Transcript of Israeli Elections, & the VetBro Industrial Complex | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

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All right, here we go. We're live. I'm listening. Cool, cool. All right. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Eyes on Geopolitics. We're here live on a Wednesday with John and Jack. Hi guys.

Hey, what's up? Hey.

Um, we're just gonna freeball it. A lot happening. Obviously we saw what happened with the Israeli election. Seems to be a deadlock. Uh, Brother Bibi is up by a couple of seats in the Knesset. They— no party has 61 needed. I think it's like 51 BB, 47 Eisenkot, and 19 for the Arab, uh, Israeli parties. So they're going to be working to make a coalition, but till then, BB's still going to be the, the prime minister until they figure it out or they do another election or God knows what happens. Um, I think it's all— I think it's all safe to say that we're not really going to hit Iran until after our midterm elections, which are next Tuesday. So it's going to be a wait and see. And all the OSINT guys will be waiting to, you know, looking at what, what kind of hardware we're sending that way and whatnot. Try to, try to basically predict what's going to happen. So we'll obviously all be monitoring the situation like good, good Americans do. Yeah. Your thoughts, guys? How are you?

Hey, well, So, I mean, I think we should just start by pointing out Israel has a parliamentary system. There's like 120 seats in the Knesset. The Israeli voters go and vote for political parties, and then those parties choose who is going to be the prime minister ultimately. And they have to form a coalition because especially at least when no one comes out with a clear majority, which apparently happens pretty rarely in Israeli politics. They have to form a coalition government, and that's basically where they are right now because neither side is capturing the majority of the voters. So I'm sure this next you know few weeks is going to be somewhat nightmarish for the Israeli people as they try to cobble together a coalition, and if they can't, then it goes into like some sort of runoff election. There's like a mechanism for that as well. So right now you have. Netanyahu's party, and then there's the Israeli center-right party, and then the, uh, the Arab parties took, I think, 17 seats in the Knesset, which is again pretty rare, uh, as far as I'm aware.

Yeah, and actually something that might happen, which is that there's a new election, happened back in 2019. Uh, I was actually in Jordan when this was going on. We were trying to negotiate, um, a peace agreement with our friend Jared Kushner, who was over there trying to— if you remember the map that they produced at that time, there were these like little lines connecting Gaza and the West Bank through these like underground highways. And it was a complex thing. I'll just say that. And at that time, they were trying to have elections in Israel. In 2019, they had 2 elections, couldn't find a prime minister until the second time. Then 2020, the coalition collapsed. They had a third election in 11 months. Then 2021, they had their fourth election in 2 years. And then 2022, so like year sequentially every single year up till 2022. They had 5 elections in 4 years for this exact reason that you mentioned, Jack, because of the coalition politics is very challenging. And it is based on the UK parliamentary system where these blocs have to form voluntarily with each other. And right now it's unique because the Arabs actually have 19 seats, which is historic.

That is very unusual. It means they have some bargaining power. The thing is though, It's not that the Arabs have to agree with what Eisenkot and the rest of the coalition want. It's that their interests have to align such that they're willing to put their differences aside temporarily to achieve something. And what they want is there are a couple of like domestic things, because remember, 25% of Israeli citizenry are Arab Muslim. You know, that's, that's an important thing to know. That's a lot of people. It's millions of people.

Eisenkot has said that he does not want to ally with the Arabs But right now, that's his only pathway to forming a majority over Netanyahu.

Yeah. And if you look at the Arabs, like, if you look at polls, like opinion polls of what do the Arab Israeli citizens want in Israel, you know, an outsider might think like, oh, there's Palestinian issues are like the biggest thing. It's like, no, that's not true actually. It's more about normal domestic issues like civil equality, for example. This has been a big problem even between Jewish populations. If you have Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi, there's a tiered system Ashkenazim are the top, followed by Sephardim, and then way down below are Mizrahi. Mizrahi are Arab-origin Jews who came, who actually uprooted from Arab countries like Iraq, Egypt, and so on. After 1948, the Israeli government paid per head for some of these people to be shipped to Israel to bolster the number of people. Over half the pop— around half the population are Mizrahi and Sephardim, which—

Falasha Jews and all of those people also.

Yeah. So there's, there's these different groups of people that have different interests, and there are specifically the Arab interests, they want, like I said, equality, which is a big ask because even the Jews themselves do not have equality in Israel. So if the Mizrahi cannot be treated as equal Jews, how can you expect the Arab Muslims to be treated equal with the rest of the Jewish population? Right. And if you remember back in, I believe it was 2019, Netanyahu pushed forward the Basic Law because there's no constitution in Israel. It's a country that has no written constitution. The Basic Law basically said it's a Jewish state, purely Jewish. There is no— there's nothing else. Right. But then again, you have this like 25% of the population It's like, what about us? You have Christians too, and Samaritans. Samaritans are a separate Semitic faith that we very infrequently discuss, but they live there too. You have Druze as well. So there's a lot of different, even religions, not just Christian, Jewish, Muslim. There's other religions, minority religions that have very little rights and are treated very poorly. The Druze, of course, are allowed to serve in the military and so on.

But I'm mentioning all this nuance because that nuance plays into these smaller pockets of seats. Like, Uh, Ram Party, for example, has 7 seats. That could be enough to push the opposition bloc over 61, which 61 is what they need. So Ram has 7 people. What about the Joint List? There are Druze as well. There's, there's at least one Druze Knesset member by tradition. So, you know, that's another, like, there are these people with like these very small interest pockets that if you can get them to all kind of sit together on this coalition, you might be able to push it across. But right now, because there are so many Arab seats, 19, you have to have at least some Arab seats. There has to be some concession going on here. And it's true for Netanyahu's side too. They have 53 seats right now. You need 61 to get a majority. So like, that's 8 more seats that Netanyahu also needs to find somewhere, right? So this is kind of a challenge where both sides are going to have to do something about the Arab seats to actually push this thing across the line, or we're going to have a 2019 through 2022 re— re-go where we're having like, a waterfall of elections until we finally end up back with Netanyahu again.

Because that's what happened then, is because Netanyahu kept pulling rabbits out of hats the way that he was doing his coalition building, where you're like, how is that possible? This dude was like done. And suddenly there's one of these small pockets of 7 seats in the coalition that was like, okay, we'll go with Netanyahu. And that's how we actually ended up continuing to allow the ultra-Orthodox not to serve in the military, even though the law has changed and it's supposed to be enforced. They do serve in the military. You know, it's almost like 25%. increase in military size of the IDF if they were required to join like they're supposed to join. So there's a lot of concessions that Netanyahu made to make it happen last time. But it seems like the concessions have been made. It's almost like, you know, you fired your bullet, you can't get the bullet back. So now it's like, well, if he abandons the far right, the coalition can't be formed anyway. So someone's going to have to move toward the middle on either side.

