepping for a amphibious invasion from the Chinese People's Liberation Army onto the the coast of Taiwan. And so what have has the Chinese government done in the last few days? They have uh jammed GPS signals. They have launched drones that are interfering with radar uh basically and um and and blocking shipping lanes um legally within where they can be. But
the point being is that if you're Taiwan, you're prepping for this amphibious invasion that may not need to happen because China can do plenty to disrupt and make life for Taiwan miserable without even setting one soldier's foot on Taiwanese soil. So u absolutely this is and and meanwhile the US is is busy elsewhere. Look at the missiles that were used to provided Israel the THAAD missiles that were used to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles. Um it's been depleted, right? So we're So if you're the US now, you're at a at a weaker state of being able to defend Taiwan than you were a month ago, six months ago. And there's also sort of a public fatigue, right? Because now the the public in the United States, they're more polarized. There's even on the right, there's some people that think we should be going to war. On the left, they think we shouldn't, etc. It's getting quite murky. There's a lot of backlash. And I'm sure Trump feels that. Some of his closest media allies like Tucker Carlson and half my Twitter feed are saying he shouldn't have dropped the bomb. shouldn't go to war. And I'm sure that stuff gets to him. But Benjamin, you believe I think that if there were to be a trigger for World War II, it would come from that region. I think so. I think I think uh we would see it in the form of a what we're seeing now trade war, supply chain crisis issues. We saw during COVID what happens when the supply chains disrupted. That was a sort of a a nonhuman event, meaning it was, you know, it was a virus. But imagine China now banning the sale of all rare earth minerals to the west, right? Um, these are minerals that are used in the construction of lithium ion batteries, uh, microchips, processors, things of that nature. And then imagine if China says, "Look, we're simply not going to sell these things to the United States and its Western allies. Done. We're not going to." What happens then? So, I think a major conflict will be precipitated by an economic and trade war, which we're now basically in for all intents and purposes. And until the US can and western allies can diversify by getting these resources elsewhere, I don't know if occupying Greenland is going to be the answer or making Canada
the 51st state will give us that. But this is where the Chinese are very effective. They have a large amount of these minerals within their borders. We know that there's a good amount in Ukraine, which is why President Trump wanted to make that deal with the Ukraine to secure those mineral rights. But these sort of this all goes back to trade and technology. You don't need to control territory for territory sake. Now you need territory that has something that's vital. Whether it's oil, less so these days arguably, but now it's rare earth minerals and access to trade routes. That is where you start messing with that, you are then lighting the fuses of war, which are already being messed with. Everything that you just rattled off is already in motion. It's already happening. It's part of why I make the claim that World War II is already happening. If China invades Tyrron, if if China takes Taiwan administratively, judiciously, militarily, however they choose to go in there, because we keep thinking that they're going to like send warships in and and and uh weaken the the battlefield with missiles or something. That's that's not how they took Hong Kong. They took Hong Kong administratively and then just moved in the police after saying we have legal right. That's exactly what they're doing in Taiwan. They even have a a parliament in Taiwan that's majorly uh pro-China, right? So they meddled with the elections in January enough to win a majority in the parliament even though they lost the presidency. Right? So I actually and I think we're seeing the same messaging coming out of Europe. If China moves on Taiwan, the world kind of does this and Taiwan's alone. Not only because the president's distracted, but also because NATO is distracted, Europe is distracted, and the last thing anybody wants is to fight over there when there's so much [ __ ] happening over here. But the thing is they don't even need to move in and invade. All they have to do is block shipping routes, which they can do. No one's going to challenge them on that. And basically stop selling these rare earth minerals to every country that wants them. What do we do then? Russia's not selling us what it has. You know, Russia can choose to do the same
thing. Well, that's not going to turn into a kinetic war. The United States, right? Exactly. It'll turn into more of what we're already seeing. More tariffs and more threats and more trade and more more of the same stuff that we're already seeing, which is a big part of why I think we're already in the middle of that is I agree. That is the war we're in right now. It just doesn't look like the wars of the past. I think it was Biden that said or suggested that if China were to invade or take Taiwan, then there would be in a war. We'd be in a war. But it doesn't need to. It doesn't need to. For China to win, it doesn't have to set foot on Taiwanese soil. All it has to do is basically isolate Taiwan economically, trade-wise, and then dare anybody else in the West or elsewhere to do anything about it. Will they do anything about it? That's really difficult to see. Even France, even uh even the president of France just came out recently and was like, "Yeah, you know, if uh if China takes Taiwan, I don't think France is going to get involved." Yeah. All if if if we in the West can find our minerals elsewhere, I think we'll throw Taiwan under the bus. And under the Biden Chip Act, that's exactly what we're trying to do is find our diversified routes. Haven't we got some like sworn promise to protect Taiwan? Yes. the officially. Yes, we have a sworn promise to def to protect Taiwan. I think that the wild card in all of this is the current president. No one knows how he is going to behave. And I don't really believe that there's such a thing as him being distracted. I think that he will put his focus on whatever it is he chooses and then that's becomes the attraction. Yeah. Xiinping also knows that he needs a win right now and he also knows that there's a huge economic benefit by ingesting Taiwan and Taiwanese semiconductors and Taiwanese infrastructure and Taiwanese capabilities because all of the United States IP for semiconductors was developed here and it's all being built there. So when you take that you get everything there that's a physical
