The Iran Mistake We Made Before the First Bomb | Ryan McBeth

[00:00:00] I've always been amazed by, like, we have this tremendous information operations capability. But it is easier to get approval to do a drone strike than it is to get approval to do any type of information operation. That night, I was able to drop five bombs. Nobody batted an eye. And I don't understand why we're so hesitant to use information operations. If you're an army colonel, how are you going to get graded if you show initiative and speed and violence of action,

[00:00:28] as opposed to, I dropped leaflets and got the enemy to surrender? Well, they don't, you know, Mark Wahlberg doesn't star in a movie about you if you dropped a bunch of leaflets, right? Is there a way for America to end the war with a round that doesn't totally suck? And what's the difference between your run-of-the-mill online grifter and a foreign state actor running influence operations to mess with your elections? Well, to break this down and more, we have an awesome guest on today, the one and only Ryan McBeth. If you've ever been on YouTube anywhere, I'm sure you've probably seen his stuff. Be sure to like, subscribe, share an episode with a friend.

[00:00:56] And welcome to this special edition of the At The Water's Edge podcast, where we look for insights beyond the headlines and take your practitioner's view on national security and geopolitics and sometimes just talk a little shit. It's the 28th of October, 2026. Let's get to Ryan. Hey. Well, good morning, Ryan. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Oh, I'm great. I just woke up. I got my morning cigar. I got my morning coffee. Tuesdays are my podcast days. Yeah.

[00:01:25] So I got to, I got, I have to run through all this. And then I have like a window of a two hour window where I, where I work out. And then I go back to looking, looking like this and, and smoking. So yeah, it's always Tuesdays are the hardest day. You know, it is hard to fit in the workouts between cigars. I have my coffee here. I do not have anything as quite as exciting as what you've got going on right now, but it looks like fun.

[00:01:55] I mean, I, you know, I, I love smoking. Yeah. So you're an army ranger, right? Back in the day. I actually, I. Ranger tab, not ranger school. Sorry, ranger tab, not ranger scroll for the people that, you know, care. Okay. I actually had the opportunity. I guess it was in 2000, 2004. And then again, I guess in 2000, 2008, no 2009 to go to ranger school. And I was like, I have to quit smoking.

[00:02:26] Yeah. I didn't want to quit smoking. And like that defines my entire military career. Like, Hey, you want to go to ranger school? Yeah. I have to quit smoking. Right. Cause I don't let you smoke there. Yeah. Yeah. You got to quit smoking for 60 days. Yeah. I don't want to do that. I think I'll, I'll just be a regular grunt and happy with that. I'm good. Now, back then, did they still allow dip in ranger school? Cause I went through in like 20, 2013. And I think they stopped that a couple of years before.

[00:02:55] So you could have just gotten some pouches. Yeah, I guess. I just, I love cigarettes. I mean, I have my cigarettes right here. I don't know. I, I mean, I absolutely love smoking and the idea of, of giving that up to, to, to not. And also, by the way, you can't eat and you have to run everywhere. Motherfucker. That's like the anti Ryan school.

[00:03:25] You know? I got to admit. Let's bring to school Ryan McBeth would never want to go to. Like all the things I did in my military career from like Seer school to Afghanistan to special forces and everything else. I can say hands down, without a doubt, ranger school was the most miserable experience of my entire time in the army. Nothing comes close. I would rather redo anything than go back to ranger school. I will tell you this. I did a video at a good fuller for space or firefighting school.

[00:03:54] And I'm 50 years old. Right. I don't give a crap. What school you've been to aerosol school, frigging sniper school, mountain school. You ain't been nowhere to you've been to firefighting school. Oh, really? It is. It is like, I don't know. I don't understand how these kids do it. And they're half my age, but you're dragging things, you know, 175 pound dummies in all

[00:04:21] this equipment, breathing the recycled air at wearing all of this crap. And then there's math associated with it of like, all right, how do we lift this person off this thing? I was doing all this stuff and I'm tired. I'm in okay shape. I'm not in great shape for a man. Really? I'm in okay shape. Okay. Okay. As you take another puff of the cigar first thing in the morning.

[00:04:50] I'm in okay shape. I'm still able to keep up. Like, cause when I go to these schools, I'll, I'll do, you know, the mountain school. Okay, let's go. I'll go up the freaking vertical danger area. Let's do it. These kids, it just, it blows my mind. You know, that I look at these kids and people criticize this generation as being soft or worried about tick tock.

[00:05:15] And then I, I go to firefighting school and I see these kids who are just perfectly perfect specimens and willing to rush into that burning building. And it is hard physical work. There are a couple of times in firefighting school where, uh, when I wasn't like behind a hose or something, I'm recording and stuff like that. As these guys, you know, they're all wearing their bunker gear, their turnout gear. And I'm there wearing like a cotton shirt. And I'm like, wait a minute.

[00:05:45] What are these? There's fire coming up out of the walls. I'm like, what do these guys know that I don't? But the instructors were, you know, they were like, yeah, you're good. Just stay right there. Don't move from that area. You signed a waiver, right? I don't remember. I'm sure I did. I had to sign a waiver at Aerosol school. Yeah. Now, do you think there might be a sample selection problem here though? A sample selection problem.

[00:06:12] You know, I think that, I think that we, uh, every generation has, I don't want to say every generation, but every generation has its heroes. Ooh, the FM DJ voice. When you look at, when you look at these, these kids, I was going to say these kids today, these kids today, they don't have to do this. They could, they could get a job for $50 an hour welding after trade school.

