Gordon Carrera

Partly because it's quite hard to get accurate.

Here, anecdotally, it's a lot of people in Iran going, why did we spend so much money on a nuclear program which get destroyed?

Why did we spend so much money backing Hezbollah and some of these other causes when we can't feed ourselves at home?

And those things didn't protect us and were wiped out pretty quickly.

So you can see why actually those things are actually kind of feeding into this delegitimization.

of the Iranian regime at the moment.

Where does that leave us in terms of predicting what will come next?

I think the truth is it's still pretty hard to predict, isn't it?

Or just go out on the streets.

Or just go out on the streets and protest, yeah.

I'm going to say you explained that very well in terms of unpacking it, because I think it does make sense, because particularly in an authoritarian country, your willingness to express your private view or to reveal that it's changed is going to be very limited.

It's only when you get a bandwagon of a lot of other people, you suddenly go, oh, hang on a sec, a lot of other people feel like this.

we're going to express this publicly and turn out on the streets to do something about it.

But I do take your point.

And I think, you know, to bring it back to our kind of question, which is if you're an intelligence analyst trying to understand this, the point is it is very hard to collect on people's private views, not their public views, but their private.

What's going on inside their head in any country, but let alone in a country

relatively closed country or a country with a heavy security service.

So I guess the point is, it is very hard to understand those shifts and changes if you're a spy service.

Yeah, I totally agree.

What you want is a source inside the Revolutionary Guards, inside the kind of heart of the elite.