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PBD Podcast Episode 222. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Reza Aslan and Adam Sosnick and Tom Ellsworth.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
3:35 - Why Reza Islan escaped from Iran
18:37 - Did Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson overthrow the prime minister of Iran
24:19 - Reza Aslan Reveals why he Stopped Believing In Christianity
49:54 - What was radical with Jesus’s messaging?
54:05 - Did Mary give birth to Jesus?
58:18 - Reza Aslan explains why he’s not an Atheist
1:16:25 - If you were to start a new country, what religion would you practice?
1:31:35 - Reza Aslan on raising his kids
1:41:45 - Patrick Bet-David and Reza Aslan debate Iran
Why would you bet on Goliath when we got bet David?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we can't no value to hate it.
I didn't run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
Outside of the fact there's terrible movies out, Avatar is not a date movie.
The first date movie.
Anyways, we're struggling here with Adam Adams trying to go on a date to see what movie to go to.
Kids made some comedy, not comedy, cartoon recommendations, but I think you want to stick to a movie.
Anyways, we have a special guest today.
We have Reza Aslan in the house today.
If you don't know him, you may have heard his number one New York Times best-selling book, Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.
He's written a few other books.
I think he's written four books on the topic of religion.
There's no God but God.
I can go on and on about the things that he's done.
Multiple New York Times bestseller.
Recent book that just came out, which we'll talk about later on today as well, An American Martyr in Persia.
Found out he's a Presbyterian, which is fantastic.
He is.
Not you.
He is.
You're definitely not a Presbyterian, which we'll get into.
But he's a Raiders fan.
His aunt is, I believe, Leila Furuhar, which in the Iranian community, if you don't know, that's a very, very big deal.
Yes, it's like saying your aunt is a chair.
Yeah, it's like at that level.
No, no, like literally, that's what that is.
Do you believe?
Yeah, and had a show on CNN.
He's done a lot of stuff.
He loves debates.
Maybe he does.
I don't know if he does love debates.
He seems to like debates.
He's been on the Bill Marshall multiple times.
He's been on all over the world.
I mean, if you turn on, if you go on CNN, if you go on Google, you search his name on YouTube.
You'll see a ton of different interviews.
Reza, thank you so much for coming out and being a guest today.
Some good stuff, some bad stuff.
Some good stuff, some bad stuff, yes.
No, it's a pleasure to be here.
But that's the part about, to me, at least for me, my interest is sitting with people that have some good stuff, some bad stuff, some controversial stuff.
That's what makes for interesting.
If you're playing it too safe, it's boring.
I don't think that's the route to go.
Well, look, my primary fields are religion and politics.
That's not exactly polite conversation.
Great kitchen table topics.
That never causes.
You guys want to talk about during Thanksgiving?
Listen.
You want to go religion or politics here?
We can go either way.
I'm simultaneously the most interesting dinner guest and the worst dinner guest.
Known for very short, loud dinners.
Yes, that's right.
Well, I mean, you know, one thing I respect about you is how much you admire the Trump family.
Like your level of when I see your tweets, man, it was just like constant admiration, love.
It was like nonstop.
A little too much honesty.
I'm all about making America great again.
That's my jam.
My jam.
Okay, so that should kind of give you an idea if you don't know who he is.
We're being hardcore sarcastic for the people that take things literal.
Anyways, Reza, if you don't mind, take a quick moment.
Get the audience who doesn't know your background.
I was born in Iran in 1972, which makes me 50, which is insane.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
My family was, you know, like an upper middle class family, landowning family, big, large tribal family.
My father was a kind of a troublemaker, communist meetings, today.
Exactly.
Yeah, yep, yep.
But like college today, the way that all college kids are sort of communist.
Just so you know, my family too.
Yeah.
So my mother said.
So Today, if you want to share with the audience what Today is.
So Today was the primary communist party in Iran in the 1970s.
And it actually had a massive role in the success of the 1979 revolution that got rid of the Shah and that eventually, about a little more, a little less than a year later, replaced the Shah with Khomeini, whose first act was to get rid of all the communists.
Which is kind of crazy.
They thought they were going to make it better for two days, but it got worse for them.
They thought they could control the religious fanatics.
And if there's not a lesson there, then you're not paying attention, right?
I think the Communist Party, they were the intellectuals of the movement.
They gave the movement teeth and they helped, I think, less politically minded people understand exactly what was at stake in this revolution.
But in the end, it's the religious leaders who have the ability to bring people out onto the streets, right?
Ideas don't go anywhere if there aren't thousands of people willing to risk their bodies in order to implement those ideas.
And so it was this weird marriage of convenience to begin with, right?
These like secularist, mainly atheists, intellectuals and communists, and the religious, pious masses, they married together to get rid of the Shah.
But then as soon as the Shah was gone, the cracks in that relationship very quickly formed.
And I remember very clearly my father one morning, very, at least from my seven-year-old perspective, very suddenly saying, it's time to go.
We got to go right now.
What year?
This is 79.
Oh, you left in 79.
So left after the Shah left, left after Khomeini arrived.
Where did you live?
Where did you live?
Where in Iran did you live?
In Tehran.
What part of Tehran?
Oh, we were in the north.