[00:06:37] But for whatever freaking reason, they decide, you know what? I want to serve my country. I'm going to do something that's really freaking hard. that I don't get a lot of money for, but that's worth it to me. And, you know, I, I am so impressed by, by the graduates that I see today.

[00:07:03] Graduates of, um, not just, uh, military, uh, advanced schools with the surface academies who are coming out like perfect specimens. Like I was just in Annapolis to see a movie. I just saw, um, Oh God. Uh, I just saw the new street fighter movie and, and, you know, Annapolis is midshipman. They're allowed off and they have to dress in their midshipman uniform and they're just perfect specimens.

[00:07:29] Like if you want to know what the perfect Asian looks like, go to Annapolis because they have assembled the perfect Asian and they're respectful. And, you know, it's like this, everyone there is a perfect specimens. It's really amazing. Nice. Well, some, some more troubling news of the day. So some, one of the conversations we've been having on the podcast is gray zone operations. And one of the cool things about gray zone operations is that they rely heavily on information warfare and information operations. We got the Israeli election going on right now.

[00:07:59] We got midterms coming up in a week. Um, we got, you know, presidential elections in two years. You know, how worried should we be right now in this era of great power competition that information operations are becoming more and more a tool of how foreign actors are trying to coerce the American public? You should be worried about it when you trade a share of stock. Yeah. Yeah. Are you familiar with stock shorting? Oh yeah. So for your audience members, you are at stock shorting is where you, let's say this, let's

[00:08:28] say this napkin is a share of stock, right? I'm going to, I'm going to borrow this, this share of stock from you. And then I'm going to give it to somebody else with the promise to pay you back, you know, in, in a couple of weeks or whenever the contract is or. And my hope is that the price of this napkin falls. And I buy it back at a cheaper price and I give it back to you. Here's your, here's your napkin back.

[00:08:55] And the whole idea is that you make money on the arbitrage difference between high price that you sold it at and the low price you buy it back at. Well, um, I did a couple of years ago, I did some research on people who were trying to reduce the price of, um, Woolworths, which is the store in, um, in, uh, uh, Australia.

[00:09:20] And so you're using bots to say, oh, these people aren't, uh, going to celebrate. They're not going to put anything out for the, um, oh my God, I can't remember the darn name of the holiday, but in, in the UK, there's a holiday when James Cook landed on Australia. Oh, say national day. I can't remember. I know what you're talking about. But like, that's probably why, because nobody can remember the name of the holiday and like it was big in the nineties and people stopped celebrating it.

[00:09:50] And when some, uh, stores said, yeah, we're not going to sell a national day merchandise anymore. Um, these bots got on Twitter and other, uh, accounts and they said, oh, we're not shopping at Woolworth again. And so now you see the stock price fall, right? No different than what you saw with Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light after Kid Rock used a machine gun on those Bud Light cans. So now that, what a great way of shorting stock, right?

[00:10:19] Get a bot farm together and have these bot farms criticize the company. Now you watch their stock fall. Okay. It fell a certain amount. Let's sell, let's buy some of those shares back and repay the people we borrowed from. It's, it's a brilliant scam. It's brilliant. Well, I, I am worried about disinformation and information warfare because I think we're being surrounded by it all the time.

[00:10:44] And it, the whole idea is to reduce our trust in the government and reduce our, our trust in the media. Um, you know, there's no, there is a reason why, um, shows like, like Tucker Carlson are popular. It's because he has the answer, right? You've worked your butt off all day. You've, you have this crappy job. You're in debt. But, but you go home and you lie down on the couch.

[00:11:14] Finally, pull out your phone and Tucker Carlson has the answers. It's the Jews. It's the whatever. It's the, well, who else is he blamed? It's the Israelis. You know, it's the Democrats. It's the elites. They're your problem right there. Oh, and by the way, you can, uh, use code Tucker to get Brooklyn betting for 30% off.

[00:11:36] Be sure to use my code when you check in, you know, America's ending cut to the commercial by the Brooklyn betting and save yourself 30% off. It's a, it's a stick. But it hasn't, is that new? Hasn't that always been around? Like is Tucker Carlson that much different than like Bill O'Reilly was back in the day? Isn't it the same grift in a different package? I don't, I don't know if Bill O'Reilly was a grifter.

[00:12:05] Like I, I look at, you know, it's, what's interesting is that, um, when you look at influencers, and I guess that's what they were right back to run drive time radio and so on. I guess you would say like Bill O'Reilly, who's the guy used to smoke cigars. Uh, oh my God, Rush Limbaugh. I guess you could call them influencers, right?

[00:12:27] But when I, when I look at their show, those guys genuinely believe in America. And what I, what I think what we have now are people who genuinely believe that they would like some money, please. And if, if the attitude of this is, well, I am going to support America or detract America, it really doesn't matter as long as I get that money.

[00:12:57] And tenant media is an excellent example of that. Um, Hey, you already have some positions. So tenant media was, was essentially this media organization. Uh, there are five supposedly conservative influencers in that media organization. And it was essentially controlled by Russia. Russia was funneling money in saying, Hey, you should do a story about this. You should do a story about that. Tim pool, who is not talented was getting paid a hundred thousand dollars an episode.

