What could they be doing that they aren’t doing?
I mean, look, I think it’s a dumb idea to activate and drop a lot of Starlink terminals on Iran. Well, this will be fun. I would support a contract, you know, a US government contract to do this, because it would cost less than some of these missiles. And at this point we have the airspace. You know, they don’t have air defense. I think every cell phone, every smartphone manufactured after 2020 or 2021 has the ability to connect to satellite internet.
This requires flipping a switch. To do this, we need an Act of Congress or an executive order, and perhaps cellular providers need some guarantee that if you provide cellular access to Iran, we will not sanction you. We will not implement it.
Do you have any educated guesses or informed hypotheses as to why these very simple switches are not being flipped?
I don’t think it’s on people’s radar screens…
How many people should you add to the country? Ninety-three crore people back on the internet?
One, I think it’s not necessarily on their radar screen. Two, not a priority because I think if the right people knew about it, they would be doing it today.
Well, hopefully someone is listening. I mean, it seems extremely obvious.
It’s quite obvious, isn’t it? And it’s one of those things where we send people to the moon, right? We have explored many of the more complex challenges.
It is a country of 93 million people. Smartphone penetration is incredibly high. People use these things, right? This is an obvious piece of the puzzle that hasn’t been established yet.
What are we all missing in all the talk about the crisis and gas prices? What are we forgetting about those 93 million people?
None of us are immune from rising costs and how it affects our lives.
Absolutely.
But it’s a very minor – I don’t want to say “inconvenience” because I know it’s much more than that – but it’s minor compared to the matters of life, death and liberty that these people have to face on a daily basis. I have many examples of Iranians stepping up and saying, “Hey, OK, look, we want to connect with the outside world. We want to be able to study at your universities. We want to be able to learn from your institutions. We want you to come and invest in our country.”
In fact, the regime also curbs foreign investment, and, you know, I would say, “Hey, foreign company, don’t send your employees over there unless they give some guarantees that they won’t hold people hostage,” because they do that all the time.
So it’s a very complicated situation because there is no good guy in this story. Good people are the people of Iran. The United States, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Israel, none of these three entities have the interests of the Iranian people on their agenda. And I refuse to show you otherwise.