infrastructure and everything here that's intellectual property. Has the probability of nuclear war ever been higher in the last couple of decades? I think the Russia Ukraine the Russia's invasion of Ukraine a few years ago um and the immediate first few months I should say the first year was the peak of the last few decades. I think we've we've backed away from that a little bit, but I think that was the peak. I don't think more today than let's say a year ago, but I think a year and a half ago more so than you know the 20 30 years prior. And do you think if Iran had developed a nuclear weapon, they would use it based on those three pillars you described earlier? No, you don't think they would? No, because the regime is not suicidal because if they had used it and we'd be able to track it, um they'd be destroyed. And they are they are a lot of things. They might be crazy. They might be irrational in some ways. They are not suicidal. They're not willing to die for this. They want they want like Hitler and the thousand-year Reich. They want this to endure and it's not going to endure with the develop which is why they why Kam the Supreme Leader maintained a threshold of nuclearization. If you cross that threshold to being a nuclear weapons state, then all of a sudden he has a big target on his back either from within or from without. And his goal is to have the regime endure for a thousand plus years, not to have it be sacrificed at the altar of nuclearization. Andrew, what do you think in terms of probability? Higher, lower? I mean, I I will give you a number. I think there's a 30% chance that we're going to see a nuclear detonation in our lifetime. And here's why. Here's why. Because tactical or does it matter? I'm saying any detonation. Any detonation. Okay. The last known nuclear detonation was 2017. Unless unless I'm mistaken, 2017 when North Korea did a test underground. That wasn't that long ago. And there were a series of tests that they did before that in an environment where testing is not supposed to happen
anymore. We are now entering a season of more conflict. We're seeing more and more strong authoritarian type leadership. Even if it's in in the lead of a of a democratic country, we're still seeing strong man type of of shamebased leadership. this cognitive dissonance where people were leaders will go contrary to where their what their advisers say. Leaders will go contrary to what's in the best interest of the people's opinion in pursuit of some sort of strategic or even uh tactical political aim with more advanced weapons with more transnational threats than ever before. Transnational threats are threats that don't derive from a national identity. they derive from something else like a drug cartel or a radical Islam or radical Catholic for all we care. With the rise of transnational threats, the opportunity for someone to get their hands on something that's nuclear and then detonate that nuclear device somewhere is just too great and it's only getting greater. It's only getting more with new cryptocurrencies. People can pay for things and and financial transactions can't be tracked as easily as they were in the past. We are definitely in an era where it's getting worse. And I remember people asking me this question two years ago and I put the chances at 15 to 20%. So in just a year, a year and a half, I've literally seen us move the dial in my opinion closer to we will see a nuclear detonation in our lifetime than we have in the past. Can I ask you just qualify something? Sorry. Is it um state or non-state actor? You think more likely? Because I I I will I don't think it will be a state I don't think it will be a clear state actor. Got it. Okay, I have a couple couple thoughts on that where I may actually answer the question. So, this goes back to your terrifying point about miscalculation or mistake. So, I think that the mistake is where the real threat lies. People at this table may remember in November the UK gave, and I'm talking about the Ukraine Russia conflict right now. The UK gave the storm shadow. Yes. To Ukraine. We gave the attackums. These are systems like missile systems
essentially to be able to you know go further into Russia with for allow allow Ukraine to fire further into Russia. And Russia was pissed off and in response they fired an intermediate range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Okay, this is the first time in history that a ballistic missile was used in this kind of a kinetic war, a hot war. And I was on an airplane leaving London to and I went, "Oh my god, is this that situation where I'm not going to land because there's a nuclear war?" Because that is precisely the kind of thing I write in nuclear war scenario where something's launched and the United States because we have a launch on warning policy launches before it lands because we're not willing to wait to see what was in that warhead. Now what was in the warhead was nothing. The Russians launched an interrange ballistic missile into Ukraine with nothing in the warhead. Why? I mean this is so terrifying. Well, we learned later when Lavough went on television, he said that he had notified his American counterparts in advance. I was taken to the State Department to see where that advanced notice came into. And it's called the NERK, the National Nuclear Security Center in the State Department. I'm messing up the name, but it's known as the NERK. It's inside the State Department. And it's basically uh hello, we're not at war. room, meaning every 90 seconds you hear bing bing bing and that's all you hear. And I was with the assistant secretary of state who said, "Annie, that's the Russians telling us we're not at war." and Lav and she explained to me that Lavrov who's the Russian foreign minister the Russian foreign minister when he said on TV which went over everybody's head including mine oh we notified our American counterparts what did that mean well what Mallalerie Stewart the assistant secretary of state told me was what it meant was that Lavaros rang up the NERK and said you know we're launching and it doesn't have a nuclear warhead that was such a big deal and I don't think the average person understands how big a deal that was when I think it was
called the Archnik. It was called the Arashnik. The Archnik was the newest, most modern version of an ICBM, intermediate ballistic missile, IMBBM, that the Russian inventory had. We had never seen it deployed. It's never been it's never been seen before. And it reminded the whole [ __ ] world, you do not want to go down this road. A a ballistic missile is a terrifying terrifying tool. Why? It launches into the atmosphere where it splits into three parts. The rocket, the booster, and then what's known as a MV uh almost like a you imagine a revolver. Take out the piece that holds the bullets of a revolver and it's called a multiple re multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicle MIRV. A warhead sits in each one of those canisters of the revolver and then it on its own can move in space and then drop warheads in different trajectories. And then those warheads as they come down from space, not propelled, as they just fall from space, they reach speeds between Mach 2 and Mach 20. And then they come in contact with whatever they're targeted. when there's a warhead on there, that warhead also it's it's scheduled to um to explode at altitude at surface level or underground, whatever they choose. But there's no stopping that [ __ ] weapon once it drops the MV. Once the MV drops the warhead, unless you have some sort of tech that can intercept a Mach 20 to Mach Mach 2 to Mach 20, which no one has, right? We claim that we have it, but we've never actually tested it, right? We try to in we try to intercept the missiles on their trajectory or at least when they're at their at their arc at their precipice. I don't think we've ever claimed to have that you can that in terminal phase you can take something out. So um I I would want to fact check it but either way but my point is when I saw those lines of Mach 20 fire just coming down into Ukraine I mean that's the kind of when I went through nuke school that's the [ __ ] that that kept me up at night. I was like, we can't live in a world that does that. And not only did Russia show us we can do that, but they said we can do this with a new weapon