[00:13:26] I am not that talented. I'm pretty good. I'm not a hundred thousand dollars. Good. I'm not. And you know, if someone came to me and said, Ryan, we're going to give you a hundred thousand dollars to do one episode, talk one hour. I'd probably think, wow, that means I can get two bisexual Lithuanians in a boat. That's probably like the math, right? That's the math.

[00:13:53] Like how many bisexual Lithuanian girls can I get? Redheaded Lithuanian girls. Can I get on a boat? You've thought this through. Okay. Yeah. It's well, that's how I do all of my, my mathematics, right? I don't use like, all right. Dollars. I use, all right. How many bisexual Lithuanian redheads can I put on a boat with this amount of money I'm going to get? It's going to be a lot. A hundred thousand dollars is going to be a lot, but, but I'm also a realist in the sense of look at me.

[00:14:23] I am wearing a hoodie with cigarette stains in it. If I were more talented, I wouldn't be talking to you. All right. I would be on some other, I would be on Joe Rogan, but I'm not more talented. So I would think, Hey, this is probably a trap.

[00:14:47] So I think that, I think that the new misinformation, the new misinformation spreaders are really what I would call decliners. And you see this on both the left and the right, where they literally make a living by telling people how awful America is. On the left, you see, oh, that was that nut job. I am politics girl. The one who stands in her dirty ass kitchen with the laundry that she needs to do.

[00:15:16] And she's like, Donald Trump just did something bad again. So she's selling. It's right. I am selling you fear. I am. I, I'm selling you. Oh my God, this president is awful. And we need to do this. We need to do that. And by the way, have you tried tide with bleach? Right. So how is this stuff different though? Like, cause this all just sounds like typical negative marketing sales tactics, which people

[00:15:45] have used from church pulpits for donations. You know, we've seen it on talk radio. I guess where does this, you know, dirty sales tactic stuff and influencer culture, which has changed with social media, but has always been there. How does that morph into foreign actors conducting information operations? Where does this go from bad culture, dirty sales tactics to direct foreign influence on American elections? A couple of ways it can happen.

[00:16:13] So, you know, in the tenant media, I don't want to say tenant media scam. Well, I don't know if it was necessarily a scam, but with tenant media, you have foreign agents funneling money through an organization that directly pays people and they have influence over their content. And, um, you kind of, you know, in some ways I've actually rejected, I've actually rejected advertisers on my YouTube channel and I'll, I'll name names. I'll frigging name names all day.

[00:16:43] Um, it wasn't remarkable. There was like a thing that fits in your pocket. It's like the size of a credit card and it takes notes for you. And, um, I, you know, it was made in China and the, when I got the actual spec script from these guys, they said, Oh, by the way, you can't do any videos that are critical of China. I'm like, bitch, I'm critical of China right now. That would be a problem. Critical in China.

[00:17:12] When you said I'm going to critical China harder. So, you know, I did not do an ad for that. Um, so that, that is another way that you can enter that soft pop power in there. Uh, we are going to give you X amount of dollars to promote this device that helps you record your conversations for later and then transcribe it using AI.

[00:17:38] Oh, and by the way, all the data resides on our Chinese servers, but don't let anybody know that. And we just are ask you not to have any subjects that are sensitive. So you can manipulate that way as well. Right. And I'll tell you, I would like $5,000. That would be nice. That's, that's at least two, two. Yeah. I would say. How many redheads in Lithuanians? Redheads on a boat for three hours right there. Okay.

[00:18:08] That's the current market rate. That's the roughly the market rate. Now, is that in the U S or would you have to travel over there? I know that they're already here. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Oh, you're in Maryland. You got everything right there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. International hub for all sorts of services. Okay. I got it. I'm going to say New York. We don't have that up here. Um, you do have the ski instructors who grow out their underarm hair on the off season. You know, actually I'm in that part of New York where it is snowy and flat.

[00:18:36] So we have all the worst weather and none of the fun winter sports. It's the worst of all worlds. Snowshoes? Oh, you can go snowshoeing. You can go snowshoeing. You got a snowshoe right behind you. What about all my water rafting? Oh yeah. That's great in the, uh, the summertime, but. That's been my experience. That's mostly, that's mostly old guys with cigars that look like you. Not really quite the, the demographic we're, we're going for with our Chinese media money. Let's get, let's get it clear. Yeah.

[00:19:03] No, I'm jealous because no one from China has tried to co-op me yet that my only co-op attempts, uh, Singapore and Pakistan is when I get, is where people reach out to me when they're trying to co-op me with scams. I had a Pakistani reach out to me. Yeah. I, and I still have a clearance, so I have to like, I had to report all that stuff. I do not. Thankfully, that was one of the best things dropping that actually made my life way easier. You know, I want to go to, uh, I actually want to go to Canada. To see a, uh, to see a wizards game in Canada.

[00:19:31] Like, Hey, let me pay thousands of dollars to go watch my team lose in a different country. Uh huh. And I have to pay to pay money for the privilege and like fill out my security clearance form. I mean, if it, if I don't make that much money off of YouTube cause I have a very niche channel. So I, I still rely on the consulting from block city and, uh, speeches that I give and stuff like that. Yeah.

