David McCloskey

The socioeconomic contract is in tatters.

The opposition, though, is still pretty weak and divided.

Elites have so far rallied around the flag and the military and security services have remained loyal.

Okay, here's the problem.

The fundamental problem is that not all of the pillars bear the same load, right?

They're not all equally weighted in terms of their sort of

support for the regime or their importance.

And the most important ones from the standpoint of an intelligence service are the ones where you're most likely to have very significant intelligence gaps.

And this is a really important point, where we reach the limits of human cognition and prediction, in my opinion.

There's some great academic work that has been done on this point, and we'll talk about this more in our next episode.

A fundamental problem is that

you have public and private views.

Every human does, whether you're a protester, whether you are an elite who is working in the office of the Supreme Leader, whether you work for the IRGC, right?

You have a public and a private view.

Those could be the same thing, but oftentimes, and especially in authoritarian regimes, they're not.

And I love this, Gordon, because in the notes here, I just would comment to everyone.

I had written out sort of a description of this, and Gordon wrote right next to it.

He said, this is quite abstract and theoretical, so definitely needs a bit of unpacking, which is a great Gordon Carrera edit to my very, very thoughtful paragraph I had written here about how we would describe this.

Come on, then.

All right, let me try.