Very exciting stuff. What does that mean? Even if Eisenkot, let's say he did— I wanted to say it in our group chat, but I don't want to get into a fight with people in our group chat on Eyes On yesterday. But it's like, if Eisenkot wins, it kind of goes from like genocide back to apartheid, and that's supposed to be okay? Uh, that's at least that's what it seems to me, my dirty, you know, liberal mind.

So Eisenkot, you know, he backs settlement blocs as a way of securing things. It's not more about like giving land to Jews. It's more about just like creating a security barrier, essentially, that would be challenging for bad actors to flow between. But that would, of course, make de facto settlements permanent in some cases, which has been happening anyway. It's not like this is going to be a new thing that suddenly it's a new policy. It's like this is obviously happening more now under Netanyahu. It has been. Yeah. He— the most important difference between Eisenkot and Netanyahu, in my opinion, as far as policy is concerned, is views towards Iran. Netanyahu verbally says regime change all the time, and they're 2 weeks away from a bomb since 2003. And Eisenkot says the regime can stay, but we need to negotiate with them on their nuclear program or do something about it to ratchet it down so that it's under control. So that's kind of the biggest difference that I see.

Yes, separate but related to this topic. I've been reading Matthew Cole's new book, Princes and Thieves, which is really— it's about Jared Kushner, but it touches upon MBZ, MBS in the Emirates, in Saudi Arabia. Erik Prince is wrapped up in all of it. And it's a wild, wild story. I'm only like 25% of the way through the book. But I think it's worth reading if you guys pick it up. Just the connections that were made and the way Kushner went about conducting American foreign policy seemingly unilaterally during the first Trump administration is, I guess, shocking is the word you would use.

Yeah, it was crazy. You know, like I said, I was there in Jordan during this time, and most of that activity happened either in Jordan or Israel or both at the same time. And not a lot of Americans know this, but we actually have a 3-star command in the West Bank that trains the Palestinian Authority security forces. Yeah. And that gentleman would frequently come to the US Embassy in Jordan because he couldn't go to the embassy in Israel because of political sensitivity. So he had to cross over the border into Jordan to do his work, like his work with the US, because he can't have a JWICS computer in the West Bank. So he's got to come over to us. Right. And it's very fascinating to see how this all worked because Kushner could kind of come and go as he pleased. This was the same time that Rashida Tlaib tried to come and visit her dying relative and was denied entry into Israel despite being a senator visiting on an official congressional delegation and so on. So very interesting to see that all happen where Kushner had like absolute access everywhere and our 3-star military commander and a senator could not access the same location.

And this unelected official completely outside of our political process is able to just waltz around and make policy for us that we don't get to choose or debate or talk about, right? And that had a big, I think, factor on why Netanyahu was able to pull those rabbits out of hats, because Netanyahu was seen as a companion of Kushner. In other words, like a Kushner whisperer. And so that helped get seats across the line.

Netanyahu would like stay in the Kushners' house when he came through New York, New Jersey. So, I mean, they're very close. Like Netanyahu slept in Kushner's bedroom when he, when he visited.

Was Kushner there?

I believe he had to sleep in the couch down in the basement. They opened up the bedroom for the Prime Minister of Israel. Sorry, Kushner, I go sleep in the basement.

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff like that. Like Spencer, what's his name? First name? God, the colonel. Army

Colonel John Spencer.

John Spencer. I think it was 2020. Could probably look it up, but I remember he was active duty. In the military, he was flown to Israel on Israel's dime, met with Netanyahu in a public, like, photography setup in Netanyahu's office, sitting in chairs together. I remember this photo because I saw it and I was like, how is this even possible? This is crazy. And he was there basically doing a PR campaign for Israel. And then when the Gaza, you know, happened, he was writing his book about and also like, like, like rabidly defending what was going on in Gaza. on behalf of Israel while he's active duty as an O-6 in the Army. Normally for any other state, you would be investigated. I mean, I was a counterintelligence agent. I'm telling you, like, we would investigate dudes for like way, way less. And like for guys doing stuff in Thailand they shouldn't have been doing on liberty, we'd kick them out of the military. And then you got this dude over here sitting in Netanyahu's office doing an official PR thing for Israel, for a foreign power that has recruited a US— multiple US citizens as assets over the years, by the way.

John Pollard being one of them, who was actually during that same time period, John Pollard was welcomed back to Israel. And, you know, first of all, he was pardoned by Trump and then he was welcomed to Israel and given Israeli citizenship and so on. So very fascinating, these like kind of crossovers between— yeah,

yeah,

these things that, that are attached to what Kushner was doing at the time.

So let me ask you, how does an '06 active '06 colonel able to do that without getting any kind of TP whack?

Because people aren't—

don't have the will.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's no political will to do anything about it.

And we've basically chopped counterintelligence down. I mean, no one even cares about that at this point.

And I mean, you got guys running around with Strava watches in, in Crete or in Cyprus. You got guys on, on aircraft carriers running around with their Fitbits, giving away the location of the aircraft carrier. I mean, there's like so many OPSEC violations, so much counterintelligence failure. Um, and there was a, you know, a rumor that the reason some of those soldiers were killed at the beginning of the war was because of ad tech that—

Yeah, it was.

Had exploited. Yeah. So again, this is like OPSEC 101, counterintel 101, and we're just kind of like letting it happen and not enforcing it. And we're just trying to be this like, quote unquote, extra lethal force that just doesn't know what it's doing. It's just kind of like tumbling down the hill and crashing into stuff as it's going down.

Good segue.

It's not easy to do them live. I'm not gonna lie to you. Like, when we did it, when we used to do the Team House podcast live and we had to like shoehorn in our fucking ads, it would be, uh, really tough to do. So touché. I mean, I'm better at it than Jack, actually. I'm more float fluid, but that's okay. Jack will get better. He's always gender fluid. Yeah, that too. That too. Um, yeah, so I wanted to touch on a little bit of the counterintel stuff because you've been hearing a little bit of like reports from like the FBI, like their counterintel like teams in their, in their offices and their field offices are like dwindled down to like, you know, half, half strength and stuff like that. What, like, how do we let that happen, number one? And number two is like, what does that mean for the United States national, like national security in general?