[00:20:00] You know, cause I might make a video and you know, I might get a hundred thousand views and then here, here's a hundred dollars to spend it all in one place. Shit. I flew to Texas to do this video. Are you saying even with a million subscribers, YouTube's not a good living? Oh, it's not. No. I mean, if, if I was, I can tell you that, um, if I was just kind of sitting in my office

[00:20:25] doing content, like just, just making stuff up, then it would probably be a good living. But kind of my problem is that I'll actually go out to Fort Rucker or I'll go to Goodfellow or let's let me go to, um, California and cover project convergence capstone too. I got to pay for all that. The army never pays for me to actually go anywhere and they won't, they don't, they'll pay for

[00:20:53] your meals, like out in the field, they'll throw in MRE or something. But like, you're paying for your meals. You're paying for your hotel. You're paying for, uh, if you stay in the barracks, you're paying like 13, it's $13 a night or something. But I mean, I was on an aircraft carrier for a couple of days. I had to pay for that. Not for the full, not for the flight there. I had to pay for the flight to Jacksonville and they paid to get me on the carrier.

[00:21:18] And once I was on the carrier, I had to pay like $16 a day for like my room and meals. How did you get into content creation? You know, um, I started out as, um, so I was a software engineer. I was working for Accenture Federal Services, writing software that found bad guys. Right. And, uh, one day we did this interview with this dude and I could tell that this dude knew what he was talking about.

[00:21:48] He was just a little, I don't know if it was on the spectrum or he just had trouble articulating things. Cause like, look, I was in the military for 20 years. I'm like the James freaking Bond of software engineers. I have no problem talking to girls. I have no problem like talking to other people. I can look you in the eye, you know, like, you know, that kind of thing. Like I'm good. So during this part of the interview and we call it the gang bang in a section of the

[00:22:15] interview, which in hindsight, we probably, they have probably changed the name since that. I really hope they have. Cause that's really not a nice name. But, um, when you think about it, um, essentially you have like three to five guys in a room at a table and then you have the candidate on the other side of the table and you just fire questions. What's the difference between overloading and overriding?

[00:22:42] Tell me how you would, uh, create a search function that would whatever. Right. And it doesn't really, doesn't really show they're a good programmer. It just shows that they can survive the heat. And then any one of those guys should blackball the person who was there. And I was like, wow, this guy really knows what he's talking about, but he just is having trouble articulating.

[00:23:06] So I started a YouTube channel that basically helps socially awkward programmers answer interview questions. Did that for about two years. And then when the war in Ukraine kicked off, I did two videos. I did one on, uh, social, why Ukraine hadn't been the subject of cyber attacks. And I did another on why army, um, why Russian tank turrets popped off their halls.

[00:23:30] And then all of a sudden I go from 500 or 5,000 subscribers to 50,000 to 500,000. Cause people at the news, they'll show you this, look at these tank turrets that popped off. But I was the only guy saying why. And I just knew all that just from my knowledge to ignoring my time in the military as an anti-tank guy. And then later doing stuff for Accenture.

[00:23:58] So I knew all this stuff up in my head and there was a demand. And now I'm like Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? I'm serious. I'm like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but with a cigar. You know, when, when Neil, when they launch a new rocket, they, they trot out Neil deGrasse Tyson and he's like, did you know this rocket can help you see beyond the stars? And now like there's a new war and they trot out Ryan Macbeth. And I'm like, well, you know, this war is about this thing.

[00:24:27] And these people want this and these people want this. And they're using this new weapon system, which is fascinating because it allows, it's called the F-100 fanny whammer. And when you shoot this thing, it can hit fannies and the fannies will actually slough off of the body. And this prevents the adversary from pooping. And this thing can fire about a thousand times an hour.

[00:24:52] So that's a thousand fannies an hour makes it really difficult for the adversary to continue, especially when they have to use a colostomy bag. Back to you, Bob. Exciting. So you're doing that on YouTube or where? Well, my channel's on YouTube and Substack. Substack is where I put all the violent content for a while, especially after, especially after

[00:25:19] the, especially after the conflict in Gaza. There was, it almost seemed like YouTube created this prohibition on showing any kind of violence. They didn't really know how to handle it. Even violence that was kind of contextual. And there's still issues with things like showing, showing death.

[00:25:47] You might be able to, you might be able to get a, get away with a truck blown up. But if you show Hamas executing people, you're going to get demonetized, even if you blur it. So Substack is part of that. Substack allows me to show all of the contextual violence that I wouldn't normally be able to show on YouTube. And then I go on a lot of shows. I have the Telegraph this week. Actually, I think the Telegraph today.

[00:26:17] I have the Sun newspaper today. I've been interviewed by many different newspapers. It's, I guess like I work for Newsmax. I guess like what's kind of interesting is that like, I'm not a, I'm not a particularly conservative guy. I don't care about politics that much. Like I like guns, but I think trans people are human. Let's put this guy on Newsmax, right? Yep. So I get the whole, oh my God, you're mega.

[00:26:46] Like, yeah, not, I mean, I just tell the truth. So Newsmax has actually been great though. They have never once told me what to say. And I get to reach out to an audience who's hungry for answers when it comes to soft, when it comes to cybersecurity and military equipment that a lot of other people can't seem to answer. Nice. You know, I've been on ABC news as well.

[00:27:13] But Newsmax has, has paid me most consistently and honestly, I need the money. So I'm going to do it. Yeah. You sold out because you need the money. You're like, yeah. Do I look, do I look like I'm rolling and it's every job. Lithuanian prostitutes. No, no. I get, I shop at Aldi. Aldi's awesome though. I know. I, I started going there. There was a cross street from tops. I went in there and checked it out. I will never go back. I love Aldi's. I love Aldi.

