Ryan McBeth
Appearances
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1086: Ryan Holiday | How to Fix Your Life with Stoicism
No, but he's acting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1086: Ryan Holiday | How to Fix Your Life with Stoicism
And I was like, get out of here. I was like, what?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yeah. So this war has been great for China and it's been great for India because they've been getting all sorts of cheap oil. And China has essentially been ignoring sanctions. In fact, just today I made a video about there were GPS modules that could help avoid jamming that were showing up inside of Ukraine on Russian missile copies. that came from China.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So essentially they're using Chinese chips to put into these missiles that can help avoid GPS jamming. They're called CRPA chips.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Absolutely. So what these chips do, if you look at a military grade GPS or even perhaps the GPS that's in a marine GPS, like the thing that's on your boat, these chips, they detect false signals and it can detect them because it'll say, all right, I know how loud a GPS signal actually is.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And if you know how loud a GPS signal is, then you can figure out, like, all right, you have this place over here that's louder than what the normal signal should be, so I need to concentrate on this signal over here. So imagine a pizza, right? And there's a bunch of pepperoni on that pizza. Each one of those pieces of pepperoni is an antenna.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
This is called a controlled reception pattern antenna, or PA. And essentially, if you're getting a lot of signal from a bunch of pepperoni on one side of the pizza, then you know, OK, well, let me look toward this other side of the pizza where I'm getting the correct signal. And a lot of those chips are manufactured in China.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And Russia has somehow been able to get their hands on these chips and is using them in Ukraine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That's the scary part. The scary part is we could say to China, listen, you need to do better at making sure that these chips aren't falling into Russian hands. And if you don't do that, we're going to sanction you or we're going to put tariffs on your goods coming in. If there's one thing China doesn't like is when you take their money. Right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
There's a limited market for GPS chips, but there's a huge world market for like cheap toasters. So we have a bigger lever now. Yeah, we have a bigger library here. There's a limited number of people you can sell GPS to. So it's one of those things where we could probably stop this if we wanted to stop this or China doesn't care, which is scary as well.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
No, I don't think you're necessarily a conspiracy theorist. I don't really see that as a possibility. I say that because if Russia didn't have this tech, it would make it a lot harder for them to launch missiles. And nobody's winning on this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
If we can attrit Russia, it would have been better if this happened two years ago. But if we can get Russia to the point where they literally can't wage war anymore, they can't fire these missiles, they can't fire these small, cheap drones, they can't attack Ukraine's electric infrastructure. The story on the ground would have been a lot different today.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
You know, maybe that could be a thing. That's a very real politic kind of idea as well.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yes and no. So at the start of the war, remember the Baraktar?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yeah, they had songs about Baraktar and they had a little music video and all that. So the Baraktar, the Baraktar TB2, Turkish drone, Ukraine was using that thing for ISR, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. They're also dropping micromunitions from that drone to hit various platforms, especially on that Russian 40 mile long convoy that was headed into Ukraine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
After July, September of 2022, you didn't really see the Barak Tar in the air anymore because Russia figured out how to do electronic warfare against it. And then by 2023, for the most part, you didn't see the drone anymore at all. It just wasn't effective.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So we all thought, all right, well, if we're going to use electronic warfare against drones, that's where you saw these Star Wars drone guns, these massive looking black guns that you'd point at the drone. And essentially with that, when the drone is flying, you point the drone gun at the drone and the gun fires a very high powered shutdown signal.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So it essentially cycles through every single possible shutdown signal in its dictionary. Yeah. You also have regular GPS denial, GPS jamming, signals jamming. Essentially the 900 megahertz band that you'd use in your cell phone for moving drones around, that's no longer usable. So you're at like 300 megahertz or you're at 1 gigahertz now.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So you're using essentially UHF to control a lot of these drones and send signal back or LDAN.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It's spy versus spy. You're absolutely right. It is spy versus spy. One guy comes up with an idea. The other guy comes up with a countermeasure. And one of the ways to prevent jamming is to use fiber optic. Essentially, you have your drone and on the back of the drone is a spool of fiber optic wire and it unspools as you fly. Now, there's some disadvantages to this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
The first disadvantage is that this drone, it can't really be recovered. It's going one way. You could theoretically fly it back, but then you lose half your distance. So a lot of these drones are one-way attack drones. These fiber optic drones are one-way attack drones. They're going one way. Initially, the range was about 10 kilometers, five miles or so, 15 kilometers.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Now we're getting up to 50 kilometers. So we're talking 30 miles of range. Of wire.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Fiber optic is pretty small, but the spools are getting pretty big. The fiber optic thing, I'm actually giving a briefing in Ohio in a couple of weeks to a bunch of Intel guys about the current status of drones in Ukraine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Oh, absolutely. You can't really use them in urban areas. You can't really use them in areas that are filled with foliage because they could snap. The other disadvantage is that you can't fire from the same place twice. Because now you have what looks like Christmas garland. They glint in the sunlight. And there are pictures in Ukraine of wires everywhere, in the trees, everywhere.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
I am honored. I hope your fans badgered you into this. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk again.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yeah, with the fiber optic drone, that's a new thing. But the advantage of it is that it can't be jammed. And if you can make it fiber optic and also put a little bit of artificial intelligence on it, now if the wire does break, it might continue on until it sees a target that's in its database and attack that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It's already a thing. Ukraine actually has, it's almost like a copy of the Shahid. Seth, that was the name of it. Seth kind of looks like a mini Iranian Shahid. But Ukraine has a drone where they essentially set the drone up and they say, OK, you need to go after a target that looks like this. And if that target isn't available, then you need to find another kind of target.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So you essentially program the stuff drone where you say, all right, find something that looks like this tank. If you can't find a tank, find an armored personnel carrier. If you can't find an armored personnel carrier, find a truck and so on. And then they just launch that and it's totally automated. We already have computer controlled killers. That's already here.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It's six to eight weeks now. Wow. Six to eight weeks. At the start of the war, it was six to eight months. It's down to six to eight weeks. Ukraine just recently in September, I think it was the 13th Brigade of their National Guard. They did an all... drone attack. They call them ground drones, but essentially drones with machine guns mounted on them.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
These drones that have machine guns on them are controlled by aerial drones. So you don't have line of sight to one of those drones, but you can bounce a signal off a hovering drone. So people were controlling these ground drones with machine guns on them through drones that were hovering, and they actually were able to attack a Russian position and they were able to hold that ground.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So one of the ways you can cheat jamming is by going up and down a frequency all at the same time. So imagine everybody has a decoder wheel and you all know what letter to flip it to at a certain second. Imagine that, but it's at a certain frequency. So you might be at 2255 for one millisecond, then you bump up to 2270, then you go down to 2258. That's actually one of the reasons GPS was invented.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It was for something called PNT, precision time navigation. The GPS sends out a time signal. So every single American military radio in the world is getting the same exact kind signal, so it knows when to jump up and down that frequency spectrum.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So you can talk on the radio, and to you it sounds perfectly normal, but you're actually jumping up and down the radio dial, kind of like you're in a car with one of those old knobs. going back and forth. But the song is exactly, imagine the same song playing on every channel.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yes, and for air raid warnings. So essentially, there's an airbase called Ingalls. It's in Russia. And this air base holds a lot of their bombers. There's other bomber bases around Russia. But we have, I think it's about 250 some military satellites. I believe all of Europe has maybe 13 or 20. So people think with a satellite, oh, I'm in my satellite.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