Well, I will say that counterintelligence, you know, it's very nuanced. There's different functional areas of counterintelligence. And even in a really broad sense, there's offensive and sort of defensive. We don't really call it defensive, but there's offensive counterintelligence, which is like double agent operations. And there's like the more run-of-the-mill, like, is the base safe counterintelligence operations? And there's obviously other stuff in between there. But working— so I was in the Marine Corps counterintelligence. We had a very, like, thinly staffed model where we do both HUMINT and counterintelligence under the same person, whereas the Army separated out counterintel and HUMINT to different people. And no offense to the Army, but the Army's counterintel is a mile wide, an inch deep. And I'm sure people will be upset that I say this, but, you know, I did multiple turnovers with Army CI teams that were supposed to be the same level as us, and they sucked. Like, frankly, there were a couple of good dudes that I've met, but that's because they were good human beings, not because they The training somehow made them that way. And the FBI also has this problem where, you know, you recruit a lot of people and they might not all be great, or the operations you have, the end states you're looking for don't require so many people.

And technology increases in such a way that you don't need so many people on the back end. Like, for example, when I was with NCIS, we would do some operations through personas online that used to require a lot of people. in, like, counterintelligence roles of various levels and types, some support and some actually counterintel agents. And you don't really need that as much anymore because now you've got really deep technological tool access that you could actually have one guy running like 50 personas. And so it used to be like one person per persona, and actually you have to, like, turn over the persona when you'd come off shift, back on shift, and, like, brief down what we talked about with the guy on the other side and, like, all this stuff. That is changing. It has changed very much.

It was like assigned like a laptop, right? Like this laptop is Bob.

Yeah, and exactly. So that actually has changed too because now we use virtual machines. So I can have a laptop with 50 virtual machines. It looks like 50 different computers running at the same time inside sandboxes.

And yeah.

Yep. And, and actually one thing that I've, I've worked on in the past was some, some cover activity where actually we would work with data centers to make it so that they're like regionally distributed so that you don't even need a VPN because the thing doesn't even exist where you, where it looks like it exists because of the way the structure is set up in the world. It's pretty fascinating using quantum cryptography and some other things as well. So like all that said, there is a degree of efficiency that can be captured by reducing the number of counterintel people. There's also a problem where you just take a hammer instead of a scalpel. So there may be like good intentions, bad execution here where they're like, oh yeah, we can rescue some efficiency or finance by cutting. instead of cutting finely, they're just like going in there with a machete and chopping down the office and being like, all right, we need to get rid of 15 chairs out of here. And I bet that's probably how it worked. They're like, how many people do we have staffed on these projects? Cut it by 10%.

Instead of like, who by name should we remove and keep in here? Which takes a lot more resources and more monitoring costs and all this stuff. And as we've seen with the administration, the way they chopped down after Doge and things like that, there weren't many thoughts about by name, by chair, by operation, you know, by requirement. Instead, it was just like percentages, like how many can we cut it by? Right. So that's what's concerning to me is that there were good intentions probably, but bad execution.

Yeah. Like, one of the more disturbing things is how many Mandarin speakers have been cut. Not that there's many to begin with, but like, I know one person in one federal agency, he was cut from his job, fluent Mandarin speaker, because You know, the administration decided he was a libtard, probably because, you know, and I should point out that, like, if you're going to fire everyone who was involved in the January 6th investigation, like, almost the— I don't want to say the entire, but like the majority of the FBI agents got pulled off their cases and put on January 6th for those prosecutions. And they were told to do that. It's not like they had some partisan political motive in doing it. It was just their job that they were given. Uh, so a lot of people got canned for that. And then there's another person I was speaking to recently, and she also is a fluent Mandarin speaker. And, um, she had a government position, would like to take new government positions. And, uh, apparently they won't even talk to her because her parents came from the mainland and they escaped like Tiananmen Square like that.

They're not going back, you know, but, uh, just because of that, because she's ethnically Chinese, they won't, they won't speak to her.

Well, this is the same with Iran, too. There's a lot of Iranians in the military— not a lot, but there are Iranians in the military that are either discriminated against or like soft discriminated against or just like not allowed to do stuff, even though most of them, if not all of them, are here because of opposition to the regime.

And like, they're victims of the regime.

Right. They're more opposed to it than anyone in America ever could be. And yet we're treating them as if they're part of it. And it's crazy that we have all these exquisite counterintelligence mechanisms and ways to assess threats, and yet we can't even apply it in a way that's effective to get the best talent in the best seat. Against the threat. Instead, we have dudes who can't even read Farsi thinking they know about Iran. And I've seen this myself many times, even in State Department, where like people have no clue because the only books they read were written by certain individuals at certain think tanks who have a certain point of view, very much related to the earlier part of our conversation coming from those places, like Ken Pollack, for example, who shared secret information with IPAC while he was writing a book about Iran, doesn't speak Farsi, and has a clear connection to another foreign power of influence. Right. And those are the experts, quote unquote experts, just like the team that was trying to negotiate with Iran on the US side back in 2015 with the JCPOA. There were 9 Americans on that team as principals, and 8 of the 9 were Jewish.

And the thing is, like, what message is this sending to Iran? First of all. Second of all, where are the experts? You know, like real experts, because these dudes are coming in there with maybe some expertise from the position they're coming in, but they don't have the actual expertise that we need to understand the nuance of the other side. And this has been kind of an issue within the, the DOD, within the intelligence community from, I guess, time immemorial, really. I mean, really, it was World War II when we actually started to figure out like, oh, we need actual Japanese speakers. And that's why we started recruiting missionaries, because there weren't soldiers speaking Japanese because we wouldn't, we wouldn't allow them to join the military. And so we put them in concentration camps. So the only guys we had were missionaries, like Mormons in Asia that could speak Japanese. That's actually how the Marine Corps linguistics program was founded, was through missionaries, not Japanese people.

I wanted to ask you, what are your thoughts about this book called The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's 30-Year Conflict with Iran, written by David Kristol? I've heard that he's well regarded.

I have not read it, but if it's like Ken Pollack's Persian Puzzle, I have to thumbs down it. But I haven't read it, so I don't know.

No, I, I don't know the thesis of the book. Um, I, I know it came out and he's like— I was told that he was like this person in the bureaucracy that like came out, wrote this book, and then disappeared again.