system that you've never seen. We can do it with a new weapon system. And we're gracious enough to tell you through the NERK, this tiny little pathway of diplomacy 30 minutes before we're doing this and you're going to take us at our word that it doesn't have a nuclear weapon so that we didn't launch on warning. It's such a game of chicken. It's nuclear chicken. It's so dangerous. What if the Nerk hadn't intercepted that signal properly? It's incredibly dangerous. Now, one more thought if I may, on Andrew's prediction of a of a radiological bomb, a dirty bomb going off, which may or may not be true. Unfortunately, that's a tough number. And I wouldn't necessarily disagree just given how rogue nations work, given that terrorists have, you know, expressed a desire to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States, which a dirty bomb is. But in my thinking, a dirty bomb, as horrible as it is, and it's going to kill people and make land, you know, unusable for thousands of years, it's not strategic nuclear war. In other words, that's not going to cause the United States to launch on warning. First of all, it's it's it's immediately not attributable. You don't know who who left it in the truck and exploded it. And so, it's a different set of terrible. And I believe that a country like Iran, if they had a nuclear bomb, has the full capacity to do something like that because look at look at the different terrorist tactics that they've used for the past 50 years. I want to ask if something else concerns the two of you. Um, I read this morning that uh it was recovered in Ukraine, a Shahed autonomous drone. Uh, these are drones that the Iranian government manufactures and and provides to Russia. They're used in the Ukraine theater. And what they found on there was that there was a Nvidia processor. Nvidia is a western company, tech company. They're known for being advanced on their AI development. And basically that this drone, this AI had autonomous capabilities, meaning you could completely jam it, cut off any GPS communications to satellites and this thing would think for itself, deciding when and where to go and what to do. Is that a bigger because that is here with us. It's being used actively in warfare. Is that a bigger concern than a nuclear
armed um a nuclear armed ballistic missile or or re-entry missile of some kind? Something like this that would have a tactical nuke on it. Is that of a drone with a nuke? A drone with a nuke or a drone with Exactly. A a drone that is a autonomous drone. Yeah. Yeah. That's terrible. This is fascinating. I mean, this is now this is now they now have these drones that are thinking for themselves in Ukraine because they're anticipating that they can't communicate with whatever to put a drone to put a nuclear weapon onto a drone, you have to have the nuclear weapon, which is the just the circular discussion of why which the Russians have, right? But the Russians I don't see putting a nuclear weapon on a drone. No, but if they put radiological if the Iranians put a radiological bomb, a dirty bomb, the Iranians, that's a different story, right? All right. This is this is an Iranian made drone using an American microprocessor with Chinese anti-GPS, you know, jamming uh techn. I mean, it was I mean it was fascinating. This thing is a is a is a is a autonomous flying computer that can just think for itself and decide in the moment, okay, I'm going to do this instead of that. There is no more human real life human feedback or control mechanism. I think there's two really fascinating things about your question, right? first is that you just described a drone that was a bastard child of Chinese, Iranian, and Russian tech and American tech stolen American tech. But but my point is when we think about the the future landscape that's a perfect example of this rising power in the east this this collaboration in the east that is not based on ideology because those three countries have nothing in common ideologically but they have so much in common pragmatically with the idea of combating the west. So that's the first that was really interesting to me. Now the second thing, this idea of an AIdriven weapon. I I am going to be wildly unpopular. I promise you by all
the sci-fi geeks out there. I think that AI powered weapons are the next like logical evolution and a good evolution for us because I would rather trust an AI that's been programmed appropriately with the rules of warfare and what's properly engagement law and all. I would trust that over an 18-year-old with a gun who's been indoctrinated by like the American like crazy [ __ ] that we do to get people ready for war. I would much rather have some AI device that can't be altered except by its own logical process. If the AI becomes self-aware and it's preserving itself and can't so if that's a huge if. Yeah, that's the line. But that there's a lot of ifs that have now slowly faster than I realize are coming to fruition. That's but that's the other concern. Right. A self singularity. Right. Right. a singularity that becomes hellbent on its own preservation, right? Which again, that's those are two big ifs, the singularity and then preservation, its own self-preservation. If if an AIdriven drone is meant to target a specific enemy and it is um noticing that it is being targeted, it'll try to avoid being shot at or taken down. Right. It'll have countermeasures. Exactly. And if it does so, if it has to make the choice of, let's say, detonating or going into a civilian area and risking harm to a civilian population that is contrary to its mission objective, but to do so would preserve its capabilities. It wouldn't do that. That's what I'm wondering. I mean, you're getting that self that self-awareness. That's what would most likely happen is an AI an AI device like what you're describing. Yeah. Would be would be programmed at the mission set. It would come under fire. It would be it would use its own best judgment for counter measures. If those counter measures were ineffective and it was starting to to be to go down, the next priority that it would have would be to eradicate anything that's intellectual property that it has on board. Got it. So that's something that we don't currently have. That's why it's so dangerous when a B2 gets shot down
overseas. Everything and also those systems from what I understand are no longer going to be single predator drones, single reaper drones. They are drone swarms. And so they work, which is its own set of terrifying Right. Drone swarms and kamicazi drone swarms, no less at that where they're they're designed to be destroyed, you know, to hit their target and not come back. The day that we see AIdriven weapons is, I think, a day that most veterans are probably looking forward to because if you've seen the horrors of war, if you've lost a friend, if you've worn a [ __ ] medal for shooting other people, like it's it's a horrible horrible thing. But how does that change the friction of going to war? because it makes going to war much easier, right? It does. It absolutely much more digestible. And that's I think part of why we're seeing this appetite for conflict moving forward, right? I think we we would be doing a disservice if we didn't talk about the complacency of the world in accepting this rapid evolution of conflict. What do you mean the complacency of the world? We're all just sitting here watching it happen. It's almost in a sick way. I think there are people watching the news in anticipation of the next conflict. It's almost turned into a giant NASCAR race. Who's the next what's the next thing that's going to happen? The horse race effect that you were talking about. We want to know what are the body counts. We want to know who's winning. We want to know what's the newest weapon. It's become almost almost TV. Well, it made me when you were speaking of the war game that you designed and you were talking about two trolls in a bar, you know, it's like that's like that's my band name, by the way. Okay. But it's literal and it's figurative and it's narrative. So, it's very interesting to me and it's terrifying because it really does speak to what you just said where the body count from far away on television is not the same thing as the horror of the person experiencing it. Indeed.