When I go over an area, if it orbits 90 minutes, then I have 90 minutes until I can see that picture again. And that's not true because the Earth is moving below you. So it might be 15, 18 hours before you go over the exact same spot again. So the way to fix that, the way to get constant ISR on a runway or on something else that you want to look at is to have multiple satellites in orbit.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And one satellite is coming over the horizon just as the other one is leaving. So essentially, Ukraine is using a lot of our intelligence on what the Russians are doing with their aircraft. So that way they know, OK, the Russians just launched a raid. So now we need to get off. are fighters in the air to try to shoot down any glide bombs or any cruise missiles that are being launched.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Without that intelligence, they're still going to detect the raid, but it's going to be after the missiles have entered Ukrainian airspace, and then you're playing catch up. It's better to have assets in place, and you can pretty much guess where those cruise missiles are going to end up by the path that the bombers are taking.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So we stopped that and now we're sharing that information.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That probably wasn't our proudest moment.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Well, the logic was we can turn this off anytime we want. Your people are going to suffer. Make whatever concessions you need to make to end this war. That's the logic. You can call it wrong. But I don't know if you remember the Army of Darkness, right? With good ass shoots bad ass. And he goes, good, bad. I'm the guy with the gun. And sometimes it really does come down to that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
We're the people with the intelligence. We can save your country or we cannot save your country. It would behoove you to do what we say.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Quite a few satellites. I'm doing this off the top of my head. I'm sure someone's going to write and go, technically, it's 249.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It's certainly possible to build factories. Now, putting satellites in space is always going to be hard. There's a limited amount of lift capacity that Europe has. The European Space Agency, they do have the ability to launch satellites, but not at the cadence, not at the operational tempo the US has, especially with SpaceX. So Europe can certainly start building more factories.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
There is an effort in Germany right now to take some of the old car factories and some of the old people who used to work in these car factories and put them to work building tanks. Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Well, it's because a lot of them are being paid.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That's the truth of the matter, right? Yeah, just a lot of them are just being paid. And it's their job. I can't really blame them all that much because they're getting paid to do that. And a lot of times they actually get paid for engagement. I see. So if you come up with a post that gets a lot of engagement and a lot of comments... then you get a bonus for that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
The advantage of that is, at least from the Russian standpoint, is that you want to write the craziest stuff possible, right? Because the whole point is to get engagement for that post.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Thank you. Thank you. We've been saying this for over 10 years. Then they said, sure.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
I think you're absolutely correct. Europe should be able to defend itself.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Look, when they join NATO, there is an agreement. You're going to spend 2% of your GDP on defense. And some nations still haven't done that. It's been three years since the war in Ukraine and Canada still doesn't have their defense spending up to 2% of their GDP. They neighbor Russia, for God's sake. Yeah. They do that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
I believe Poland is trying to get to, I want to say six divisions. So you figure divisions, 15,000 soldiers. One thing, I was just in Poland recently on a NATO trip. And in Poland, it's cool to be in the military.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Poland has really stepped up to the plate. But look, when I was in Poland, I spoke with this woman. She is a teacher, like a kindergarten teacher. And she's dealing with all of these Ukrainian refugees. And it's horrible. These are kids who've lost their fathers. These are kids who can't go home. And it's horrible.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And this was right after our Secretary of Defense went to Europe and defended Europe. And these people are mad at me. And I'm like, dude, I'm on your side here. Sorry, you just happen to be standing here.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yeah, I just happen to be standing there. That was kind of an issue for these guys. But I wanted to hear what they had to say, because Poland is a major U.S. ally. We're very lucky to have them. They're taking things seriously to the point where, look, Poland just bought more HIMARS missile launchers. HIMARS is a multiple rocket launch system that's basically fired off a truck.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It was very effective in Ukraine. Poland bought more HIMARS launchers than we have. They bought M1 tanks. They bought Korean K2 tanks as well. What do you got? We'll take it. And I believe it was Latvia who wants to start mining their border again. Mining which border? I assume the Russian border and the Belarusian border? Well, technically, Poland borders Russia as well, Kaliningrad.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So that would be ideal. I think Poland is part of the landmine ban treaty, the anti-personnel ban, the Ottawa Treaty. They're considering pulling out of the Ottawa Treaty just because landmines have been pretty darn effective.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is if you go to work every single day and you hate your job and you can't really figure out what's wrong with your life. And then you go home and you turn on the computer and all these people are telling you this is what's wrong with your life because we're giving all this money to Ukraine instead of the American people.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Britain can field, I believe, two divisions. France, I want to say they can field three. And Germany, they want to get at the point where they can field three and an additional fourth of reservists. I believe Germany is actually considering bringing back conscription, which they ended in, I think, 2012.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
The German soldiers that I have met have been incredible. They are highly professional. They're motivated. It's just that their government just failed them. Their government let their military go to hell. But there's a lot of good German soldiers there who are dedicated and are committed. They're very serious about the threat.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Look, I've been to Europe recently, and the further you go east, the scarier Russia gets. and the more concerned people are.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Estonia has some of the best cyber troops on the planet. That's because of the soldier of Tallinn. There was a statue of a Russian soldier that this town, I think it was in Tallinn, and they decided to move it to a Russian cemetery. When Russia found out that they did that, Russia cyber attacked Estonia. They turned off the electricity, didn't they, and the internet? They turned off banking.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
They turned off a lot of stuff. After that, Estonia said this is never going to happen again. And so they probably have some of the best cyber troops in NATO.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
When you look like Lithuania, their major brigade is the Iron Wolf Brigade. So a brigade of 4,400 to 4,700 people. And their brigade is actually kind of neat because the king of Lithuania, back in whatever century, he went to sleep and he had the dream of an iron wolf that howled with the voices of a thousand wolves.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Where he woke up, they decided that's where they're going to start the city of Vilnia. Right. So there's a lot of history to that brigade. And the Lithuanians in that unit are very highly motivated people. But there's only one brigade, right? Lithuania is only so big.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Then it's really easy to come to that point of view. That Ukraine is the bad guy. Russia is a Christian nation that's just trying to get rid of the gay people.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
The problem is that they have to. The ultimate plan is taking the Baltics and then taking Poland. They have to do that. Russia has to do that. Why? Because right now their border is about 1,600 miles or so that's undefended. There's no major rivers. There's no massive mountain ranges. So if you take Ukraine, then you have the Carpathia Mountains to the west.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And then if you take Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and then you take Poland, then you've taken a 1600 mile border and you've shrunk it down to 150 miles.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That's their belief, because for very many years, Russia has essentially relied on general winter. to defend itself. When the French invade, then General Winter comes out and destroys your army. When the Germans invade, General Winter comes and destroys your army. And it worked until one day it won't. So that's Russia's feeling, that they feel like they need space so they won't be invaded.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It does seem a little odd, but that's just how Russia feels. That's their basic psyche. To secure our borders, we used to have that with the Warsaw Pact. We no longer have that, so we need to secure our borders from the West.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
I don't believe Putin's ever come out and actually said that. But logically, why are you going to invade Ukraine? You can say, well, it's for resources. You could also say, well, it's because there are family members who live in Russia who also have relatives in Ukraine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And if Ukraine is kind of moving toward the West, then it's really tough when your family members in Russia call Ukraine and they have all these freedoms and you don't. That's a tough one to swallow.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
You know, look, every country has a right to enter into a defensive agreement with any other country. Look, Russia had a defensive agreement with Cuba. They put missiles in Cuba.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yeah, we were like, no way, man. But we're allowed to say that and they're allowed to enter into an agreement with whatever country. Right. We've had a communist country across the border with the U.S. 90 miles away. Right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