Yeah, yeah. The thing is like there, there are a lot of people that write about these things, whether it's China or Iran or Russia. There are people who are Russian, Chinese, Iranian writing, and then there are everybody else. And for some reason, it's the everybody else written material that gets the big underlined posts and the stuff written by the people who know what's going on get kind of sidelined as like, well, yeah, but, you know, they don't really understand our politics, so we're not going to read it. And it's like, but yeah, they're telling you what's going on, though. You have to— you need to read this. Like, there's a book called Iran: A History by Abbas Amanat. And Abbas Amanat was actually the chair of the Iran department at Yale University for many years. He's now— he's like a Professor Emeritus. It's like the best book on Iran from like the 18th century till today. Everyone should read this if they're interested in Iran. I have never seen it discussed in government ever. And it's crazy because like it's far head and shoulders above any book written by your average think tank guy who's only writing that book because they're commissioned to write it over that 1-year fellowship that they have at RAND Corporation or whatever.

Whereas this dude spent 40 years teaching this material at the PhD level at Yale. And he's Iranian. Like, I mean, it's like there's so much such a chasm between what we think expertise is and what it really is.

Yeah, I see it here. Yeah. Available now on Amazon. You can go pick it up. Iran: A Modern History. I'm going to put it on my list.

I have a question.

I have a question. I mean, like, let's say you're a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed analyst, CIA analyst or DIA or whatever, intelligence analyst. Or officer and you're about to get, you know, you're being put on the Iran desk.

Yep.

You're not being told to read this shit, this kind of stuff. Like, I hope you are, at least like for those people who are on the ground getting the intelligence and disseminating it.

So the thing is, my opinion is if you're a junior analyst and you just got thrown on this thing, you're like, hey, you're the Iran guy now, the desk officer. And you're like, I don't know what that is. I call it Iran. You're like, okay, step 1, it's Iran. Step 2, for every book written by a non-Iranian about Iran, find a book written by an Iranian about Iran. And there are many. And I'm not just talking about nonfiction. I mean, like, read literature, read books that were written like in the 1980s, the 1970s, fiction. Because like fiction tells you a lot about how culture is designed, what they value, how they see the world, how they have conceptualized time. How they think about shame, guilt, these kind of things that are very nuanced. And it's not, it's not multipolar, like, oh, it's either shame or guilt. Like, there are interesting gradations here that are super important to understand if you're an intelligence officer, especially because you will understand better which buttons to press and which to avoid, where the vulnerabilities might be. What are things that we think are true, but they don't see it that way?

Like, are we speaking 2 different tracks here? That stuff will start to reveal itself as you carefully distribute different sources. And my other thought is, I think a lot of junior analysts are afraid to read those books because they think they're either getting sucked into the other side's ideology or it's, it's wrong to read it because they're not, you know, Iran is the enemy, right, to them. That's a monolithic view, or China or Russia. Or there are people who are like, oh, you're just a junior guy, you don't know anything anyway. And they get discouraged. I see this a lot with Russian analysts actually getting put on Russia desks because Russia was our enemy for a long time. There used to be a huge deck of expertise on it, especially the early 2000s when guys had been in the Cold War, were still active duty in senior positions, and they would talk down to people on Russia stuff because I was doing Russia stuff when I first came in in 2003 or 2004. And they'd be like, oh, you don't know anything about Russia. Don't even try. And it's like, well, we kind of have to because you're retiring, you know?

Right.

Yeah. Be more productive about this.

It doesn't end once you leave. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And actually on my first JSOC deployment, uh, my team leader made me read The Ugly American. And he actually, all of us on the team had to read it. And then we had like a little book talk together about it, um, because we were going to somewhere in Asia and he wanted to talk about like, what did that book mean to us? And like, because Ugly American, if people haven't read it, isn't just about the ugly American. That's one archetype. But there are many other archetypes in the book too. It's just the ugly American is the worst. But there are other American types that are also bad that are not like productive if you're working with a partner or an ally or you're trying to work with an adversary. Like if you're doing offensive counterintelligence, you want to get a double agent. You need to kind of understand what they're thinking about or else they're just not going to listen to you. They're going to see you as a problem or a threat. And you need to like understand why do they care about what they're doing, you know, and then use that and manipulate that and then turn them.

Right. But you can't do that if you don't read their stuff. If you only read stuff written by ourselves, you're never going to succeed.

Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty interesting. John, you wanted to talk about, uh, what was going on in the UK with the, the guys that got arrested, rearrested, I guess, uh, for the, uh, RAF— fuck, what's— oh, it doesn't— the RAF base Fairford. Um,

yeah,

from a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, really kind of interesting because so 2 of the guys just went on trial yesterday, their very first day on trial. That's why this is kind of in the news again. I was on BBC yesterday talking about it. And the 2 guys that were on trial were not part of the group of guys that were doing the surveillance outside the base. These guys were the ones in Manchester. If you remember, a few days after Fairford, there were guys in Manchester. One of them is in a wheelchair. The court drawings, if you look them up, are kind of like clearly approved by their attorney to make the guy look as vulnerable and like crippled as possible. So it makes it very hard for the jury to like be mad at him. Right. And these dudes are not Iranian, by the way. They are Foreigners from somewhere else in the world, but not Iranian refugees, mind you. There are actually 2 Iranian-UK dual nationals that were let on bail. So there's a total of 9 guys right now. Okay. We have the name of 1, 2, 3, 3 of them, and 6 of them are unnamed. Right.

So the guys that are out on bail, one of them was rearrested. The other ones are out. The dude that was in jail or on trial yesterday, The other guy that was captured with him was also let on bail. That was a UK-Iranian dual national. So there's a lot of like stuff happening in London, Manchester, Fairford. So if listeners remember back in May, there was a guy arrested in Turkey by the MIT, which is Turkish CIA essentially, which is led by Hakan Fidan, a very close ally of the IRGC. And we've talked about on the show before about my thoughts on why he might have given this guy through a rendition to the United States despite being aligned with that guy's handler. And it has to do with Turkish interests in Syria. That's my theory. Side story. Anyways, that guy, Saadi, was also indicted, and he's now in trial in the United States. Saadi was handling guys in Europe, and actually they successfully conducted 20 attacks under the name of Hayi, H-A-Y-I, over from, from February through May when he was detained. He was detained. Operations stopped. And I mentioned him because he was the main handler for operations going on in the UK and Europe at the time that killed people.

There were fatalities. Then they stopped for a month or two and then they started up again. And we have Raf Fairford at the end of September. To me, as a counterintelligence agent looking at this, there was a new handler that was appointed that took a couple of months to rapidly scale up contacts, but didn't get to vet them very well because of time pressures. Somebody was like, you need to find some people. You need to do something to do this operation as fast as possible. Here's some money. Go. And I think that's what happened. And it got disrupted, obviously, because MI5 was watching it the entire time. So were counterterrorism police. which is a branch of the UK police. And the interesting thing is, looking at this the way I'm looking at this, there was probably one individual, the Abdul Kareem, 24-year-old, who actually was in direct contact with the IRGC or the Kata'ib Hezbollah middleman that was in Iraq that was doing this, just like the previous gentleman I mentioned. The other guys were either unwitting or like quasi-witting. I don't think that they were in contact with the IRGC. And the reason I'm mentioning IRGC is because Prime Minister Burnham said that he was talking to the IRGC.