Is there anywhere on this map, Annie, that that is safe in a war? Because you know I think as a way of dealing with the angst of this in our group chat me and my friends we when these things start kicking off all the time I think this is a coping mechanism we all like share the fact that some of us are you know down here on the map and one of us is in Australia but then my other friend unfortunately he's in like Dubai and we're always looking at a map and when the bombs are going off. Is there anywhere on this map that is safe in in the event of a nuclear war? Mhm. There's one tiny little place, New Zealand, and a little bit of Australia. And that has to do with, if you follow the idea of nuclear war, that agriculture fails when we have a nuclear winter and the sun gets blocked out and there's no more. You know, there's large bodies up in the mid- latatitudes are frozen over in sheets of ice. And when you have all the billions of people dying, it's because agriculture fails. And it is said by those who study this, the authors of Nuclear Winter, that there are some areas in Australia and New Zealand which would remain viable. But you're talking about kind of hunter gatherer type people. Now among the stranger conversations I have had since nuclear war scenario published was with several billionaires who actually have bunkers in New Zealand. No. Oh yeah, they will remain nameless. But they were very I will not name them. I will not name my sources. But they but what was interesting to me it was that um these individuals were the response to reading my book and realizing the world could end in 72 minutes wasn't let's all get together and make sure nuclear war doesn't happen. Or maybe it was and I just didn't hear that part of the conversation. But it was more about how fast can I get my G5 um loaded so I can get to New Zealand because a G5 can an aircraft a person a private aircraft can take you from Los Angeles to New Zealand without refueling. And so I think what I'm saying on a narrative level and it speaks to the watching of TV or the trolls in the bar is like and this is me the parent speaking. It's like I really believe in diplomacy. I really do
believe in communication. Um I'm often accused of sounding polyianaish here, but I will cite I I spoke of the Reagan Gorbachoff joint statement nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. But what preempted that was these two individuals Reagan and Gorbachoff, you know, arch enemies, the United States and the Soviet Union. This is in 1983. Ronald Reagan saw the movie The Day After, A Great Narrative, uh, an ABC TV movie about a nuclear war, and it so upset him. He was Reagan being a nuclear hawk. It so upset him that he reached out to the archeneemy, the Soviet Union, Gorbachev, and said, "We need to have a dialogue and we need to reduce our arsenals. We're not going to live forever." And when we think about all the existential threats that are in front of us, some people say the sun's going to explode or some AI is going to get out of control in pest control um scenario where it just kind of takes us out or whatever. But but it appears to me that the greatest existential threat we have is ourselves in this regard and that and these weapons of that can wipe out this planet in a couple of minutes are clearly the greatest existential threat. And there doesn't seem to be any way back from that which is a great opportunity to realize you know this is the the pathway of more wars is not the only way. I have a a strangely more optimistic and fatalistic um perspective here. So when I look at this map, I think there's lots of places that are safe in the event of a nuclear conflict, especially if you consider traditional nuclear conflict, which is going to come from the the nine states that are nuclear capable. You're going to see whatever exchange of strategic or tactical warheads happen. You're going to see trade winds take whatever debris comes specifically from surfacebased detonations because uh seedbased uh detonations and uh air based detonations will not create the same amount of fallout. So you'll see trade winds do what they do. But in large part you're going to see two centers of the map firing at each other. So South America is going to get spared, Africa is going to get spared. Europe is going to be absorbing bad winds depending on what the trade winds look
like. Uh like Southeast Asia and Australia largely these are going to be spared locations depending on what Pakistan and India do. Right? But my concern isn't the nuclear factor. It's the human factor after that. When Russia or China and the United States and Israel and and and Iran, when all these countries are just destroyed by their own conflict and whatever fragmentaryary governments are trying to reset themselves, you've lost all of that GDP, you've lost all of that infrastructure, you've lost all of that that world order. So now people are just going to get worse. African warlords are just going to get worse. Latin American warlords are just going to get worse. I mean, it's going to be the age of the warlord again. I don't know if that's as much a fatalistic view as perhaps it is a naive view because when one of the components that you left out are the fires that will be burning after the nuclear detonations and the fires burning are what lofts the soot and that is what causes a nuclear winter. And if you look at the climate modeling, even a small air quotes nuclear war between India and Pakistan is enough to cause a mini nuclear winter. And so there will be no African warlords because they will starve as well. There will be no resetting of any of these governments. In my understanding, interviewing the experts on nuclear war, looking at the the climate models that now tell us this very factually that humanity dies. And so I don't think it's a reset at all, unless a reset is like us going back to our huntergatherer state from 12,000 years ago trying to figure out how to kind of evolve again. I mean that's I don't think that human I don't think that all human beings will be lost. There will be human beings that make it through that. And if there's if there's modeling then the modeling is based on averages. And I I I would love to see how a nuclear winter spreads across the globe. But the idea that humanity would end meaning the last human being would be lost. The probabilities of that just seem unrealistic. No, I don't think it's an extinction level event. I think it's a near extinction level event. I mean that was an idea that was first proposed by Carl
Sean based on the climate modeling that was available in the 80s which was pretty you know how the computers were but now you're looking at this the modeling and again this is just p based on like soot going into the atmosphere that you maybe you with your training would be one of the survivors but the rest of us I'll tell you exactly what my training when I lived underground in a silo we knew that if a nuclear weapon went off above ove your head. Take your life while you can because trying to survive what's left behind is going to be worse. Dying as your as your organs melt is far worse than shooting yourself in the head today. And that may sound terrible, but what we're talking about is terrible times. What we're talking about is terrible times. And nobody wants to try to It's not like the movies and the TV shows. Nobody wants to try to live through that. You either get spared because you are luckily on vacation in Patagonia when it happens and then you just have to figure out how to live off of [ __ ] weeds and and sheep or you're somewhere where you can't avoid it. We often joke in a in a dark kind of way. If you see a mushroom cloud, run towards it because you will much prefer the sunburn than the survival rate afterwards. My takeaway from what you said was Middle Earth indoors. See, that's why I said New Zealand. I was thinking I was like, Benjamin, Middle Earth indoors. Narrative. There's your narrative. I thought it was So, my understanding is that there's actually three safe zones. You are right. There's Hawaii. No, I thought it was Hawaii. Uh, correct me, but I thought it was Hawaii, Greenland, and New Zealand because there's so many targets in Hawaii, Pacific Fleet. It would be a target a target of nuclear catch. And same with all of Europe because I don't and you know when I talk about a full-scale nuclear exchange I I certainly in my book I'm talking about thousands of warheads you're talking about Russia and the
United States being involved in a full-scale nuclear exchange. How does that what's the sequence of events that leads us there? Because you'd think just launching one nuclear warhead would would have a pretty big impact. How big are our biggest nuclear warheads in terms of the radius and impact they can have? I'm thinking of the movie War Game. Remember in the 80s which kind of had a visualization of that? And in at that point in time we had 70,000 nuclear warheads. Now we have 12,300 appro approximately between the nuclear armed nations approximately 10,000 of which are in the US and Russia. So we each have 5,000. Why do you need that many? That's my point. That's that is the point. That was the point that Reagan and Gorbachoff began. And they it is because of their initial work that the world has moved in the direction of arms reduction which I believe is the hopeful the only hopeful direction that we must move when it comes when it comes to nuclear strategy the this the sense behind the weapon is that uh the average warhead I believe is about 300 kilotons right now a modern-day ICBM can carry about 10 warheads sometimes between three and 10 but they they try to minimize the number of missiles by maximizing the number of warheads. So the detonation from a 300 kg detonation is a specific amount of space. I think it's like 50 miles orund 110 miles of blast radius and like 15 to 30 miles of of fireball. So, when you are targeting the MV on your destination, the MV, the multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicle, the little um revolver in the sky, when you're targeting that, when you're programming that to release, you're not trying to hit the same place with 10 warheads. You're trying to spread your warheads so that the blast radiuses eradicate everything in the footprint. So, you need 12,000, 10,000, 5,000 missiles per country. You need 5,000 warheads so that each warhead can cover what 300 square miles and you can blanket it across multiple strategic targets and completely eradicate your opponent's ability to wage a counterattack.