I think the difference here is that NATO is not an offensive organization. NATO is a standards organization.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
You're absolutely correct. And they deserved it, right? You don't want to get bombed by NATO. maybe don't put people into rape camps.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
No, it's not totally insane. When you think about it, although the mission in Afghanistan wasn't really a NATO mission, many NATO members, including Ukraine, supplied troops. A lot of those nations supplied troops for Afghanistan. You might be able to make that argument, but look, one of the deals is that a lot of NATO countries, they don't have the expeditionary capabilities.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
There's really only four expeditionary, four and a half expeditionary militaries in the world. That's the United States, the United Kingdom.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
france russia and to a lesser extent china and by expeditionary these are nations that can at scale move troops and effectively get supplies to those troops in order to have those troops fight in a different area of the world most countries have a little bit of expeditionary capability but for the most part most armies of europe are defensive armies
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So the idea of saying, oh, well, NATO could invade Russia, for the most part, a lot of these militaries are purely defensive in nature.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
They just don't have the logistical ability, the logistical lift to move outside their own borders with very small exceptions like humanitarian war, like East Timor, or if there's an earthquake somewhere in Indonesia, you might be able to get some troops over to Indonesia to help out. For the most part, it's just not built like that. Their militaries aren't built to be expeditionary.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Why is Harry Potter so popular? because kids have no agency. Kids don't even get to decide what they eat. When you read Harry Potter, it's about this powerful wizard who knows secrets that adults don't know. So when you're one of these people who can't figure out why their life sucks so much, It's like reading Harry Potter. I know the truth. I know the secret.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Israel is another example. I've had Syrians talk to me, and these Syrians have said, how come Syria doesn't invade Israel? I'm like, dude, Syria can't invade Israel.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
get a couple of miles into the border, maybe. And you know what? Israel can't invade Syria either outside of a couple of kilometers. They just don't have the logistical capacity to do that. War is hard and logistics is even harder.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
think about it this way. That is the argument that we can look at. But when you're Russia and you've always been in this tech backwater, when you're Russia and you don't necessarily have any defensive borders yourself, you might get a little concerned about that. Russians are thinking like Russians at this point. I'm thinking like an American where I can look at NATO and go,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Many of the countries in NATO don't really have any offensive capability. But if you're a Russian, are you really going to necessarily count on that?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Well, I mean, the proof is in the pudding.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So I don't even know what militarily what it would take to actually perform an invasion of Russia. And actually, when you think about it, even though Russia has been attrited to a certain point regarding manpower and regarding vehicles, one of the huge issues is that Russia has been fighting for three years. You learn things. You learn things while you're fighting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And so now Russia has all of this real world experience, this genuine, honest to God, real world experience in fighting a modern war. They are way more dangerous now than they were three years ago, even though technically their capabilities have been attrited to a certain point. They can build up their military again.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
They can certainly be a real threat, especially with all of this knowledge that they've developed.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
You're absolutely correct. It's very scary when you think about it. For the longest time, Russia just didn't have the ability to learn. The Russian army was very inflexible when it came down to things like call for fire. Let's say you have a unit advancing and they run into some trouble. In an American unit, oftentimes you might be able to call for artillery.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And if that artillery has already been allocated to you, you'll be able to call that artillery and you'll be able to have that artillery land on the bad guys. You'll be able to call that artillery in. Whereas Russia, a lot of their artillery fires are pre-planned.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
About a year ago, they started using the Orlan-10, which was a drone, to actually perform on-demand artillery attacks against Ukrainian forces. And that's something they learned to do. Like they slowly figured it out. And it used to be that the Russian army was very inflexible. And that isn't the case anymore. So they're a lot more dangerous than they were just a couple of years ago.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Biden is corrupt and he was giving money to his cronies and laundering it through Ukraine. So it's really no different than Harry Potter.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So that's a very good question. And there's a lot of guys who died in Kursk, a lot of Ukrainians who died taking Kursk. And I believe their whole idea was we're going to take Kursk. It's going to force a lot of Russian units all the way over to another part of the front lines, pressure off our front lines. It was a gamble.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And it didn't really work because instead of moving forces from one part of the front lines to Kursk, they managed to get North Koreans to fight for them. And it was a gamble and it didn't pay off. And for the most part, Ukraine has been pushed out of Kursk.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Initially, it served the purpose of, all right, we're going to take some land. That way, when we negotiate with Russia, we'll give back Kursk if you give back these other lands that we have. And right now, Ukraine is fighting a rearguard action. So I don't want to say they're no longer there. They are still there, but they are slowly getting pushed out.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And they're doing it in a way Ukraine is doing what's called a rearguard action. So they're still fighting to allow their troops and equipment to leave while they still have them rather than try to stay and fight this onslaught.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
You're absolutely correct. It is a very fluid situation. And the fact is that Russia really doesn't have any motivation to stop the war. And that's mainly because when it comes to their goals, they haven't completed all of their goals yet. And their goal is, of course, to take over all of Ukraine and then eventually go to the Baltics and then Poland.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
They have to do that in order to secure their country from what they perceive as NATO aggression. So Russia is under absolutely no motivation because they believe if they can keep pushing and pushing, eventually Ukraine will collapse, at least according to them.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That's certainly a possibility. Now, the kind of ceasefire that Russia wants is one where Russia remains in possession of Ukrainian land. And eventually there's going to have to be some sort of give and take. As much as I'd hate to put it like this, Ukraine is likely going to have to give up some land in order to ensure some kind of peace.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
I foresee the Donbass, mainly Luhansk and Donetsk, becoming a sort of, not Russian satellite, but almost like a no man's land or like the Sinai Peninsula was in Egypt when Egypt and Israel agreed to peace and there were peacekeepers in the Sinai Peninsula.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So perhaps the Donbass becomes a sort of free state that is perhaps aligned close with Russia and you have a peacekeeping force, D4, let's say, Donbass force. that patrols that area. Russia is limited to having a certain number of tanks near that area, and Ukraine is limited to having a certain number of tanks and troops in that area.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And perhaps in return, they get Kyrgyzstan and Zaporizhia back as territories. So who's going to patrol that? The UN? Europe? That's a good question. It could be the UN. KFOR was a mainly NATO operation. That was the Kosovo Stabilization Force. The MFO, Multinational Force and Observers, is a joint, I believe it's 13 countries, United States, Japan, Norway, Colombia, Fiji.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
They have a military and Fiji actually does the rotation. So it could be something like that where a third party force is used. The ideal situation might be some non-aligned countries like Brazil, Indonesia. They could supply troops and different countries would pay for the upkeep of those troops while they're on rotation. It could be something that lasts 20 years.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
The MFO, Multinational Force and Observers in Egypt have been around since the 1980s.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
The Fijians, in my experience, are highly professional soldiers. They essentially have three battalions. One battalion rotates to Egypt, one battalion rotates to Lebanon, and the other battalion stays home. It's mainly a reserve army, and these guys go back to their plantations and farming. They leave again and go on another rotation. They're highly professional soldiers.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That is the fear. The fear is that Russia would use any kind of time. Ideally, a ceasefire will usually last for 30 days. And that just means, all right, there's certain agreements that ceasefire, you won't shoot at each other. That'll give a chance for some soldiers to rotate out and rest. Now, you're not going to rebuild your forces over those 30 days.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
But ideally, a ceasefire turns into a permanent peace treaty. And after that, we have negotiations on what troops are allowed and what areas of demilitarized zone and so on. So I could certainly see something like that happening eventually. And it almost certainly benefits Russia.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