[00:27:43] It was so much faster. But if I was rich, I would shop there more. Ah, well, if you're rich, you'd have to feed all those Lithuanian prostitutes. I know. I know. Yeah. So, so here's a, you're going to be a good meta question for you. You know, we've seen, uh, there's like two groups of veterans. Uh, there's a group of veterans that, you know, they finished the service and they're like, all right, you should never talk about it. Closed door, closed community, civilian world's different, like keep behind closed curtains.

[00:28:11] And then you have, you know, admirals and generals who go on stages at political conventions and endorse candidates a day after they retire. Um, where do you think the lane is for folks who they've been in service? They have knowledge and expertise. They want to share it. How do they go out into the world and share that in a media environment that is inherently partisan in many respects? Well, that's a good question. I don't know.

[00:28:38] I think that, I think that to start off, like you have the right to do that, right? You know, you have the right to be partisan once you leave. And I, in fact, I remember when, when I was in, uh, I guess it was when Obama was being elected. Uh, I remember it was a John Kerry and George Bush in 2004, right? John Kerry and George Bush.

[00:29:06] And then Obama and, um, um, Rami. McCain. McCain. McCain. And 08, yeah. Yeah. And I remember like people would ask me about that and I would deflect the question because I don't ever want to unduly influence my soldiers. Like, I don't ever want them to vote for McCain because I said something that made them do that. Like they, they should get, you know, I can, I, I let me give you resources to investigate

[00:29:35] which candidate you should vote for. But I will not tell you who to vote for because that is not my place as your senior leader. I, I a hundred percent believe that, that you should be a political at all times. Um, but for once you get out, it kind of becomes your right to like shed your skin and endorse who you want to endorse. Now there is an issue with that. And that is like everything you say from now on is going to be tainted.

[00:30:05] And that's one of the reasons why I don't get political when I talk about Intel stuff, because there is the truth and there is the truth you want to hear. And I will, I will criticize the president a hundred percent, but you're never going to see me say he's an agent of Russia, orange man, bad agent Krasanov. No, I will say, Hey, Mr. President, maybe next time if we go to war with Iran, let's bring some allies. You know, just tossing it out there. A couple of guys with frigates, maybe escort ships in and out of the Strait of Hormuz.

[00:30:35] Come on. So you're thinking we should think through and plan operations before we start a war? We had a plan. That is a novel concept. We had a plan. It was just a shitty plan. I thought the plan was, Oh, I just walked out of this meeting. Hey, send the carriers. We're doing this. I'm pretty sure that was the entire planning cycle. We had a plan. We followed it all the way to the graveyard.

[00:30:59] You know, but I can also commend the president because he's the only guy with the balls to look at Iran and go, these guys, they want to build a nuclear weapon because they want to use it. And once they use it, they believe it'll cause the end of the world. And yeah, their country might be destroyed, but the Mahdi will reappear. The Mahdi will raise an army. Jesus will reappear. The Mahdi and Jesus will drive their army to Jerusalem.

[00:31:27] They will defeat the Antichrist in Jerusalem. And then there will be peace on earth for either nine or 19 years. And there'll be the final judgment. And there are people in Iran, the 12 Rashiach who genuinely believe in this. And I am cool with that. You can believe in stones as long as you don't throw them at me. But President Trump never sat America down and said, listen, these guys want to build nuclear weapon to cause the end of the world.

[00:31:57] And we need to kill them before they do that. So us in Israel, we're going to bomb the crap out of them. Hopefully we kill a bunch of people. There's a new government. But he never did that. And so I can respect his decision to do it, which I think was a good idea. And I can also say, would it be nice to bring a few allies along and explain to the American people why it was necessary, but not his style. So, you know, when a general, former general, former admiral gets out and they start getting

[00:32:25] political, I mean, that's their right to do so. But they also have to realize that in today's political climate, you know, the other side is never going to trust you again. Yeah. Well, let me pick on that for a bit. So I've heard this argument my whole life about religious fundamentalists in Iran who, you know, want to destroy the world, bring back all their stuff. But there's an inherent, there's an idea in international relations theory that all states are rational actors.

[00:32:54] And if I observe Iranian state behavior, especially how they've acted in this war, they do seem to be very rational actors. Everything they've done has made sense. They've played their cards very well. They seem like they've got a good team running their country right now, even if they're horrible people. And I don't see the difference between why Iran with a nuclear weapon becomes more of a threat to the global community with their religious fundamentalists than, say, America with a nuclear weapon is a threat to the global community when we have Christian fundamentalists

[00:33:22] who want to bring about the end of the world right now. Some of what you see show up at MAGA rallies, especially in 2016. So I guess where is the line between understanding why that religious community and Iran with their state structure plus a nuclear weapon is more of a threat to global stability than the United States? Provocative comparison, but. Yeah. So I guess one thing is history, right? We have had a history of not using nuclear weapons for a very long time.

[00:33:49] Iran has not had any nuclear weapons not to use. Right. But if you look at their theology, it is built around. We must create the end of the world so the Mahdi can return. They genuinely believe that in the year 868, the Mahdi, the final Mahdi, the 12th Imam disappeared. And he is still alive, but he is in a state of occlusion and he will return.

[00:34:16] And again, you're allowed to believe that I am cool with you believing that I'm not cool with you hurrying it along. All right. Like that's not cool with that one. But I think the, the, the, the major difference is that there's things that some Christians say, and you might, might, might be a good book, right? If you ever, I actually read some of the left behind series, right? And I'm a mainline Irish Episcopal, right?