So although I haven't seen the indictment, because the way that British legal systems work, they don't really tell you very much. The fact that the Prime Minister said it kind of like points toward it probably being something that they've got evidence for, right? That they're willing to say it publicly.

Right.

The other, the other individuals were not. Right. So only one of them is charged with this 2023, under this 2023 law about materially assisting a foreign intelligence service. That's Abdulkarim. The rest of them have like a variety of other lesser charges that are not so egregious. So it's very fascinating to see this like multi-cell network that was stood up in about 2 months after the initial cell, which was way more effective. Again, I said 20+ attacks in like 5 months that killed numerous, like half a dozen people, right? If you remember, like there was some, some fires set that in Golder's Green, they burned the ambulances, they stabbed some guys, you know, they're doing a lot of surveillance. So that was like a better run operation. But a lot of IRGC case officers and handlers in Quds Force and the intelligence organization were killed in the last 8 months. So now you're left with like the lower guys who don't have any experience. It's like if you were like a brand new human collector, but then all the category 1 top level dudes got whacked and they're like, hey, brand new guy, go run this like super sensitive operation.

You're like, oh, what do I do? I guess I'll use WhatsApp to go recruit some dudes in London. And pay him money. And that's basically what happened, right? Because they actually— they wired him £500 to go get that vehicle and like send the vehicle up to Fairford and all this stuff. So very interesting to see, like, clearly like a very inexperienced team here, but it's because of the constraints they're operating under. They don't have another option. Like, they can't wait, right? And even then, we talked about this in the previous show with— I think it was Andy and I talking about this, that even if they just touched the base, like, oh, we touched it, that's enough. That's a win. because that means they breached security. They got through, they, they put a black eye on the US and UK and so on. It's not about necessarily blowing stuff up, although they would love to do that. It doesn't have to go that far. It's just enough to signal to the other side that, hey, we are still here. And I think that's really what the goal was here. It just happened to have been disrupted.

I think I've mentioned on the show before, there's this great book, Bomb, Burn, Destroy, and it's about the German sabotage networks in the United States during World War I. And that's one of the takeaways from that book is their efforts were also very amateurish for the longest time, working with the German diaspora in the United States. And really when it picked up steam was when the Germans sent over a professional intelligence officer and he started coordinating and running the operations. And that's when they started to take off.

Yeah. And I see in the chat somebody asked a question about our opinions about immigration in the future. We need people like the Yale professor I talked about to balance population and so on. And actually, that's a great point. And countries like China, Russia, and Iran have very structured and merit-based education systems at the very top level where you're producing these really, really intelligent mathematicians, engineers, things like that. For example, Iran has something called the Math Olympiad. These guys are like the most brilliant mathematicians in the world. I know some of them here at Yale, and there's something like 80 of them per year that, that leave Iran to go finish their PhD outside of Iran because they can't continue there. And half of them don't return at a minimum because they don't want to go back to Iran. Because if they go back to Iran, all like, let's say you're a physics PhD studying molecular you know, nuclear research, for example. Well, guess what your job will be when you return to Israel? And you're like a genius, right? Like, you're like looking at like how to solve the problems of the universe and this government wants you to come back and build a bomb.

Yeah. Do you really want to be on a Mossad hit list? I wouldn't.

Right. So they're like, well, I'm just not coming back.

Yeah.

Now, the problem is in the US, we're not letting them stay. In fact, we just changed the rules about F-1 visas and working as a student where if you're a foreign student, there are now new restrictions that either make it impossible or have huge restrictions on how you can Work in America and be paid. And it should be the opposite. This is my policy position. It should be the opposite where we should, like, dramatically incentivize these guys to come here.

Yeah.

Yes, we have counterintelligence. Yes, we watch what they're doing. We even tell them, like, we are going to watch what you're doing, but we love what you're doing on the academic side. Keep doing well and you get to stay here. If you fuck it up, we'll take you out. Right. And I think that's the way that it should go down because these people can contribute to the United States. I mean, look at Wernher von Braun, a Nazi. came to America and established our space program. Like, we would not have won the space race against the Soviets without this dude who was a Nazi. Right? So like, and there are many other examples of the Nazis that came here. Operation Paperclip. People haven't read that. I highly encourage you to go out and read about Operation Paperclip. It's like 3,000 Nazis that we brought to America, like proactively. The Soviets did the same thing. I can't remember the Soviet name for their operation, but they did the same thing. Right? So. Why is it now we're so afraid? I mean, we can do it. Our technology is better. We have ubiquitous technical surveillance. We can see what these guys are doing.

We should incentivize them to come here and be productive instead of scaring them to go back to either Iran to build a bomb or to go to China or Russia and help them against us. Right. So it's kind of like super logical to have them here instead of anywhere else on the planet.

Yeah, it's just brain drain. Uh, do you want to get into this, uh, New York Times story, guys?

Yeah, I'm down.

All right, so let me share. You

guys can keep asking. Oh, there's another question that was asked, um, just before we get into this, Jack, just because this relates to, uh, have we lost initiative in the Middle East? Yes. I just wanted to hear you guys say

it. You're afraid so.

I think the Abraham Lincoln is the best place to point toward to answer that question because the Abraham Lincoln has twice come up at moments of losing the initiative. The first time was after the invasion of Iraq, 2003, when Bush stood on it and said, mission accomplished, and we lost the initiative. The second time was just a couple months ago when the same ship, Abraham Lincoln, was rusted out. Dudes were jumping off the boat and had to get sent home after being, what, 270 days at sea? I think the Abraham Lincoln is a great archetype for answering that question.

8 sailors, 8 sailors tried to commit suicide.

When, when you hear the policy wonks using terms like escalate to deescalate or reestablish deterrence, that's indicative of like total strategic failure, in my opinion.

And let's not forget that war is the failure of policy. And Clausewitz said that war is, you know, policy by other means or whatever, but really it's war is a failure. If we're fighting war, we have failed.

Right.

You know, other options that are better and for everybody. And maybe it's an easy thing to do to hit a button to launch a bomb, but that, that means you failed at actually agreeing to anything or fixing something.

Yeah, let's get into the podcast, the special ops podcast, the space.