But depending on the terms of the ceasefire, if Russia has very favorable terms where they say, OK, Ukraine's army is limited to 200 tanks and they're not allowed to join NATO and they're not allowed to raise an army larger than 100,000 troops, that's an issue. That's an issue for the defense of Ukraine. And in 10 years, Russia could try again.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That's a very good question. I've actually been in touch with some Alawites who've been telling me that they have elements of HTS rolling through Alawite cities, just murdering military age males. They cut off water, they cut off power. So it's forcing people to leave their homes. But hey, there's a curfew. Oh, you're on the street. Bang. Right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So we are sending weapons to Ukraine now, and this is being recorded on March 23rd, 2025. Right. So if you're listening to this on Monday, maybe not.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Left your home to try to find water, try to charge your phone.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
that does appear that seems to be happening i don't know whether that is government policy because you have the current leader of the current de facto leader of syria right now who's now dressing up in a suit and shaking hands and looking like he's a perfectly normal politician i don't know whether this is hts doing this as a matter of government policy or it's a rogue group from hts
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
One interesting thing is that the HTS could be considered the army of Syria right now. They reached out to the Kurds and it appears that the Kurds have said, yes, we will join the federal army of Syria. Now, they might be separate Kurdish brigades, but it looks like they might be under a unified command.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So as of right now, I don't know what's going on when it comes to who is actually committing these atrocities inside Syria. The other side of the coin is that there may be some Syrians who I don't want to say don't care, but might be looking the other way because they're Alawites who were in charge for quite a few years and now they're getting what's due.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That's a hard thing to say to a family who's just been murdered.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
One of the issues that you're running into is that we don't have a lot of media in Syria. So we're getting a lot of stuff secondhand. And so we don't really know exactly who is doing this. And the people who are doing this aren't necessarily going to tell you. Like I said, we really don't know right now, but it does seem like Alawites are being dragged out of their houses and murdered. Okay.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Awkward ending. It's a pretty awkward ending for the Alawites, too. Look, everyone has their fingers crossed that this conflict in Syria was going to maybe lead to an Islamic-ish democracy. It'll definitely be based on Islam, but maybe there'll be rights for minority groups in there as well. Maybe, look, we haven't seen Sharia law pop up in Syria. So I am still cautiously optimistic.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It's one of those things to back all the way up. Yes. In the big scheme of things, essentially the United States knows that it's going to be fighting China in 2027, 2028. President Xi Jinping has said you must, to the PLA, People's Liberation Army, you must be ready by 2027 to attack Taiwan. My guess is that 2028 is probably a better date because that's when there's an American election.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
But unfortunately, there's really no Western journalist in Syria that can kind of explain what's going on right now.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
I believe an election in Taiwan as well. So 2028 would probably be a better date. We have essentially three years to get... troops over to the Pacific theater. The easiest way of doing that is to cut the 84,000 troops that are in Europe. And in a lot of ways, it's kind of a shame, but Ukraine is becoming a victim of real politic.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Essentially, we need to get troops the heck out of Europe, and I believe they want this war over. No one's going to win, but if Russia takes over Ukraine, that's fine. If Ukraine kicks Russia out, that's fine. If Russia takes some of Ukraine's land and leaves the rest alone, that's fine as well. They don't care anymore.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
They just need to get the heck out of Europe to start putting troops in Taiwan, most likely the Philippines and Australia. So that's the basic strategy here. And so the president really doesn't care. He just wants the war over. And if Ukraine has to make concessions for the war to end, that's fine as well. Because at this point, it's going to become Europe's problem. Hey, go take care of that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Because the last thing the administration wants... Is Russia collapsing, which could happen around 2026, 2027, maybe?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yeah, vehicles are a little bit different. So you can actually look at vehicles and you can look at their marshalling yards and their storage yards. And essentially, they don't have any more cheap armored vehicles. I mean, stuff that was made during Soviet times that they can refurbish. I think maybe 200 or 400 vehicles left. Wow.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
You can actually look at satellite footage and see these depots getting smaller and smaller.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
No, they're out of MTLBs pretty much. It's basically a box that carries troops. Okay. Really no guns on it. And these are very useful as battle taxis. Get your soldiers to battle. So essentially, Russia, they're never going to run out of tanks. But instead of 12 tanks in a company, there'll be seven. I see. Or six. That's kind of the problem they're going to enter.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And you're already seeing Russian soldiers use things like mopeds or motorcycles to cross no man's land to perform attacks. So I think what we're afraid of is essentially Ukraine missed its window not to win, but to lose less. Okay. And because of that, what we're afraid of is that if Russia collapses internally in 2027, 2028, we're trying to fight China.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Now we have Russia dissolved into multiple warlord states, each of which have nuclear weapons. Now, granted, those nuclear weapons are controlled from Moscow. They still have the permission of action links. They still have the codes to operate those weapons. But that's not good.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
And so the last thing we want is to be running around Russia trying to recover all these nuclear weapons while we're simultaneously trying to fight China. That makes sense. Horrible as it is to say, it's easier to let Russia win.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
So it was Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. When the Soviet Union fell, there were nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. And again, those permissive action links, the things that actually, the code to make the nuclear weapon explode, they were still controlled by Moscow.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
But Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan signed a treaty saying, we promise you won't attack us if we give these nuclear weapons back. We encouraged Ukraine to do this. Hey, we got your back. We'll protect you if you give these nuclear weapons back. And apparently we haven't been sticking to that promise. That makes sense.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yes, that's correct. Eventually, you will be able to do that. That's what we're afraid of. And also, a lot of people don't know that you can't just take a nuclear weapon off the shelf and detonate it. The reason we came up with these permissive action links is that originally our nuclear weapons were essentially protected with bike locks. Like back in the 1950s, 1960s.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Yeah. One Air Force guy grabbed a plane that happened to have a nuclear weapon on it, took off, flew around for a while, and Russia went absolutely nuts that we allowed that to happen.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Don't even know if this guy knew whether he had a nuclear weapon on board or not, but yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
This guy, he noticed that there was an attack. This thing was Stanislav Petrov. This guy was on duty one night and he noticed, I think it was three nuclear weapons that were headed toward the USSR. And he was like, all right, this is definitely an attack. We are within our rights to counterattack, but why would the US only attack with three?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Well, correct. And he essentially saved the world that night. Yikes. Stanislav Petrov.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
It would certainly behoove us to make sure that no nuclear weapons were in Europe and Europe would certainly be helping. But, you know, those darn terrorists, if you're a warlord and you want some easy money and some terrorist goes, you know what, I'll give you a couple million dollars, this nuclear warhead. What are you going to do?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
Well, they'll figure it out. Yeah. Eventually they will figure out it was you because every nuclear weapon, it decays in a certain way and you can figure out where this thing was manufactured.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop
That's the biggest issue. And as crazy as it is and horrible to look at Ukraine and say, you know what? Sorry, Charlie. We need to worry about China. That's the truth.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
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The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
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The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
That guy's been out of the game for a while. And one of the guys made a comment. What are these things that everybody keeps pointing to? And they're talking about the phones. They don't realize that it's a phone with a touchscreen. It's like, they've never seen this. They've never heard of this. They didn't know Iraq. fell.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
That's how long they've been away from other people and other sources of information and just probably other humans, because they would have gone, hey, what's new since you got thrown in here a week ago? Oh, Saddam Hussein is gone. No, they haven't talked to anybody for 12 years or however long it's been, 20 years. All right. So Al-Assad becomes president. He gets 97 percent of the vote.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