[00:34:44] I'm a mainline Irish Protestant, Anglican, I guess, come to America, you're Episcopal. We don't really believe in the rapture thing, but the first couple of left behind books are actually pretty good. But the people who write those books aren't really necessarily looking to cause a nuclear war to create the end of the world. They just are prepared for the rapture. Whereas if you look at 12 or Shia, they are behaving rationally.

[00:35:08] People think that, that, that wanting to cause the end of the world is an irrational desire. But if you're a 12 or Shia, it is perfectly rational. Ron is acting as a rational actor. And I think one of the reasons they agree to the Obama deal, all right, we won't enrich any uranium for 15 years. It's because they didn't have the rocket tech to hit the U S or Europe. And it was going to take another 15 years to build it.

[00:35:39] So we don't need a nuclear weapon right now, but building a nuclear weapon is trivial. Let's see a uranium enrichment. That's hard. You know, the, the little boy bomb, the gun type design where you have a pit and you have a hole and you just fire that pit into the hole and cause a critical reaction. That wasn't even tested.

[00:36:05] The, uh, scientists at Los Alamos back in the 19, 1944, 1945, they knew it was going to work. It's just because you put enough uranium in one place at one time, slam it together fast enough. You have a, you have a nuclear bomb. So they didn't even test that. They had to test the other device, the gadget. They had to test the, um, the, uh, the compression device, but they didn't even need to test the other device.

[00:36:33] So Ron knows already knows how to build a bomb. They just need to, the big problem is the delivery system. Right. So by agreeing to not generate new nuclear material, it doesn't really cost them anything. Cause like, Hey, we're going to have the end of the world soon. Anyway, what's another 15 years? Let's get a rocket tech up to the point. And you saw them try to hit Diego Garcia. They took that missile. It was convertible, right? They took everything out of that thing before they fired it at Diego Garcia.

[00:37:03] And it's still like, you know, they needed to give that thing some Viagra. It just didn't have the oomph to reach Diego Garcia, but they tried, right? Like ideally if they could reach American, European, any country with nuclear weapons, except Russia, if actually Russia would probably be even worse. It would probably strike back everything they had. Do you think this current war though? I mean, a lot of folks have said, and I'm sympathetic to this view that this current war and the fact that it hasn't worked is almost guaranteed that Iran's now going to make a nuclear weapon.

[00:37:35] I've asked Joe Ken about this too. And we're kind of agreeing with like within the next five years, it's almost inevitable that Iran's going to have a nuke. So that depends on what we do next, right? Okay. What do we do next? Look, well, we, you can kill your way out of a problem. That's a option. Do you see, where do you live? You live in upstate New York, right? Outside of Syracuse. Yeah.

[00:38:04] Outside of Syracuse. Are there any, just check under your desk for me. Are there any Algonquin Indians under your desk? There are not. I'll check for any Akik Indians. Yeah. I'm about five miles away from where the sacred fire used to be lit 24 seven. So yes. So I'm not saying it's right, but it is an option. You can kill your way out of a problem.

[00:38:33] And we're pretty good at that. We do have a history of doing that. And so if you do the thing we don't want you to do, we're typically a fairly peaceful people. But if you start doing that thing, we start killing our way through the problem. I mean, it is not. A lot of dead Iranians. And I think, I think the idea here, hopefully only the bad ones. And we're pretty good at discriminating the good for the bad.

[00:39:00] But, but I think that mistakes happen. We did double tap a school. You know, I got to tell you. As someone who used to run drone strikes and did deconfliction. That was a, that was a pretty big fuck up. Not our best moment. But out of 30,000 strikes, you get one. Yeah. I mean, it's a big one, but they were doing 1300 strikes.

[00:39:29] And I, I can't even freaking imagine that I'm more of a horn of Africa guy, but Jesus. Can you imagine 1300 strikes a night? It's insane. That's a lot. It's an average, but you know, one, one mistake, big mistake. Don't do that again. But, um, you know, you learn from those mistakes as well, because you don't want that to happen. Um, but I, I can actually see a policy of containment where, you know, and it's kind of what we're

[00:39:59] doing now where, when you say, all right, we're just going to keep up this blockade essentially forever. Iran might be able to export some oil by rail a little bit through the Caspian Sea. The tankers really aren't geared for exporting that much oil because they're, they're Volga tankers designed to go through the Volga Don canal and the Volga Don canal ends up in the Strait of Azov. So good luck with that. Like the Ukrainians might have something to say about that. They just love taking out tankers.

[00:40:29] Um, so just by, just by reducing their ability to earn money from oil revenue, you don't need to blow up Bandarabas or the, uh, or Karg Island. We'll just keep the blockade on. We can do that relatively indefinitely unless there's another conflict with like China or something, then we're in trouble. Yeah. But you keep up the pressure. They're losing between 450 to $500 million a day. Sooner or later, you're going to run out of money. Does that mean their government collapses? No.

[00:40:58] I mean, Saddam Hussein didn't collapse. North Korea hasn't collapsed. And now they have nuclear weapons that can hit mainly in the U.S. Well, they're probably getting some funding from China there too. And also North Korea doesn't give a crap about their people. Mm-hmm. You know, at least, at least Iran does have democratic-ish elections in the sense that you can vote a corrupt mayor out of office in Iran. You can vote for your local legislature. Everyone's handpicked by the Ayatollah.