Yeah, the Vet Bro Podcast industrial complex. So this is the special ops podcasts changing the narrative of the war on terror. in the New York Times, written by Wes Morgan, who's an— well, he is an author. He's also a previous guest on the Team House.

Great book about the— what's the valley? Is it Korengal?

Peck Valley.

Peck Valley. Incredible book.

So yeah, this book is basically about, you know, the veteran special ops podcasts out there and how that is recontextualizing the war. and how it's reaching out to people and telling, you know, the story of the war, but also some misconceptions about it and how it gets interpreted. There's a little shout out here to the Team House pointing out that our pod does not really get into the culture war stuff. We don't really talk about masculinity and injecting steroids and all that kind of stuff. Like, it's just We kind of stay focused on what we do.

Even though we all are on steroids.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone is really interested in listening to, you know, me talk about, you know, how much I don't like Trump or, you know, what I think a man is like. Who cares? You know, stay focused on, you know, these veterans' stories and enabling veterans to tell their stories is kind of the goal. So I guess the big main thrust here of the article, though, is about how a lot of these guys that they're having big guests on these podcasts have the takeaway from 20 years of war that the reason why we lost is because we never really took the gloves off, because it was restrictive ROEs, that we weren't vicious enough, we weren't brutal enough, and that's why we lost.

I mean, you could both—

because we look at like, so look at who was brutal, like the Soviets, right? Or the Russian-German conflict, like Stalingrad, Leningrad, like scorched earth. Or even General Sherman in the Civil War, scorched earth. I mean, was that better?

Or the Russians? You know, we have an even more specific example. The Russians fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Now, are you telling me that the Soviet Red Army fought with DEI policies? That's why they lost it. Come on.

Yeah. I mean, were the ROEs that restrictive?

At times, yes. There's a legitimate argument to be made at times that the ROEs were ridiculous. Like, I talked to one Special Forces guy. where the Taliban were taking over this town in northern Afghanistan. And there the Taliban had like a T-72 or T-55 tank that was flying a Taliban black flag cruising around the city, and he could not get authorization to do an airstrike on this tank. So what are we doing here, guys?

Yeah,

like,

this is obvious.

Yeah. So it's stuff like that. Like, there was times in the war where You know, they would, our soldiers would take enemy gunfire from a building and they simply would not authorize airstrikes on that building. Sometimes there's a good reason for that, but a lot of times it's like, what are we doing here? I mean, we're taking fire.

Convince me of the good reason for it. Yeah.

Yeah. If it's like a schoolhouse or something, maybe there's, you know, hesitation there because we don't know who's inside. But I mean, in other cases, it's like, drop a 500-pounder on it and move on.

Yeah, we had very restrictive stuff, like even with the overhead, like UAS systems where you want to do a strike on a building, like, you know, the dude's bad. Like, you've already got the intel, he's already in the building. You have to do an 8-hour soak. And this is at SOCOM. You have to do an 8-hour soak of overhead on the building before you can strike it to make sure that no women or kids come in or out. It's like, this is a very arbitrary number of hours. Yeah. And you're going to let me strike it at 8 minutes and 1 second, but not Or 8 hours and 1 minute, but not 7 hours and 59 minutes. Like, what is the difference here? Um, and there were numerous times when like somebody would come out and our GEOINT guys would be like, oh, that shadow, probably a kid in the, in the chat, in the Merc chat between us and them. And then we'd be like, okay, so does that mean the strike is off? And like, they'd wait and they'd go talk to the targeting officer and targeting officer's like, how sure are you that was a kid?

And like, we've been sitting there for like 5 hours. Of course they're like, not a kid. You know, so it's like this whole thing was for nothing then because it doesn't matter if it was a kid or not. And the other thing is like in the early years of the war, like 2003 or 2004, rules of engagement were pretty open. So like you could shoot pretty much anybody. And there were some places in Iraq, for example, where like if someone was on a roof, you would shoot them. Like, period. Like, that was how you're allowed to do it. And then it would go the complete opposite way where like you can't fire back unless you have PID. Even if you were fired at, you can't fire back unless you have PID. PID. positive identification of the exact guy that shot at you. So like, if this dude's like good at shoot, move, communicate, and he shoots you and he moves to a new location, like you're done. Even if he pops up again, you can't be sure that it was him, right? At like 300 meters, for example. So like, we kind of in some ways shoot ourselves in the foot both ways because we're either like ultra open or ultra restrictive.

And we're very bad at like a middle ground that would actually make sense for the very specific engagement. Because even in On one day in July 2004, for example, guys fighting in Anbar have a very different war going on than guys fighting in Baghdad, like requires different rules of engagement because it's a different war in those places, you know, or in like a, in a Shia town controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr, very different stuff going on and the way the enemy's fighting versus like Iraqi army forces that haven't surrendered yet, like totally different story here. Right. But instead we had like blanket ROEs, like you will just treat everybody the same. But it's like, but they're not the same.

Yeah.

They're fighting differently, you know what I mean? And some of them are like protected by Geneva Conventions because they're soldiers, like Saddam's forces, for example. Whereas then you get these like Sauder forces that are not state actors suddenly get this like quasi protection that we give them, and then they get like too much protection. Then they learn about the protection and they use it, especially like when I was doing interrogations, like because I was in when we had the change from enhanced interrogation techniques to very limited interrogation techniques and they knew what those changes were. So like they knew what to say, what to do to exploit that even in the detention facility where they knew exactly we would hold them for 14 days. They knew how many meals they were allowed to get, how much time they were allowed to pray, like all these things. And they would use every single one of those things, even in captivity when you could have just shot the dude on the roof.

Yeah. I had a drone guy tell me about how, uh, you know, to your point about starting all over again, starting the targeting cycle over again. They'd be watching like a dude driving a car for like 8 hours or whatever, and they finally got cleared for the strike. And if the strike misses, like the Hellfire missile hits right in front of the car and the guy bails out of the car and runs, they have to restart the cycle all over again to kill the guy and then just let him go because it's like, by the time we go through the process.

So what we, what we did around that, like 2016, SOCOM started doing something called restrikes authorized. So like when you were getting the strike approved in the first place, you would have a line in your target package that would say restrike authorized. Because before that, you would have to do exactly what you just said, Jack. We have to like redo the entire target package because no longer is it a vehicle with 2 guys inside. Now it's a guy on foot. This is a different target. As far as—

Is this better than the car though?

Yeah.

The guy running through the open desert, like, seems pretty clear cut.

Yeah.