You got the Damascus Spring election. Question mark, congratulations, but not really. Gun control, extraordinary rendition. Okay, so by this point, we can see that al-Assad is a monster, right? He's definitely gassed his own people, right? He's killing all these dissidents. He's throwing people in prison.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
This is not the ophthalmologist that everybody had hoped for who likes the internet and computers.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Just visit Jordan Harbinger dot com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, out of the loop, Syria. Syria has been in the news lately. A lot of you have been following this. Many of you have not. And even if you have, it might just be a little too darn complicated to wrap your head around. There are so many different players. There's the dictator. He's gone now.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And that's kind of what Syria looks like. I just want to pause and let people who are now just learning that there is a regular shape for each chicken McNugget that is uniform across all of them. That has to sink in for a second because no one's going to listen to the next thing you say until they're like, wait a minute, my whole life.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I've been eating Chicken McNuggets, and now I realize the shape is not random. That's right. Those are molded.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
They have four shapes, and it's like the boot, the bell, and I can't remember the other two shapes. But two shapes should be enough to get most people off Chicken McNuggets for the most part. Anyway, continue.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
It's funny that you just described ISIS as ne'er-do-wells.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
But then there's this group, that group. There's actually over 70 groups. or something like that, at last count, that were vying for power in Syria, and the situation evolves day by day. There's a heck of a lot going on.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Okay. It's interesting because it's like they had another option for getting him to stop using chemical weapons, but instead they were like, what we need to do is make sure that everybody who's been hit with this chemical weapon is dead and can't say anything.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Here to cut through some of the noise and give us a great overview of this conflict and where it currently stands is YouTuber Substacker, if that's a thing, Ryan McBeth, he's a good friend of mine, and he does a lot of videos on geopolitics, military weaponry, these kinds of conflicts, and all of the things related to this. I wanted an overview on Syria.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
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The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I have heard that a lot of people who are Hezbollah supporters were pretty pissed off about the fact that they were sent to Syria to kill civilians on behalf of Assad, who kills tons of Muslims.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Because that doesn't bode well. HTS is an offshoot of al-Qaeda and now runs Syria. It's not something you want to read or see.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I'm pretty well informed, but Syria is just one of those things where there's like 20 different balls in the air, This episode seems a little bit disjointed. This is a very complicated conflict. The timelines are weird. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's fog of war. This is a really long-standing civil war that is, I guess, kind of, sort of, still not quite over. So bear with us.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Yeah, like we're having a little bit of a laugh, but it's a really serious subject with multiple parties fighting the government, but also fighting each other and just doing it in horrific ways. It's not like when a real national army says, look, we got all the manpower we need. We have naval support. We have air support. We're just going to cordon this off. This is like house to house.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Let's burn this entire village down and kill everyone in it. And then we won't have to worry about it anymore. Kind of fighting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
We do try to make things as clear as possible. And I wanted somebody who could juggle a lot of balls, and that is Ryan McBeth. So here we go, out of the loop on Syria. Thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it. Coming back over the holidays. Absolutely. By the time this airs, it'll be 2025. Can you believe it? Oh, my God. Yeah, I know. Where's our jetpack? That's right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Yeah, they just cut and ran. I saw the videos. I saw dudes stripping down, literally stripping their uniform off and running away with like shorts on and a T-shirt because they didn't want to be known as military. I assume their first stop was someone's house to get a decent set of clothes on so they could blend in with civilians and pretend that they were also running from this offensive.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
New year, new Syria, which is what we're talking about today. New year, new regime in Syria or something that resembles a regime. And you sent me an email with notes, and I think it's just the best beginning. Because you wrote, to start, don't get wrapped around the axle if you don't understand what's going on.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Speaking of ISIS and Sharia law, now for a word from our sponsors. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors, those who make this show possible.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support this podcast are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can always search for sponsors using the AI chat bot on the website as well over at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. And hey, if you can't remember the name or you're wondering if there is a code and you can't find it, Email us, jordan at jordanharbinger.com.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
We're more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Out of the Loop Syria with Ryan McBeth. Aleppo is essentially isn't that kind of the New York of Syria, whereas Damascus is the Washington, D.C.? Is that fair?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Yes, you could say that. OK, so they capture this big city, this main city, the main city that's not the capital. And then they decide, let's roll to see the government, because if that's how they defended Aleppo, maybe Damascus, we can at least encircle it. And I think that was their initial plan. And it looks like since everybody just cut and ran, they just kept moving.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And like we said at the beginning of the show, Assad gets in one of his jets and flies to Moscow. And I think, didn't he have a fake press conference where he pretended to still be in the country, but he was already gone?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
That could have been fog of war stuff, like Reddit post says this, but truth says that. I don't know. I just remember hearing that he had a fake press conference where he was like, all right, we're going to dug in over here. And he's like, yeah, dug into my four seasons stay over here in Moscow eating caviar while you suckers hopefully shoot your way out. It was just nuts.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
OK, so they get rid of Assad. But what does this mean for the world? Who is in charge of Syria right now? Can you even answer this question?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
There are about 70 factions fighting in Syria right now, but it's best to think of them as two big groups, pro-Assad forces and anti-Assad forces. That was obviously before a relatively large event, which is Assad tucking his tail in and flying one of his private jets over to Moscow forever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Well, yeah, I was going to say, you know what happens when a Syrian studies medicine abroad and comes back to Syria. Nothing good. Nothing good.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
A friend of mine who has been a guest on the show, Bradley Stein, S-T-E-Y-N, if people want to search for him, he was recruited by the apartheid government to go undercover in the communist movement, went to Angola, got trained. flipped sides because he was like, oh, actually, maybe we're the baddies, white supremacists. And then he ended up uncovering an assassination plot against Nelson Mandela.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
It's a super interesting story. Not that there weren't a zillion assassination plots against Nelson Mandela, but he uncovered one of them and ended up being his bodyguard for a while, which is pretty cool.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Yeah, make it so that I can walk down the road without getting shot at by bandits or ISIS. Yeah, look, he's got his work cut out for him to pacify Syria and make it a civilized place again after all of this war. Yeah, maybe he'll calm the rhetoric a little bit. Was it him who said, I want a peaceful coexistence with Israel? That is not something that Islamic terrorists generally put in the news.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I got to wonder if Assad is sitting around in whatever five-star hotel or wherever they moved him into in Moscow. And is he watching the news nonstop, looking at all this? Is he like, yeah, I got a meeting with Putin on Monday to see if they can go in and invade and get me my country back? Or is he just like, it was a good run. I'm over it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I think they just don't want to not do it and then find that they're now being used to run bombing raids towards Israel and they have to shoot them out of the sky. I'm not trying to excuse it, but that's probably the logic here. Oh, there's chemical weapons. Should we let those go into HTS's hands and hope for the best or destroy them right now and not have to worry about it anymore? OK, I get it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
So what does this mean in conclusion here? Because this is super confusing for a lot of people. Hopefully we've cleared up a lot of the players and what's going on here now that Assad is gone. But what does it mean for the world? Israel, OK, they've got a neighbor that is not Assad. Were they better off with Assad, who was secular?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And maybe the devil you know, now they've got HTS next door, the devil you don't know. But that says we want peaceful coexistence with Israel, which is OK. Status quo slash better than Assad. But what about the U.S. ? Russia, China, the Middle East. Do you know all the other neighbors that are definitely relevant that people never talk about?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
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The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