And Russia are pretty paranoid of the nuclear program and the United States. So they created this dead hand system. Mhm. What is the dead hand system? The dead hand system is exactly like it sounds. It's from the Cold War. And it was this idea, the paranoid sort of pullet bureau was thinking, what if those Americans do a preemptive nuclear strike and kill us all before we even have a chance to launch? We want to be able to make sure that we end the world and kill all of them. That's kind of the idea behind it. And so they came up with this system which is now known as the dead hand because you could literally be dead and have it launch anyways. And the way it goes is that there are ground sensors across Russia that would, you know, sense the bombs going off and this is kind of like early AI, if you will. The computer would know that and would then launch all of Russia's nuclear weapons. all of them at the United States, even if everyone were dead. With time, probability increases. Probability of something occurring. And it's funny, I've seen there's been a few people in the public eye at the moment that have gone through sort of mental, cognitive decline. They've experienced bipolar and and um schizophrenia and things like that. I just wonder if one of these individuals who has these nuclear weapons, these nine men around the world, if they had some kind of cognitive issue, could they could they in their delirium or whatever without anybody being able to stop them tell their army to launch nuclear weapons and that army would follow those orders? Don't you need two people to turn the key? They're following orders. They're following orders. I think that I think that your question the answer might be yes. I think the answer is actually yes. And what's interesting is like there are certain countries nuclear arsenals that we don't know about. Now I happen to get my information on the most current nuclear weapon systems from the Federation of American Scientists has a group of people led by a man named Hans Christensen that lead a group called the nuclear notebook and they gather the most current information that can
possibly be known by anyone. and prepare it for the rest of us to read and it changes every year and they do a phenomenal job but for example they will tell you that we don't really know much about Pakistan's nuclear command and control we simply don't know we don't know much about India's nuclear command and control is Russia's Russia's command and control when I was in the silo at least was still decentralized which it gave almost autonomous launch decision to the commanders at the silos themselves what does that mean so in In the United States, it takes a validated order to clear a computer system before the controlling officers can launch the system. So the president has got to say launch and then and then he gives an actual validation code that gets carried in the nuclear notebook and then any system that validates the same code is now armed to launch. Nobody can just launch. So the president has what's called um sole authority. He doesn't ask permission of anyone. not his sect staff, not the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. It's his alone. He may ask their advice, but it's his decision. He reads in the black book of the inside of the football. What's the football? So, the football is that satchel that goes around with the president 24/7 365. Also, the vice president. Inside of that are is a black book. That's what it's nicknamed. It's called the black book, I was told, because it involves so much death. And inside of that are predetermined strikes for all of our enemies or adversaries who might ever launch against us. So it's not a decisionmaking. They're not sitting around, okay, here's what happened. What do you think we should do? It's do you want to choose A, B, or C? And do you want to go with subset D, E, F, or Q? It was once described by a man who carried that football as a comparable to a Denny's menu. Each of those line items, I'm I'm going to give it to you in painful detail. Each of those line items is followed by an authentication code. And the authentication code is then put into the football. That authentication code is then sent to every nuclear capable site across the United States
and any nuclear capable sites in Europe. The authentication code will only work to authenticate with missiles that have the predetermined target set that was in the black book. Now that the emergency action message, the EAM that is received by the missile crew, they can't determine what it means. They just get a message, an encrypted message. Then they turn it and then they check the authentication code against a bank of authentication codes that they're given every morning. A whole new bank that recycles that changes every morning. If it if the two codes match, only the system knows. The crew does not know. And then the crew the crew will follow the action steps of an authenticated message. If and then part of those action steps literally include unlocking a safe, pulling out a plastic wrapped piece of paper that you crack open and then from within that that piece of uh plastic. You crack out another code and that code is a specific arming code that will arm the weapon system that you are at. And then you go through the whole check. It's a huge checklist of items until you get the checklist item that says insert your keys and the checklist item where you have the commander of the capsule count to three and then you both turn your keys. That's you're just following orders. You're the whole time. Did you ever turn your key? We turn our keys probably five or seven times a week because Eam are always coming through and we never know what they say. EM the emergency action message. So you're they've set that system up so that you don't know what you're doing. You're just following orders. be nobody who's It's like a firing squad where everyone's shooting, but you don't know who shoots the fatal bullet. Yep. And by the way, everything that he just described can happen. Not always, but in as little as 60 seconds. The terrible joke is they don't call them minute men. That's the ICBMs for nothing. Based on everything you know, do you think that if Russia launched a nuclear weapon now, do you think the the US would respond?