I have a question. Uh, the changing of the rules of engagement, like John, you mentioned early on in the wars, it was pretty, uh, you know, fast and loose, or more fast and loose than later on. Was it because we wanted to start integrating the whole like counterinsurgency stuff and like, yeah, not make people upset about it and try to win hearts and minds and that whole fucking thing?

Well, the big change was 2006 when McChrystal came to Iraq and started doing the very specific targeting cycle, the F3EID— find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, disseminate. Um, F3EAD. And so that, that's when they actually separated the 2 conventional forces from special forces, where conventional forces began to dramatically limit their rules of engagement. And then SOCOM kept basically what the old rules were, but looked more open in comparison. That's when you had things like Jessica Lynch. If you remember her, a main reason Jessica Lynch was captured by the Iraqis was because when their unit got ambushed, they hadn't practiced how to fire their weapons and things like this because they didn't expect to actually use them because of the rules of engagement issue was very restrictive. And their unit was a reservist unit that didn't have a lot of experience. And the reason, like in the moment when she was taken, it's because she was trying to actually remediate her rifle. I don't know if people know this. She was trying to remediate it. It had a round stuck in the chamber and she didn't know how to do tap, rack, bang to remediate it. So like she wasn't able to fire her weapon in defense.

Right. So like, this is the conventional side.

Isn't that some of the stuff they teach you at the beginning?

So the Army is different. And Jack, you can probably talk about this, but like Army basic training, they don't do marksmanship like the Marine Corps. Like in the Marine Corps, you actually go to the range and shoot at the correct range that you're firing at. Whereas the Army, they have a piece of paper printed out with different sized targets as if they were virtually further away, but on the same piece of paper on a barrel. And they sit there and dry fire on the barrel. at 10 meters on a 300-meter simulated target. It's like, you don't know how to do windage. You don't know how to do like compensation, remedial action. Um, this is at the basic level. It's different now because the war's over. And of course we've learned all of our lessons. But back at that time, you had people in like tricolors from Vietnam, these giant flak jacket vests from Vietnam with these long-ass M16s and M16A2s, like, like as long as half their body. Right. And they don't know how to operate them properly. And they're like thrown into the war without armor plating on their, Humvees, by the way. Like, this is like the early years of the war when like, we're like, oh yeah, it'll be easy.

We'll just dismantle all the Iraqi forces and then fight the insurgency. And it was like, clearly, you know, the Abraham Lincoln thing we mentioned, it went a different direction.

Yeah, the Marine Corps definitely has a greater focus on marksmanship at the entry level. I went to infantry basic training. I think like regular basic training where everyone else goes is they probably have it different. But then This is a million years ago too. I mean, I went through basic training in 2002, and I do know that the entire marksmanship program in the Army has been like totally overhauled. So I'm not exactly sure what they do, but I mean, the qualification was, you know, shooting E-type silhouettes from 50 to 300 yards.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even back then, like in the Marine Corps, we were using iron sights. So like we had to know how to do— Oh, don't get me started, John. And all that. Now they're using like super—

Here he goes.

Back in my day, we had iron sights. Yeah, now they have these like little red chevrons and they're EOTech, you know, like at the basic level. Like, how do these guys get these weapons? It's crazy. We used to have to like fight to get a Picatinny rail on our rifle.

And now they're like, I always bring this up with Andy Milburn and Marines of his age. Like, yeah, hey, you guys had iron sights back then, right? And then watch them freak out. All we had was iron sights.

Yeah, an 18-inch barrel on our rifle. Couldn't get around the corner with it.

Well, the flip side to the ROE conversation that you point out, John, is like how ridiculous it was at other points, how loose it was at other points. During the war against ISIS, for example, stuff like some things came off the rails, man. We blew up a lot of stuff. And I mean, part of it is because there was enormous political pressure to defeat ISIS. And we had a partner force, the Iraqis, who will not move unless they have overwhelming American firepower on their side. So there is a reason why we opened up the ROEs. It's not just because we were like, oh, let's blow up civilians. That's not why we did it, because we had to defeat a really evil organization. And our options for that were limited unless we were going to like reinvade Iraq and invade Syria with ground troops. which no one anywhere wanted to do. But like the Times did an investigation into airstrikes that actually CENTCOM was uploading the videos, like kind of like bragging about it, you know, like, oh, look, we destroyed like 10 enemy compounds in Mosul. Well, the Times sent reporters out to go and investigate and interview the people who lived there and found out that oftentimes they had nothing to do with ISIS.

Which year was that? I want to make sure that

wasn't me. 2015, 2016, around that time frame.

Yeah, that was, that was me.

Yeah. Well, I mean, John, do you remember an ROE where they— part of it was that if there were 6 or more vehicles outside of a home, you could just blow up the home?

Yeah.

And that's actually—

we did that during, during Ramadan. We did a thing where we got this thing called Gorgon's Dare. And like dudes would go to funerals for their fellow fighters who were killed. And so women weren't allowed at those funerals and they were usually only ISIS fighters. So we were allowed to track all the ISIS fighters and see where they went and kill them all on our way home without knowing if they were actually ISIS fighters. But it was like the inference of if they are at a funeral.

I'm, I'm kind of okay with that. I

mean, same here. And I'm a dirty liberal, bro. And I'm okay with that.

Yeah. But I mean, some, What I'm saying is that just the ROEs got so loose, they got loose for a reason. But it's this question of like speed versus accuracy. Like, you can be very slow and very deliberate and therefore very accurate. But when you're fighting like an actual enemy army, like we were with ISIS, it's like you have to move faster, you have to expend more munitions. But in doing that, you end up killing a lot of people. There's a lot of collateral damage. Um, so yeah, I, I think John's absolutely right there that, you know, the, the ROE was both too tight and too loose at various times during the conflict.

I'll give you another example of a very tight one. So it was in Afghanistan and we had, there were 2 Taliban snipers that shot a Marine in our unit, killed him. One of our guys did counter sniper and shot one of the guys back in the leg, in the thigh, wounded him. But because of the way our ROEs were, we couldn't kill the guy because we shifted position while, while moving on to the objective. And so we had to actually rescue the Taliban guy and keep him alive and bring him back to the hospital, like give him a blood transfusion. I interrogated him on his deathbed, putting him in this thing called bats and hides, which is where they like scan your irises and your fingerprints for biometrics to see like where you were captured previously. It's like clearly he was. And, um, The dude's like dying on the bed, but we like saved him after he killed one of our own Marines in front of us because the ROEs were so restrictive that we couldn't just like finish killing a guy we already shot. Right.

You didn't smother him with a pillow.

We're not the SEALs.

Oh,

goddamn.

Sing.

Talking about the SEALs.