[00:41:26] So it's, you know, which do you want the, the moderate conservative or the extreme conservative running your, running your city, right? Like you can, you can pick. That's not the case in North Korea though. Um, but in, um, in Iran, you know, if we turn off that money supply and just keep them contained and we might have to do this for another 10 years, then that really restricts their ability to build that nuclear weapon.

[00:41:56] It doesn't solve the problem of getting the leadership out, but I don't see how that's possible unless we have a ground mission and the president has squandered a lot of his support or something like that. That's a really tough thing to do to look the American people in the eye and say, Hey, I'm going to send our sons and daughters on the ground to go fight Iran. What we should do. And I have advocated this before. I mean, were you special forces? You're special forces, right? Yep. That was a green beret. Yep. So, all right. The Ryan McBeth plan.

[00:42:26] I'm familiar with shady shit. Very comfortable with the, uh, the, the, the template. All right. Here's a Ryan McBeth plan. All right. Take Hormuz Island. That's a farp. And you take Bandar, a boss. Yeah. You got an airfield and you go to the townspeople, a bandar, a pause with your little green beret on. And you say, okay, we're going to teach you how to fight bad guys. And we're going to give you more than the eight rounds. They actually give you in the army to show you a weapon familiarization.

[00:42:54] Now that we've taught you, we're going to take some J tax and bet them with you. Now, March North and kill everybody. Not dressed like you. Uh-huh. That's, I mean, I don't know if that would work, but that would be my plan. March toward Tehran with American weapons and a couple of J tax. Kill everybody. Not dressed like you. Take the government. What do you think? Does that work? So problems with that? Cause there's two ethnic groups you could do. There's two ethnic groups. You could actually recruit to, for that plan.

[00:43:24] Uh, sensibly you have the Kurds and the Blokistan and the Kurds have their own military structure, the Blokistan liberation army, cross border Palestine. Kurds haven't lost our number yet. No, they, they know how to get in contact with us. Um, they don't, they don't pick up very often. We ghosted them like four times. Wow. So that's the problem. Like, and you could absolutely convince both those ethnic groups to do a breakaway from Tehran, but you're not convincing either one of them from leaving their ethnic region to go take Tehran.

[00:43:54] Like that would be a collapse of the current geographic territory that makes up the Iranian state. But there is no ethnic group that I've identified that would actually sign up to try to project power into Tehran. I mean, just look at the terrain there. Like it's so difficult just to move from valley to valley to valley. I mean, the Northern Alliance is a great example of Afghanistan, but that's really the exception, not the rule. So Libya was different because they're moving along the coast.

[00:44:23] Libya, more freedom of maneuver. Hmm. Easier, easier logistically to project power and also fall back. But like you start moving through those mountain passes in Iran, like once you cross one, it's very difficult to withdraw. It's a bunch more of an all in proposition. And now you have light infantry forces going up against essentially regime militia, assuming you bomb all the conventional troops. So you have your own light infantry forces going up against regime militia in dense urban terrain.

[00:44:51] And in a numbers game, you know, the Kurds, the Blokestans, whoever else you can peel off, they I don't imagine that they have the numbers needed to take that city. And I think even at that point, you're looking at like city state warfare where you have Tehran as a garrison state inside of Iran. And even like the local Jewish enclaves around the city are picking up AKs and manning the walls to protect their city because that's where they live. Yeah.

[00:45:19] I think it devolves into that when I play it through in my head. I could be wrong. That's how it plays through in my head. If I do a feasibility assessment. See, I would, I would figure the army, the Artesh, like they, they're, they would be on our side. They would, you know, some of their leaders are former IRGC, but I would figure the Artesh would flip. And maybe I'm just being rosy. I think there was a possibility of that before we started bombing them.

[00:45:46] Cause I think once we bombed them with Israel, it became America versus Iran, not Iran versus a corrupt regime. I think there was a narrative battle that we had to win prior to dropping the first round and we skipped ahead. We lost that opportunity. Yeah. I think I was wondering like, you know, why didn't we take out Tehran's media? We didn't take out the radio, right?

[00:46:12] We didn't have a command solo plane broadcasting. We weren't dropping leaflets. Like it's kind of like, well, where, where, where, where's the PSYOP people here telling people what to do? Well, and you think Iran would be a right place for that because they have a history of protest movements. Like there's public opposition to the regime. Like there is something there to work with, but you, once you start bombing the country, you trigger the rally around the flag effect.

[00:46:40] And now you lose access to those dissatisfied people that we could have done offensive information operations to recruit and support. You know, I mean, granted the last time we did this with Iran didn't work out very well. It's kind of the reason why we're here now, but Hey, we've learned a lot. We could do it better. Yeah, we have. We've gotten pretty good at it. I'm not saying it's a bad technique. I'm just saying we didn't do it well last time. Let's, if we were going to try it, we could try better now. But I think we've, we've lost the opportunity for that. And it'll be another 20 years until we see it again.

[00:47:10] You know, I, I think that, uh, God, yeah, we used leaflets and radio and command. So I don't know. It wasn't called command solo back then. Oh God. What was it called back during 2003? Was it command solo? I don't know. I was in middle school. I'm not sure. Okay. We had a different name for it. Maybe high school. Maybe that may have been transition year. Yeah. I would love to do a video on that. I think it's a Pennsylvania reserve unit or national guard, you know, that operates all

[00:47:40] those PSYOPs planes. And we, we didn't activate them. Like I would love to go there and just do a video. I, I had some, uh, PSYOPs guys, um, help design a, uh, a surrender leaflet for one of my novels where, um, you know, I actually tuck it in there. If you buy a fucker branding, you get a little surrender leaflet for the desert army.

