Gordon Carrera

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.

But I think even in some of those cases, a bit like people, those people may not be willing to express, even within those circles, or even if they were your source and your agent.

what they really think and what they might do inside a crisis.

I think that could be quite hard to predict.

You know, will those people, when it comes to giving the order to shoot, will they want to do it?

How will they react?

What will happen?

Those are very hard things to collect on as an intelligence agency and to predict.