So yeah, the article's pretty interesting here and it talks about sort of the recontextualization of the war and whether or not we're coming away from 20 years of war with the correct takeaways, with the correct after-action bullets. So I'd give— recommend giving this article a read. It was pretty interesting.

Yeah, it is pretty good. I started, I was about halfway through. Looks pretty good so far. I stopped at the team house part because I was so— I was smiling. I want to tell you guys that I saw it mentioned in there.

You know what's funny, John? You know, you're a glass half full kind of guy because I was like, we should have got more fucking love in there. But

it's because you didn't mention Vacheron watches.

Yeah, what I, what I was telling D was you got to be careful how much love you wish to get from the press because, uh,

yeah, how notorious do you want to be?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that's the other— that's my, my view too about this is, you know, any publicity is good publicity.

I want to be notorious enough to have a second home, John.

And the thing is, like, uh, to get a fluff piece in the New York Times, like, that's cool, that's good PR.

Yeah.

But the negative, the hit piece, that's what turns you into a fucking legend. That's the best thing that can ever happen.

Stop saying that because our whole show is based on like not pushing that, specifically the Team House. I push on Eyes On because I don't give a fuck.

It is. But if some, if some lefty rag wants to make a hit piece on us, I mean, it's good publicity.

I mean, bro, I mean,

yeah, that's Donald Trump's strategy. Any publicity is good publicity.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's not wrong.

It works.

Jacko, tell us what you're working on, High Side.

Uh, we are looking to publish tomorrow or Friday the next piece of the Willie Merkerson story, a Special Forces soldier who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam. That story is already published on the High Side. The one that's about to come out is what he was doing in Sudan in 1985. There was— the Libyans were making a lot of progress in Sudan, and the CIA didn't like that. So they ran an operation to get the Libyans all kicked out of the country. And Sean has been investigating that really in-depth, interviewing a lot of people. Um, so please, uh, go check out The High Side. That, that, that piece should be out before the end of the week.

Yeah. And that link is in the description, so it's easy to get to. Um, John, what are you working on besides like, uh, bottles and diapers?

Yeah, so I got my exams for law school coming up, which is this whole like side gig I have going on outside of the Eyes On, you know, which is my main, my—

Side gig. Yeah. Law school. Yeah.

Yeah. I've actually written like 50,000 words of notes since September. But all that is, that's my side thing. Like I mentioned, I got this other project I'm working on. I'm writing a story, or it's actually a true story about how I met and got my wife out of Iraq, which is insane. I've actually never told anyone all the details publicly. So like when you guys see this, you're gonna be like, I didn't even realize it was that intense. But it, it was pretty intense. And for many reasons and over a long period of time from the intelligence perspective and counterintelligence perspective and also like from getting her out of Iraq perspective. So yeah, I'm working on that slowly but surely. But of course, I have a lot of, you know, moons rotating around this planet that I am here. So sometimes it gets attention, sometimes it doesn't. But I hope to have it done by early springtime. And actually, there's another thing I'm working on. It's a research paper. So you know how we always talk about sanctions, or at least I always talk about like, you know, sanctions alone are not good. So I'm actually doing— this is for school, but I'm going to publish it academically too, about pistachios, carpets, and saffron in Iran, which are like the chief non-oil exports of Iran before the sanctions came in.

And what I'm going to do is some sensitivity analysis to see like what's going to happen to the global market for Spain-produced saffron, Turkish-produced carpets, and California-produced pistachios, which, by the way, is like a $6 billion business. per year. What's going to happen to those markets when sometime in the future the sanctions are removed? Because there's going to be a massive disruption. And if you're either into trading or an economist, you're going to see opportunities there to probably make some money if you know what those new vulnerabilities look like and if you can get ahead of that. So I'm doing some research on that because I'm very interested to see like what's going to happen that day that those sanctions are removed. Because if you get it on the ground floor, you can definitely make, make a good penny.

I'd like to get in on the ground floor, John.

Pistachio farmer. Who'd have thought?

Yeah. Yeah. That's super interesting, right? Like when a whole bunch of like supply comes online, right?

Yep.

What happens to the original, you know, the, the original, the guys who are making the $6 billion a year or in the, in the pistachio market?

Well, one spicy, no pun intended, thing I found out was that in Spain, The saffron, like if you go to the grocery store right now in the United States and you want to buy saffron, it comes in these little glass bottles and it says like Spanish saffron. Apparently almost all saffron in Spain. So some of it's grown there. Most of the saffron is actually imported from Iran, taken out of its packaging, repackaged into this Spanish saffron and sent to the United States and sold in the US.

Wow.

So most people using saffron in the US are using Iran-sanctioned saffron, which is allowed to be sold here for a reason I haven't figured out yet in my research, but I'm going to find out. So it's kind of fascinating just even that like initial thing, like there's a lot going on here that is not so direct because we always talk about sanctions on oil and like, that's like the big thing. But it's like, how are people evading sanctions on food goods? Right? Like, like luxury food goods, you know what I mean? Like around the world. It's kind of fascinating to think about that.

Well, I had a restaurant, right? And, and one of the tricks to our burger and how good our burger was called Bonnie's Grill. It's still there if you want to go by. Not making money on that.

Sponsored by Bear Watches.

Don't— that we're all making money on. We used to put Aleppo pepper on our burgers, right?

From Syria.

Yeah. And initially, like when this, the civil war kicked off, like it really spiked. And then it kind of leveled out. And I was getting it from like a Middle East supplier in Brooklyn. And the price kind of stayed the same throughout. So I don't know if like they were, you know, the same thing that was going on with the saffron, you know, like, I don't know. But that's it.

That's fascinating.

Bootleg Aleppo spices.

It made the burger very good. I'm gonna say it here. And I want people to keep me honest. Jack was— I was trying to get Jack to like berate me yesterday. I'm writing a book, and it's going to be done. And it's going to be put out on December 1st. It's called American Insurgent. I have to do the audiobook. I'm going to read the audiobook with somebody else too, because I'm gonna have another person read it as well, like certain other parts. And it's coming out— yeah, it's coming. What,

you need a woman's voice on the other side?

No, I need a British guy. I might use Andy. Free work. Yeah, free, uh, free work from the Colonel. Um, it's gonna come out December 1st. Hell or high water, I'm gonna fucking finish it because I'm done being a lazy piece of shit.

Get your life together, man.

I need to. I know.

You should release chapters so that it like keeps you honest.

That is a good idea.

People do that on Substack.

Andy's been doing that with his new book about Israel and Gaza. So that is a great idea, actually. Thank you, John.

You're welcome. You can pay me for that.