[00:48:06] Uh, in this, one of my novels, there's, uh, you know, we use, uh, those aircraft to, we use command solo aircraft to, uh, encourage desert soldiers to surrender. And I think it's the neatest thing. Cause that I learned how to design a surrender leaflet. And it's fascinating how, like the reason that it looks so janky is that the art is designed

[00:48:35] so to, uh, so I don't know if people can look at this, but like it essentially takes up the whole page and is of a darker color. So that way the adversary can't color in their own stuff. And it's fascinating. And it has very clear instructions. You know, when you surrender, put down your weapon, put your hand on your head, you know,

[00:49:00] and there's a reason why the leaflets look like they were designed by a five-year-old. And that's, that's because like that has to go to the edges. So they can't use it for propaganda purposes and write their own stuff in. It's really interesting. The whole design theory behind it, uh, and, you know, be, be readable for people who don't know how to read. And in this case, the leaflet was printed in Spanish and in English because there's a

[00:49:29] population of desert that speak Spanish in my novels. But it was, it was fascinating. I thought like that, that was a whole education and why we didn't do that in Iran. I just don't know. I've always been amazed by like, we have this tremendous information operations capability, but like, it is easier to get approval to do a drone strike than it is to get approval to do any type of information operation.

[00:49:55] Like even in Afghanistan, there was this time where the Taliban was saying that we had blown up this truck with kids and everything else. And it wasn't us. It was an IED strike. Like they blew up the truck. We had all this stuff and it took like three days just to get a response back for putting this information out there in the local area. Like that night I was able to drop five bombs. Nobody, nobody batted at an eye. Yeah. And I don't understand why we're so hesitant to use information operations when we have such a robust capability to do it. If we wanted to.

[00:50:25] I don't know. That's an excellent question. I don't know. I'm not. And I've asked Bob Curris used to run psyops for the army and he didn't have a good answer either. He's frustrated too. Yeah. I guess like maybe people, people look at it from the standpoint of like, well, you're not real warriors, right? Like our job is to find and kill the enemy.

[00:50:49] And what you're doing is, has nothing to do with, you know, finding and killing bad guys. It's kind of this touchy feely, you know, I don't know. That's the only thing I can think of is that we don't really consider it real war. We consider it like, uh, something like they tried to do in Vietnam. Those only marginally successful. Maybe there's just not enough papers about it that, that the, the killers will actually

[00:51:18] read or maybe it's considered not aggressive enough. I mean, if you're a, if you're a, um, if you're a, an army colonel, you know, how are you going to get graded? Graded. Are you going to, I guess you're going to get graded for effects, but if you show initiative and speed and violence of action, as opposed to, I dropped leaflets and got the enemy to surrender. Well, they don't, you know, Mark Wahlberg doesn't star in a movie about you. If you dropped a bunch of leaflets, right? Yeah.

[00:51:47] A division that surrenders doesn't write up as well as a division that you destroyed when your OER comes to you. Yeah. Although the effect is the same. And when you think about it, we have the most effective PSYOP. We have the most effective PSYOP facility. We have the most effective PSYOP campaigns in the world. It's called Hollywood, right? The entire world watches our movies.

[00:52:16] Yet, you know, we don't really think of the cultural aspects of America that can kind of, you know, show America in a better light. Ah, maybe a movie is not going to help when you just blew up the wrong car. Yeah. But they seem like really nice guys. You watch that movie. It's how to lose a man in 10 days. Hilarious. Yeah. All right. Let me go pick up the parts of my son. Well, hey, we're coming up on time.

[00:52:44] But before we go, you know, tell people, you know, where to buy your books. I know you got merch. Plug your stuff. Keep this man gainfully employed. So I do. I do have, you can get my novels. Actually, this one, people seem to love The Wind Machine. About a hedge fund manager who discovers a nuclear war with China is coming and how he might make money on it. I need to read that one. It's available at Amazon and Audible. I can send you a key if you want a key for it.

[00:53:14] Oh, yeah. But I also, you can find me at ryanmcbeth.substack.com or just put Ryan McBeth into YouTube. I'll pop right up. Awesome. Well, Ryan, awesome talking with you today. Really appreciate the time of the conversation. And I am very jealous of that cigar. You can smoke. Can't you? So my wife, like, that's her one thing. Like, doesn't care about anything else I do. But like, if I ever become a smoker, she's leaving me. Oh, my God. Is that easy? Oh, yeah. No.

[00:53:45] No. Then, I'm just putting it out there. Two Lithuanian redheads. Do you have a boat? I do not have a boat. Get a boat. And then the Lithuanian redheads will follow. All you got to do is light up a cigar. Shit, I do that every day. Hey, we'll see what we can do. My two kids might have something to say. I see. Actually. So I'm lucky. I'm a military guy. I actually like my wife. Like, I lucked out.

[00:54:14] I came home from Afghanistan and she was still there. Not everyone who was in that situation. So I am very grateful. Baby, I love you. Whatever Ryan says. I love you. Is she Lithuanian? She is not Lithuanian. She's an upstate New York gal. That's why we're here now. Well, thank you for having me on. I had a great time. Me too. Thank you so much. I'll cut it there. We'll let this upload.