Not even a question. But do you think they would even know? Do you not think the person the president for example would think? Not even a question. Really? Not even a question. Do you not think they would think it was something else? I mean, there's been times in history where they thought, "Maybe that's something else. Maybe we've made a mistake." They hesitate. I think that your question is valid because it's not truly instantaneous. There are interceptors, there are counter measures, there are second and third order uh intelligence sources that could be checked within just a few seconds, right? One satellite corroborates with another satellite kind of thing. But all in, you have maybe seven minutes to decide if you're going to counteratt attack or not. Seven minutes because that's between when you pick up the first satellite signature of a launched ICBM or a launched submarine weapon. depending on whether it's going into the atmosphere or whether it's a cruise missile that's coming straight for your shore. Like at most you probably have about seven minutes before a counter code, a counter order has to happen because the nuclear bomb is going to get from one continent to the other in approximately 30 minutes. It's actually, if you do the math like I did, it is 33 minutes from Pyongyang to Washington DC and it's 26 minutes and 40 seconds from Russia to Washington DC. You know, we all kind of know Donald Trump's ideology because we he's so public. Do you actually think that he would sit there and say see something come and get the intel in and he would listen to the intelligence? We just said earlier that he doesn't listen to the intelligence. He might not. I mean that's that's the that's the prerogative of the president and it's and then I mean the other sick part of this and Annie you can correct me if any of this is stated. Even if we don't react right away and everything is destroyed, we have airborne assets that will launch all of our systems after complete annihilation of the United States. Okay? So even if we were wrong, the
submarines and the airborne assets will still That's why we have a trial. Again, this always comes back to the to the deterrence part of it, which is this is why we must have all of this force just in case because all of these war games have been practiced and rehearsed so often. this all. But I'm going to tell you a terrifying detail. I interviewed the commander of the nuclear sub forces, Admiral Connor, for my book. Not someone who normally talks to journalists. When the book published, he rang me up and asked me to have lunch. Not something that often happens to a journalist. I thought, am I in trouble? Okay. I met with Admiral Connor and he said to me, "You never asked me about my time in the nuclear bunker under the Pentagon." And I said,"Well, how would I have known about that?" And he said, he was curious that I had reported that the public does not know how often the Pentagon practices nuclear war. We don't know. Andrew may know. We don't know. It's classified. And what Admiral Connor said to me was, "You never asked me what I was doing in the nuclear bunker beneath the Pentagon. And you never ask me how often we practice preparing to tell the president that he needs to launch to your question. I mean, I'm at the edge of my seat. And I said, he said, "Guess." And you know, I started with once a year, right? Because what do you think? I mean, that's like terrifying. And you know what the answer is? Three times a day. They practice three times a day telling the president that there's a nuke coming into shore. Three times a day. And I said, "Admal Connor, why do they practice three times a day?" And he said, "There are three shifts at the Pentagon in the bunker." And I I think the terrifying point that we're making is to your question, which is a normal human question. Like, wait a minute, someone really wouldn't do this. I mean, you would stop and think this can't be right. You know, all of that. That's the movies. That's that's not the defense department. That's not the system of nuclear command and control. The system of nuclear command and control is rehearsed for precisely go at minute 7 and that is terrifying.
I also think that's why we're not moving closer to strategic nuclear war because you're you're capable you're nuclear capable nuclear ready countries have been doing this three times a day and they all know what the [ __ ] are we fighting for if we if we do this what's it all for like we're not we're not going to win tomorrow there's not going to be Putin on a pedestal or Trump on a pedestal saying we won everything will be destroyed mutual assured mutual assured destruction so it makes much more sense for them to hold their weapons and continue using it as a as a deterrent. Not just a deterrent for nuclear conflict, but a deterrent like Russia's using it right now. Nobody will get involved in Ukraine and nobody will support Ukraine incurring further into Russia because everybody's afraid of what if. That's the that's a huge ace in the hole. Every single one of you watching this right now has something to offer, whether it's knowledge or skills or experience. And that means you have value. Standstorm, the platform I co-own, who are one of the sponsors of this podcast, turns your knowledge into a business through one single click. You can sell digital products, coaching, communities, and you don't need any coding experience either. Just the drive to start. This is a business I really believe in. And already $300 million has been earned by creators, coaches, and entrepreneurs just like you have the potential to be on Stand. These are people who didn't wait, who heard me saying things like this, and instead of procrastinating, started building, then launched something, and now they're getting paid to do it. Stan is incredibly simple and incredibly easy. And you can link it with a Shopify store that you're already using if you want to. I'm on it, and so is my girlfriend and many of my team. So, if you want to join, start by launching your own business with a free 30-day trial. Visit stephvenbartlet.stan.store and get yours set up within minutes. What are you doing about all this information and how you feel about the global conflicts at the moment on a personal level? Is there anything at all you're doing to prepare or anything you're doing to try and prevent it on a
personal level? Benjamin, outside of my teaching, I mean, when I do media appearances, I just try to talk about this as much as I can. And I design curriculum on media literacy. I think teaching I I teach high school kids, middle school kids how to consume media. And at least if you can't learn about it to be able to separate information from misinformation and just to and whoever I can get in contact with and here's how you how you understand and that involves understanding the use of rhetoric, the use of political persuasion or propaganda and just so at least we can try to be better informed. And is there a central concern you have about the world we're heading into and the new technologies and AI and all these things that sits above all other concerns? It's a breakdown of civic um literacy that we don't understand how governments work. We don't understand how our government works on a local level, on a broader level. And we lose the civic connection with our literal neighbors. We we don't care. We're not invested in them. Their well-being is not our well-being. And so it's every person fights for themselves and I'm going to vote for the person who yells and screams the loudest. So I think um a civic breakdown it leads contributes to that polarization. That's what I concern about. Same question to you, Annie. Anything you're doing to prepare and what's your central concern above all others? Well, on a on a hopeful pop, you know, optimistic uh point, I would say that one of the most fascinating moments for me in this past year was being asked to come to the Vatican to speak to the cardinals about nuclear war, a scenario, so that they could talk to the pope. And this was Pope Francis when he was still alive about his effort him about his efforts for peace. So, how's that for a paradox? Talk about nuclear war to think about peace. And what I learned in that process was that a lot of the hope lies in getting individuals like the Pope, like the United, you know, the United Nations, these third parties that are not government specific to help engagement for these different nations diplomats to have better conversations. Mhm. And so you have world leaders who in essence I loved your point about civics