One of their major industries was illegal drugs, Captagon. Yeah, we did a whole episode on Captagon. We'll link to it in the show notes. Fascinating.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
That might be a decent point to talk about, but I feel like we're getting a little ahead of ourselves because some people are like, wait, who's Assad again? All right. Who are the players in Syria? What we know now from Syria is the government fell. The dictator Bashar al-Assad is gone. He fled to Moscow, like we just mentioned. And now... There's another kind of proto regime in place ish, maybe.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
If you haven't heard of Captagon, don't worry. I did a whole show about it. Again, it's linked in the show notes. The reason you haven't heard about it is we have better stuff here in the United States. And I put that in air quotes, of course, but it's basically like crappy Adderall.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Yeah. You wouldn't do it if you had access to Adderall, cocaine, meth, whatever speed. Because my question is, how come we don't have a ton of it here if it's so cheap and easy to make? And the answer is, because we have other stuff that's better, that's cheap and easy to make. Womp womp. Yeah, but the busts with Captagon are mind-blowing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
They'll find like $200 million worth of tabs in a shipment of washing machines or something that goes to Dubai. It's just nuts.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
That attack on Iran, that was when the Ayatollahs, I always separate the Ayatollahs from the people of Iran, who are awesome and have some of the best food. The Ayatollahs, they talked a bunch of smack and then they immediately got their entire country's worth of air defenses knocked out by Israel in two days.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Oh, poor Hezbollah. No toys, man. No weapons, no rockets. Hamas, whatever's left of them, no more rockets for them than either. They get all that stuff from Iran, correct?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Yeah, we have screwed them over so many times. The only reason that they haven't lost our number is because they don't have that many options.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
But let's back up then and talk about who was Assad, because like you said, he wasn't very interested in running a country. And then suddenly he became one of the most murderous dictators of our generation.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Good luck. Man, what a mess. I assume there's still light skirmishes or fighting happening somewhere in Syria. I haven't really heard much about it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
That would be absolutely incredible. I would love to see Syria. My friend went and he said it was just incredible. He was like, the people are great. The food is great. And of course, he was a Kiwi from New Zealand. And he's like, look, I don't mean to be dark, but everything is really cheap right now because it's a little bit of a crappy way to describe things.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
He was a little more tactful than I was just now. But One of the things that he did is he went around to a lot of people and bought their family heirlooms from them and said, if you want this back, here's my phone number and address and I will give it back to your family in 10 years or whatever if you want to. And he put the price paid for it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
He has like a museum-ish thing in his house in New Zealand full of all this old Syrian stuff. And he's like, yeah, I'm just expecting these people to call me back and be like, can I have my great grandfather's backgammon set that he made? out of marble or pearl or whatever. And he'll be like, yeah, 50 bucks. That's what I gave your dad for it. Here you go.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Because these people needed money to escape. Anyway, he said it was just the most incredible country, one of the most incredible countries he's been to besides Yemen, another place that none of us are going to in the next 20 years. I don't know, man. You want to go to Syria once this thing dies down? Are you a traveler?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I didn't go as a tourist. No, it might be more fun when you can go as a tourist instead of when you're worried about people shooting at you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I want to go to Iran, Syria and Yemen, and I might die of old age before I get the chance to do it. Syria, though, looking a little more promising than the other two so far.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Yeah, more power to him. Ryan McBeth, thank you so much for coming on and explaining this very complicated set of moving parts in Syria. This episode is like juggling 20 different objects at the same time. This is just a really crazy amount of things to keep in your head. I can only imagine what it's like if you're actually in Syria trying to deal with all this as well.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
It's just a complete cluster. that frankly could have been a lot worse than it ended now. I mean, look, the civil war was terrible. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is we could have had HTS take over and turn this place into something terrible. We could have had it turned into 10 more years of civil war.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Maybe it's too early to say, but so far it looks like that's not happening, which is just a miracle. If there's any positive news coming out of Syria these days, it's this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
That's right. We'll have a bathrobe made for you. Yeah. A slightly too small bathrobe that you have to wear on appearance number six. Thank you so much for inviting me on. Thanks, Ryan. You're about to hear a trailer for our interview with Bill Browder.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
He was one of the first investors in Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain and became a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin, who to this day has him looking over his shoulder after he uncovered a massive fraud inside the Russian government. This is one of our most popular episodes. So if you haven't heard that yet, you'll want to check that out.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Making 10 times your money. is the financial equivalent of smoking crack cocaine. And once you do it once, you just want to repeat it over and over and over and over again. It was completely, absolutely Wild West chaos, gold rush type of situation. The companies were run by these oligarchs, and these oligarchs said, well, we might as well just cheat everybody on everything.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And so while I was sitting there down 90%, they were going to steal my last 10 cents on the dollar. I took a decision which nobody had ever taken before, which was to take on one of the oligarchs. I did. I fought back, big time. I ended up with 15 bodyguards. There was a lead car, a lag car, a side car, three armed guys in my car.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
When we got close to the home, they would go and scout the rooftops for snipers. They would look for bombs under the cars. and secure the stairwells and then escort me into the apartment. Then I had two guys with automatic weapons sitting in my living room. It was very, very intense, very scary. And after that, I hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky to help me investigate it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Sergei and I exposed the crime. The same people who Sergei testified against arrested him and then tortured him to try to get him to withdraw his testimony. And they thought, you know, here's a guy, he buys a Starbucks in the morning, he wears a blue suit and a white shirt and a red tie, and he works in the tax practice of an American law firm. He'll buckle in a week.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And it turns out that they got him wrong completely. He's the most principled guy in the world. He was really a man of steel. On the morning of November 17th at 7.45 a.m., I got the call from Sergei's lawyer, and it was the most horrifying, life-changing, soul-destroying news that I could have ever gotten.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And if you want to hear more about how Bill Browder took on one of the most powerful men in the world, Vladimir Putin, and continues to fight for change, check out episode three of The Jordan Harbinger Show. All things Ryan McBeth will be in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at JordanHarbinger.com slash deals.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, be sure to check out our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. The idea here is to give you something specific, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, and your relationships in under two minutes. These are short reads that are packed with good little nuggets.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
So if you know somebody who's interested in Syria, geopolitics, and current events, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Yeah. Like, how do you fight corruption when your dad is the dictator? Because you can get rid of anyone you want. Oh, wait, that's the pretext for getting rid of anyone you want. Instead of just, yeah, my dad doesn't like or trust this guy. It's that guy's corrupt. So he has to go to prison forever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And anybody who's friends with that guy, just to be safe, should probably also go to prison forever. You're absolutely correct. So Bashar al-Assad, he's in charge of the occupation of Lebanon. So Syria occupied Lebanon. And is it safe to say that Lebanon was almost like a puppet of Syria or is that overstating?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
So Bashar al-Assad is like, I'm gonna be an eye doctor. Gets a call from his dad that's like, just kidding, you're gonna be a dictator.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And you gotta wonder, was he like, sweet, I always wanted to be one of these powerful billionaires, or was he like, I was so looking forward to living in London and not being a dictator, but maybe borrowing a couple hundred million dollars here and there from the country, no big deal. That seems like the best place to be.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
You're not a dictator, but like your dad is, so you're loaded, and you have a security detail, and you have a life of luxury, but... Maybe not everyone in the free world wants to see you dismembered in public.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
That doesn't sound very hard ass of a dictator. He's like, all right, my first order of business. We got to get a LAN going, man. Have you seen Duke Nukem when you have 12 players? It is awesome. Oh, and we got to murder a bunch of dissidents in brutal ways in public. But we'll get to that later. First LAN party. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Is that the belief or is that just a side effect of one of the beliefs?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I see. OK, so the Alawites are a minority, but they gain control and they help other minorities, which is why you see online some support for Bashar al-Assad, because you see these people who are like, it's going to be worse now because they're a small minority Christian. Maybe they're Druze, maybe they're some other secular minority. And they're like,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
HTS, who we'll get to in a second, the new regime is not going to be better for us. Trust me, Bashar was a bastard, but this is going to be even worse. You just watch. So this guy becomes the dictator of Syria. He continues the tradition of supporting minorities and pitching other bad guys against each other in some way and repressing everyone. And you mentioned they're in the Ba'ath Party.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
I heard about that from the Iraq War. Is that the same Ba'ath Party that was Saddam Hussein?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Oh, that's a fortunate coincidence for him. Otherwise, he would have been ineligible. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
welcome to the show i'm jordan harbinger on the jordan harbinger show we decode the stories secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you our mission is to help you become a better informed more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to ceos athletes authors thinkers and performers even the occasional astronaut hacker real life pirate or special operator
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Wow. He was so popular. That's the thing with these dictators. They are just insanely popular. Lukashenko was like 90 plus for 80% of the vote. These guys, man, the mandate is really strong, unless there's some f***ery, in which case all bets are off. But otherwise, the mandate, man, it's a clear majority. Okay, so... All jokes aside, isn't al in Arabic the or of? Yes. Okay. Yes, absolutely.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Technically al-Asad means the lion. Asad is lion. I see. So this is not like the city where they're from. This is the name they've given themselves to sound tough.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Is that the, I won't sugarcoat it, the kidnapping program where the CIA was like, that guy's a terrorist. We're going to put a bag over his head and he's going to pop up later in a place that doesn't have constitutional rights or where we can get away with it. You're absolutely correct.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Oh, that's, I want to be clear. If that's protecting us from terrorism, fine. But it sounds pretty terrible and possibly like one of those things that we're going to find out later was just a big mess and tons of innocent people got tortured to death in Syria.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
Oh, that's awful. Yeah, hopefully they don't find that stuff in five years. Hey, there were 300 people down here. We had no idea. You know who won't slaughter your whole family? The fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at 6minutenetworking.com. I know networking is like a dirty word these days. This is not schmoozy. It is not cringy. It's very down to earth. It's all about improving your relationship building skills. And it'll make you a better colleague, a better connector, a better friend, and a better peer in a few minutes a day.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
It really is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to that course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course, once again, it's all free. I don't need your credit card number. There's nothing for sale. It's over there at 6minutenetworking.com. Now, back to Ryan McBeth.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
They went into, what is it, Sednaya, it's called, prison, and there were kids in there that had been born in there, probably because their mothers got s*** by the guards. It is so gross on so many levels, and they showed the footage, and it's like people lived in there for how long? And it looks like a dirty... shower and that's the whole room, and you just sleep on the floor in the dark.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1099: Syria | Out of the Loop
It's just horrifying, the conditions that you would see in a place like this. It's hell on earth, and people spent decades in there. I followed the Syrian Civil War subreddit, and somebody had posted videos and news of the guys that they were finding in these prisons were saying, oh, are you from Saddam Hussein's army? And it's, oh, I got news for you, man.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Oh, boy. You know, when the whole war started, the design cycles for drones were every six to eight months, they had like a new kind of drone. And now we're seeing design cycles of six to eight weeks. It's really amazing what both sides have done with drone technology.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Just recently, with Russia inventing these FPV drones that spool wire out, so they're essentially wire-guided drones that can't be jammed. It's also pretty amazing that Ukraine has developed some of its own ballistic and cruise missiles during wartime, which is a pretty heavy lift to design something like that, especially during a war when you're also trying to get beans and bullets to the front.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
The Kursk Concursion essentially proved that Russia's nuclear threats are essentially Nothing. If Russia was going to use a nuclear weapon, dropping it right on troops entering the Kursk offensive, because there's one road going in and out of Kursk, that would have been an ideal place to use a nuclear weapon. It would have stopped the advanced cold, just like that, and they did not do that.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
So it's questionable as to whether or not Russia will even use nuclear weapons. It's actually pretty questionable as to whether nuclear weapons work all that well. after years of failed maintenance. One of the things that I pointed out is that in 2021, the U.S. spent $50 billion on maintaining a nuclear stockpile, and Russia spent about $66 billion on their entire army.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
We have a rough number of warheads, so take a wild guess whose warheads are probably in better condition. That's pretty much the situation. We have a front that is mostly stabilized, although the Ukrainians are slowly losing ground. They're going to have to close that loop somehow.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
But if you take a look at some sources, especially Covert Cabal, who essentially buys satellite footage and then counts Russian tanks, Russia will probably be out of tanks by 2026 and other armored vehicles. And that's going to be a big problem when you can only manufacture about 50 tanks a month.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Probably the most significant development is the advent of North Korean troops inside Russia. You know, Russia has always had this deal with their elites. The elites have said, do whatever you want, just don't touch our boys. So Russia cannot do another general mobilization, or Putin will end up hanging upside down outside a gas station like Mussolini.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
And by bringing in North Korean troops, Russia has this next source of troops that it can put into the fight or at least perform rear line duties like guard depots or just do transportation, things like that. So you might have an unending source of men, although... North Korea's price for giving out those troops might slowly rise and rise.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
We want more oil, we want more tech, we want more this, we want more that. So, there will always be a cost to those North Korean troops.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Seems like it's going pretty bad. There are extreme communication problems. There are North Korean troops who are, they have very difficult time understanding what the Russians want them to do. And then once they do it, they don't know how to acting. Look, the Russian army that waltzed into Ukraine or stumbled into Ukraine in 2022 is not the same Russian army we have now.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
If you survived and you learned, you do have a measure of skill. And so you're coming into that as seasoned veterans. You may be combat weary, but you also have combat experience. Whereas the North Koreans haven't fought war essentially since 1953. So they have no experience, no idea what to expect. I can imagine there's some North Korean soldiers didn't even know that drones existed.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
And now you have first person view drones slamming into them. It must be an incredible shock. Like someone who's been on a lifeboat for years and they come home and all of a sudden there's new technology and such. It must be incredible to be a North Korean soldier to be thrown into this meat grinder.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Now, this is starting to look a lot like Vietnam, where Every president rolled in and was like, I'm going to fix Vietnam. And they went, oh, crap, we can't fix Vietnam. And now Russia's in this weird state where they can't really raise more troops. They're probably going to have to pay the North Koreans a heck of a lot more money to get more troops from them.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
And also, their economy is in this weird wartime economy where Russia literally can't win. And by can't win, I don't mean they physically don't have the ability to win. They might have the ability to win, as in military victory, but if they do that, their economy collapses. They have this wartime economy that is overheating right now.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Everybody is either in the army or they're working at a munitions plant or building vehicles. So, the second this war ends, now you have all these people who are jobless and know how to use a gun. What are they going to do? What happens when that kind of thing happens? Well, you get the Ceausescu Special, right? So they're in this weird situation where they can't stop the war.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
They can't win the war. They can't agree to a peace agreement because their economy will suddenly grind to a halt. So this is the most logical choice is to actually keep the war going, as crazy as that sounds.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
It's extremely important, mainly because Russia has a huge machine tools problem. It's something that not a lot of people talk about. Russia doesn't really manufacture advanced machine tools, and they get a lot of their machine tools from the West. Well, that's been cut off since 2022. So now they have this choice. We have machine tools. Do we use these machine tools to manufacture weapons?