like just this idea about your neighbor. I got the sense from the Vatican and I'm not a Catholic but I got a sense of the neighbor as a concept you know the people and that you know yes we want to have a really strong defense in the United States. And I think that's an important part of national security if not the most important part of national security. But you must also have a care about your neighbor, others on the planet. And I was really inspired that this whole world exists out there that I was not privy to before at the United Nations, at the Vatican, and elsewhere to get people to communicate. And Andrew, I'm leaving the United States, brother. I'm I am I am fully engaged in relocating and immigrating with my family. um finding one of those safe havens around the around the world where we can just plug in and become part of a community, become part of a globe uh understand and raise my children as global citizens and global citizens who are American rather than American citizens who reject the globe. Where are you going to go and when are you going to go or is that classified? Uh, so I'm not going to tell really anybody where. I might I'll tell you personally where, but uh we had a plan to leave by 2030 and we're currently on track to to execute that plan by 2026. 2026. Yeah. So, um, next year. Yeah, next year. So, my I I already have plans to change my appearance significantly in December and then uh if we if we have everything lined up appropriately, then we'll be we'll be leaving the country by spring of next year. Why change your appearance? cuz I don't want to be identified anymore. I don't I can't legally change like my name, but uh but I don't have to be the guy that looks like this all the time anymore. I've changed my appearance before. Well, I imagine it was your it was your job, right? But but you have a YouTube channel. You you you do a lot of sort of public education, so you're going to shut down the YouTube channel and all those things. No, I think what I'm probably going to do is is only start serving my audience. Like right now, I do a lot of serving
other audiences. It's why I love I love contributing to your show. I love contributing to other shows. Um, but you know what I've found is that civil that civic breakdown, just for anybody who wants to do a thought experiment, if you look my name up and go on any other interview other than the ones here with Dary CEO, what you will find is thousands of ignorant, hateful comments, questioning everything from my intentions to my credibility to whatever else. And that's not just me it's happening to. It's happens to all of us. I mean, you're mir your name is smeared on a daily basis and it's because I am a fan of you that my algorithm feeds me all the [ __ ] about you two. That's the world that we live in. So, I don't have to continue to feed everybody. I can just feed my audience and my audience won't care what I look like. My audience won't care if I teach them from behind an animated AI image of myself, right? But I can continue to teach without having to be the CIA guy with the hair. if you were to make a case for others to follow in your footprints because I'm I'm somewhat curious. You know, sometimes I have dreams of running away and going to like, I don't know, Bali or something and just New Zealand, laying low or New Zealand. What would that case be to someone like to someone like me or to anyone listening as to why they should maybe consider getting out of this very polarized algorithm driven reality that we live in? I mean, you can get out of the polarized algorithm without leaving the without leaving your house, right? It just takes a little bit of uh practice for your own information security, for your own information kind of insulation. Uh but the case that I would make for for really radically changing your life if you're an American citizen is understand that the United States is an is a country of decreasing influence around the world. And in many ways, the actions that we've been taking recently are to try to rapidly expand our influence again. But we are declining influence. And we should be. We should be. Our strategy post World War II was to become the world's bully and to benefit off of all the economic benefits that come from being the world's weapons supplier,
financial tools supplier, uh medical supplier. Like we we wanted that benefit. Well, now we find ourselves in a position where we have no strong allies. Like we have countries that like us, but those countries that like us are not strong on their own. So we have a we have a weak Europe that's artificially weak because we've kept them weak. We have a weak Latin America that's artificially weak because we've kept them weak. So the only way to really understand the existence of people outside the United States is to get outside the United States and not just to tour outside but to live outside to actually see what it's like to live on the local economy, learn the local language, understand the local culture. I mean, you can walk around Porto, Portugal, and you'd be depressed because you see Soviet era buildings and everybody's over the age of 50 and they've all got their eyes downcast and they look just totally defeated. But only after you've been there a month, two months, and you make a friend do you actually get into a house and you share a bottle of of amazing port and then they light up because culturally they don't get to be animated on the street like we get to be in New York City. And if you only live in the United States, you have a perverted view of what the rest of the world looks like. And you have to get outside of the United States to really appreciate what you have inside of the United States. So you got to get the [ __ ] out to understand what you're fighting for back at home. All the people who are here who are just spouting nationalistic dril, they don't have any idea what they're actually fighting for. So the reason why you're taking your children out of the country is so that they know what they're fighting for. so they understand and appreciate what it means to be American, not what it means to be polarized, not what it means to be, you know, whatever whether whether you're uh New Yorker or whether you're Colorado or whether you're Fidian, but to actually understand like, hey, we have a democracy that we need to nourish. We should be proud to serve. The men and women in uniform are making a genuine sacrifice. There's there's something special about the United States. Unfortunately, the people inside
the United States don't understand that for the most part. Benjamin, you talk a lot about deep fakes and AI and stuff. And as Andrew was saying there, it's um especially as someone like me who's a podcaster and I've built an audience. And so when something goes on the internet, it gets more clicks than it used to get. So there's this whole like like deep fake war that we're much of my team actually that are in the back there, my chief of staff etc. spends most of her time fighting at the moment, which is every single day there's a new deep fake ad video. They'll take videos from this podcast conversation, change slightly how my lips are moving and get me to promote WhatsApp groups or uh various other things. And there's there's a spectrum to this. The one end of the spectrum is so horrific that I probably actually couldn't say it on this show, but there's a really horrific spectrum to this. And it's um it's it's almost emerged out of nowhere in the last I'd say six months. Like in the last six months is really when it took hold to the point that every single day it is some it's part of my day. Every single day I'm emailing this one thread that I have with Meta in Facebook telling them this is a new one. This morning I emailed them. Just a screenshot of a lady who lost £3,000. She's a single mother. Um she loves the show so she listens to me and something came up in her feed and it was me telling her to join a group and she joined the group and she's lost £3,000. And she was saying she said to me in the message I can actually read it out. She said, "I'll never trust anything on the internet ever again." And it was sad because she's a single mother that tried to do something for herself to help her family. Interesting digital times. And you talk about this quite a lot, the impact. Is there any way for us to prepare? Is there anything that we can can do? One of the the big takeaways from the the war game that I did uh and um there was a documentary film that was made on it called War Game. And what I noticed was that it comes to all this is a crisis. So regardless of the crisis, the best you can do is manage it. You're not going to win it. You're not going to defeat it. You will not overcome the
forces of u misinformation and and generative AI manipulating you or what you're saying and your followers. The best you can do is manage. And you manage by educating people as much as you can on how to on on understanding how rhetorical manipulative influence works, understanding what, you know, Aristotle taught us these techniques a very long time ago and they're still in force today. And it's the use of, you know, um, appeal to emotion, appeal to reason, appeal to credibility. I I the I the curriculum that I develop teaches beginning with kids so that when you by the time because by the time they get to college at university, it's too late. I need to teach them and we need to teach them young enough to understand. If someone is asking of you something on the internet, someone you think you trust, pay attention to their tone, what words are they using? What what are they are they appealing to you emotionally and know right away that that's a clue that that might be where you're vulnerable emotionally. You're susceptible to someone who says this or to this cause or to that issue. That's the best we can do. When I say manage, and I'm sorry, I don't have a better answer, but the best you can do is just say, "Let me let me teach you how manipulation works and how uh and how misinformation works so that it hopefully you can recognize it or it or it strikes a chord." So, if you ever come across something, you'll say, "Okay, I've seen this before." That's that's the best. And it's and I don't and it's not enough and it's incredibly frustrating. But I I actually read about a study recently where they take young children and they do exactly that. they just they show them adverts and they get them to point out how it's trying to influence their emotions. They ask them to try and track the source of it etc. And just that practice um increased their awareness and therefore reduced their likelihood of being impacted by a scammer ad. So I go one step further and it's controversial and I've gotten some some push back on it. I actually teach kids how to create bad content. I teach them how to be trolls not so that they can
become professional trolls so that they can identify when those tools are being used against them. I do this where I have them simulate a um let's say for example I'll have them simulate a Senate campaign um like a political race and I'll say I want you to f to take uh existing Instagram and Tik Tok videos and absolutely deep tweak them modify them pull them out of context make the other person say things that they never said take positions that they didn't and then the students do this and then I had one that actually made its way to the Senate Democratic National Committee and they thought it was a real campaign I said it wasn't it was done through my students, they had marked it clearly as educational, but what the students learned was, "Oh my god, if it's this easy for me to create it, how what about things content that's coming at me that now made them aware that made them the equivalent of leaving the United States to see what is it like in other parts?" When you see what it looks like from the other side, when you actually create it, you realize how what it might look like. That's one tool. And I'm not trying to teach them again how to, you know, it's like not I'm not trying to teach you to steal a car so you can make a life out of stealing cars, but to teach you to design a safer car. Closing comments then to sort of encapsulate again for the for the listener at home, how they should be thinking, what they might do in their own lives to live a better life to to result in a better outcome for themselves, their families, and for everyone else. Um, starting with with you, Annie, what would you say? I think that more information is good. More information sources allow a person to figure out what it is that's meaningful to them. But I think you have to be disciplined about how you get information. I mean, I do a thing with myself where I I time the amount I actually set a timer for the amount of time I'm on X or wherever because and it always goes off and invariably I'm like, I must have missed the timer, you know? And yet, if I'm reading something analog, a book of poetry, as I sometimes do, or a book of non-fiction or fiction as I often do, you know, that's a different kind of time. And so, I think it's very valuable to be aware of that.
And so, my two things and my takeaways just off the comments about like where you can be really become dissatisfied with the state of the world and the speed of information. For me, it's just like father time and mother nature. I spend a lot of time outside or as much as I can rather given how much writing I do. But like I just go out and connect on go on a walk in the winter. I ski, I hike, I'll go do a yoga class. I mean this may sound like what does this have to do with any of this but it does because I really believe the human condition doesn't change even though all this technology does and that we have to have this balance in our own self of all this stuff coming at us and just existing in the world and then you figure out how you want to change evolve and in my case report Benjamin the biggest thing I would say is to and I tell this to my students all the time I don't care what position position you take, what views you have. I don't care what you end up doing with your life. Promise me you will stay curious. Promise me you will ask questions. Promise me you still want to learn and you don't become complacent. And that means being active in your community on a small civic scale, understanding who you're electing for, who you're electing on a small scale, but not just being apathetic because if you don't make decisions about what is going to happen to you, others will make them for you. And I promise you won't like the outcome. I think curiosity is the first line of defense towards protecting um what you value. Andrew, I would tell everybody to be very diligent with where they learn and frankly as far as the people that I've met, uh Steve, you are a phenomenal source of information and the people that you vet to bring on this show are fantastic. So, if people don't know where else to start, this is a fantastic place to start. If anybody's still listening or for all of them that are still listening, they already know this to be true. Um, and then the the other thing I would say on top of that is if you don't want to radically change like I am so willing to radically change for my family, small steps are where it all begins. Just small steps and
understanding what are your kids watching on their screens? What is your wife watching or your husband? What are they reading on their screens? What do they think about the world? Because we're not going into a world that is going to inform us on its own. So, we must inform ourselves and the only way to trust the information that you have is to be very diligent with what it is that you're consuming. Thank you. Thank you so much. Um, I always come at these conversations from a selfish perspective because I somewhat think that's the maybe the more selfless thing to do. And um, I had so many questions about the nature of the world. And through the gauntlet of subjects that we've been through today, I've found many many of the of those answers. I feel more hopeful in a way, but I feel more prepared against the things that I'm hopeless about. One of the things I don't think about enough is, as you've said, the information that I'm getting. And it feels almost wrong in the world we live in to put barriers and systems in place to filter the information we're getting because our natural state is just to open up our phones, just to look at the news, look at the screen. Um, and and it's almost against, I guess, human cognition to to then try and apply another filter between that. And then you worry about the filter you might apply and do I mute people? Do I block certain words? Do I not look at that news channel? But then I'm just in this echo chamber. So, it's it's quite a complicated situation to be in. What I return to most of the time is I um I return to kind of what Annie said, which is my Maslovian needs of connection and and loving someone and having a good life um are maybe my refuge amongst all the angst. But then again, I have I have a conflict because I don't want to be ignorant and I don't want to be in a suspended state of disbelief where these decisions happen without my choosing and with my knowledge. So I maintain my curiosity and maybe that is the answer. Maybe it's a complicated mix of everything all of you have discussed. And I thank you all for being here today and being um um civil and respectful and disagreeable in a certain areas with your opinions because I think that's exactly what we're missing so much of. It's a difference of opinion but a
respect for the same outcome. So, thank you so much. Thank you. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. [Music]