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Do we use them to manufacture parts for oil rigs, which we need to sell oil in order to get money to pay our troops? Or do we use these machine tools to manufacture the bogies, the wheels that go under trains? So they have this horrible choice. And so if they can import weapons from Iran, import weapons from North Korea, I'm not sure any weapons are imported from China. I believe only tech.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
But if they can import that stuff, that takes some of the pressure off the machine tools that are needed to make other things.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
I actually haven't heard anything about a drone manufacturing facility in China. I know a special economic zone was set up where Russia is building Iranian Shahed 135 drones inside Russia using, I believe, African labor. They've imported these people from Africa to go and work.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
I haven't heard anything about China, though, although that's a tough one, because from what I understand, China doesn't mind buying Russian oil or selling the microchips in the form of microwave ovens that they can then disassemble. But I don't believe China has actually gone the direct route of selling weapons. That might be for a few reasons.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
One is that they might not want to anger the United States. who might throw tariffs on goods for them exporting actual physical weapons. And the other is that, you know, China's set a goal to invade Taiwan by 2027. So they need all the weapons they can get for that kind of thing. And there's only two times a year you can do it. You can do it in October, you can do it in April.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
That's when the Strait of Taiwan sea state is low. So that date is coming up, TikTok. So I think we're looking at October 2027 as a date when China might try to make a move on Taiwan militarily, and they need all the stuff they can get in order to do that.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
You know, Russia used Syria as a staging base where they could get an airport there and they have a port, like a port for ships. And they needed that base because Russian ships aren't very good. And in order to go from place to place, they have to refuel. So that one particular base allowed them to refuel and have an actual base in the Mediterranean where they could conduct operations.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Now, the other reason that Russia was in Syria was that it was an excellent way to farm XP. If you wanted to train your pilots in how to do precision bombing, or in some cases not so precision bombing, you could do that in Syria. And you could gain that experience. There are air controllers who get experience.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
There are special forces who get experience fighting ISIS or fighting elements of the resistance. And it's one of those things where everybody wins except for the resistance. The Russians get a little war experience. that they can blood their soldiers on and get some training on their soldiers.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
But when you think about it, Russia has all this equipment in Syria, and that could probably be used in Ukraine. So I think kind of toward the end, Russia was looking at Syria as a headache. It'd be nice to get rid of this thing. I mean, yeah, we need the base, but it'd be nice if we can give this thing back so we can move all this equipment over to Russia.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
I think Russia saw where things were falling in Syria. And plus, kind of like Vietnam, when we had the South Vietnamese, you had a dictator. There was massive, massive... corruption in Bashar al-Assad's army to the point where soldiers would pay their commanders not to show up. Like, here's a couple of Syrian pounds. I'm going to go work my civilian job. You just say I was at roll call every day.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
And it's very difficult to run an army like that when you have those soldiers who don't actually exist in the ranks.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
I do. You know, it's kind of like Domino's here. I actually, I think it goes back to the New York Times. And I told Israelis about this, they say, oh, Ryan, you're crazy. But I actually, I believe that this could be a good theory. Essentially, on October 17th, 2023, the New York Times claimed that Israel bombed the Ali Arabia hospital.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
And actually, it was an Islamic State missile that landed short. But again, it's the New York Times. They don't tend to fact check stuff. And so they said, oh, Israel bombed this place. That article was up for six hours. And that was when the world left the side of Israel. Israel lost the information war that day when the New York Times, when they kind of showed their anti-Semitic base.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
And after that, Israel said, you know what? We're not going to win the information war. We're not going to run around randomly killing people, but we're going to go hard on Hezbollah because it's not like the world cares. We lost the New York Times. We lost the public. We're just going to go hard. And so they went in hard on Hamas.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Once they treated Hamas to a certain level, they said, we're going to go in hard on Hezbollah. Once they went out hard on Hezbollah, Hezbollah actually had operators, genuine, honest-to-God special forces inside of Syria. They were farming XP there, fighting against ISIS, Daesh, and fighting against the rebels. So what does Hezbollah do?
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
They pull those guys back into Lebanon because they have to fight the Israelis. Now Assad has one less brigade of troops that can be reliable. And I strongly believe that HTS, which is the organization that essentially took over Syria in 10 days, I believe they said, you know what, this is our opportunity. There's a reason why they invaded the day.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
They attacked Aleppo the day that a ceasefire was signed between Hezbollah and Israel. They knew that Hezbollah wasn't coming back. All right, there's one less brigade we got to worry about. We have 50 days to take all of Syria before President Trump gets in office and there's a new sheriff in town. That's exactly what they did.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
So I think it all goes back to the New York Times and a fake news story. Have you heard from the New York Times? Are they able to corroborate your theory? I am not. And what's interesting is that about last year, I actually did a story on the New York Times. Like, why do they always consistently get military stories wrong?
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
And after my research, what I found was that they only have eight people on staff who have served in the military.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
That's correct. And that was as of last year, 2023, around October, by 23. That's when I did my video on them. I have a feeling they haven't increased their personality. And some of those personnel were reporters that were like audio engineers, janitors, you know, that kind of thing. And you know, the way to get it right is to hire good people.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
You know, if you're going to have a person report on medicine, Might want to be a doctor, maybe a PA, or maybe a degree in hospital, clinical, whatever. So, if you're going to write articles about the military, it would help if some of your people had some military experience, and they don't.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
That's actually a good question. I honestly believe that originally, so let's see what they aren't. They're not drones coming from offshore from an Iranian mothership. If the Coast Guard had heard about that, you know, look, the Coast Guard goes after Narcos submarines. If they can manage to capture an Iranian mothership launching drones, they'd never have to buy a beer again, right?
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
So it's not an Iranian mothership launching drones. Typically, if you were trying to be sneaky and surveil military bases, you wouldn't have your lights on, right? You wouldn't have your navigation lights on. But we can probably say it's not that. What I believe is that most likely these drones were part of a red team kind of exercise.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Only people who needed to know about the exercise knew about the exercises. That's how you run a red team, right? And then after the exercise, everything became a drone. Helicopters became drones, low-flying aircraft became drones, everything became a drone. And some of this is compounded by the fact that people really don't know what the laws are for drones.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
It is perfectly legal to fly at night as long as you have your lights on. And the FAA considers drones to fall under the same rule as manned aircraft. So you can't actually shoot them down, right? So there's a lot of misunderstanding in the public about the laws and what was going on.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
You're absolutely right. Some of our laws might need to be changed because, like I said, the FAA treats drones like they're manned aircraft. So you can't just go around shooting them down. And you also can't jam them because the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, does not allow civilians to use jammers. This would mean civilian police as well.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
So the police can't use jammers because they interfere with signals. The FCC bans can't have jammers. The military can use jammers, but I guarantee you the second you turn that jammer on, everyone's going to complain about how their GPS isn't working or the military base or how their cable's out or whatever signal isn't working correctly. Seriously, we need a way to deal with this.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
And right now our tools are very limited because our laws are kind of very 2006-ish. when it comes to these kinds of drones. And I can understand why people would be frightened about these incursions, but legally, there's not a lot we can do because we can't shoot them down and we can't jam them.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
All we can do is put up a sign saying, no drone zone, try to find the guy who's actually controlling those drones. And with the way the internet works or satellite communication or even autonomous drones, that person could be anywhere or the drone could be totally autonomous. and fly from place to place without any outside signal.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
No, I think you're absolutely correct. It's just the legal tools in their toolkit may be limited. Also, look, if you... Commanders tend to be fairly risk-averse people. So they're doing a risk assessment and they're going, all right, if I shoot this drone down, but first of all, they have to have equipment to either degrade or destroy the drone in the first place.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
These anti-drone guns, essentially you point them at the drone and then you pull the trigger and it sends a signal toward that drone and it sends the shutdown code of every possible drone in the inventory. That's why you have to refresh, update the software on those drone guns every once in a while because new shutdown codes come, right?
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
So, in order to do that, you have to have the shutdown, you have to have those weapons, those anti-drone guns accessible. That's one thing. Now, if that drone is autonomous, you can't shut it down by pointing an anti-drone gun at it, right? Because it's not receiving any signals. It's just using GPS or it's using terrain matching in order to navigate.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
So you do something like that, all right, maybe you could degrade GPS at the airport, but who's going to complain about that? Everybody around the airport and the aircraft that are using GPS to land. That's another issue you have, that you could also shoot them down. And now the question is, all right, let's say you put an MSHORAD system out of the airfield to shoot down drones.
The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 21st, 2024: Ceasefire Looms in Israel & Ukraine’s Key Moments in 2024
Are you going to be responsible when that rocket overshoots that drone and lands in a neighborhood by Wright-Patterson? Because usually it's not a good idea to fire a live ordinance around homes, right?