Okay.
Yeah, I got it.
Yeah.
Nicaragua.
Yeah, we were the nicer area.
We had things.
Gandhi.
What city would you say?
If you're in the Gandhi area, like what area?
Do you remember the area or no?
I don't remember the exact.
There was an area like if you lived in the north, you're like to say what would be the, you know, it's like saying you lived in Beverly Hills type of area.
Maybe not Beverly Hills, but it's like to say you live in a good area.
Yeah.
Well, I will say that like those people, the very rich people, they got the message way before anybody else.
73, 74.
Yeah.
They all got out with their Swiss bank accounts intact.
Have you been back to Iran since you left in 79?
Just once.
I went back in 2005 before I was anyone and when I could just kind of, you know, sneak under the radar.
This was right after Ahmed Jinijad became president.
Good time.
Yeah, it was a crazy time.
And I went back for about eight, nine weeks on a research trip, but also to see my family, to see my home and just to kind of see what the place was like.
That's probably the last time I'll get to see Iran.
What would happen if you went back now?
And what do you think would happen if someone like Pat would go back now?
Because that's a lifelong dream of his.
I just don't know the reality of it.
I think that if I went back now, I would probably be never heard from again.
I'd probably disappear at the airport.
I think if Pat went back now, he would be welcomed with open arms.
And then someone would knock on his door a few days later and say, you sent a text and that text makes you a spy.
Come with us.
Does there need to be any justification for them taking you away?
Or is it just that the theocrats are just going to come get you and that's just how it works?
See, here's the awful truth about Iran is that there are a lot of ways that we could label it, that it's a theocratic regime or that it's a fascist regime or that it's like a military regime.
But the truth of the matter is that like most autocratic states, it's impossible to really know who's in charge of what, right?
The person in charge of your life is the guy on the other side of the desk.
You know, if he's a bureaucrat.
Yeah.
If he's had a nice lunch and, you know, had a nice conversation with his wife, then maybe you're okay.
If he had a fight with his wife, then you're screwed.
And it's not like you can point to the law to say, but that's not how it works, right?
In countries like Iran, the law is whatever the person in front of you says the law is.
And that makes these kinds of situations very difficult.
So when an American citizen of Iranian heritage, which happens quite often, gets arrested and accused of these sort of very vaguely worded crimes, it's very hard for the American government to kind of do anything legally to support them because the law is such an absolute mess over there.
Is there a law in Iran, an established constitutional law that provides for a fair judicial process for anyone committed of a, who is allegedly committed a crime?
Yeah, absolutely.
Does anyone pay any attention to that?
No.
I mean, you could appeal to it, but people just sort of laugh at you.
That's the problem with not just Iran, but all of these sort of autocratic states.
Please go back to the upringing.
So I'm tracking all of it.
That two day, it's kind of a rebel like the younger ones.
Like, you know, two days in a movie theater, you would stand up to kind of give recognition to the Shah, and two days wouldn't stand up.
Like they would do, they were rebels.
They were like stuff like that.
Yeah.
And then go ahead, continue.
We're listening.
So seven years old, you guys, your dad says we got to get out of here.
79, right before Khomeini, right after Shah, you guys leave, you come to the States.
Yeah.
And I think for my dad, too, people forget that when Khomeini, Khomeini, Jesus, when Khomeini returned.
Just so you know, to Americans, it's the same.
It's the same guy.
But to us, it's the same.
Yes.
No.
The OG.
The OG.
OG.
Khomeini.
It's very new.
You got that right?
It's Khomeini.
By the way, you corrected him.
When he corrected himself, Americans are like, what is he doing?
Please.
Emphasizing that.
But there's a big difference.
Yes, Khomeini is the OG.
Say it.
For us Gringo Americans, pronounce the different name.
Khomeini.
I got you.
Stop it.
I got you.
Stop it.
Khomeini was the founder of the Islamic Republic and the guy who invented the very idea of the supreme leader.
Khomeini is the current supreme leader.
So say the two names back then.
Khomeini Khomeini.
Khomeini Khomeini.
Two totally separate words.
It is.
Exactly.
It doesn't sound anything alike.
Anyway, the point is that, you know, when he came back, I think people don't remember this.
When he returned from exile in Iran, there's millions of people came out, you know, to sort of welcome him as the savior of the new Iran.
He very publicly announced that he wanted nothing to do with politics, that he had no interest in government, that, you know, he was happy that the Shah was gone, but he just wanted to be left alone.
He wanted to go back to his home and to his family and to his mosque and to his studies.
And my dad, who never trusted anything anyone wearing a turban had to say on any subject, just thought, bullshit.
Like, that's, I don't believe that for a minute.
And so just in case, let's grab some things and go.
And if it does turn out okay, we'll come back.
You know, let's just leave for a little bit.
So that's what it was.
It was really an emergency thing.
You know, wake up in the morning, grab some things, put it in a suitcase.
We're going to just leave for a little while.
And that was obviously.
Where did you guys go to?
Did you go straight here or did you go like to Spain and then you came here?
Was it like an inner?
There was a brief stop in London for a lot of Iranians checking out.
London was like stop number one.
But then for us, our destination in the United States was Oklahoma, was in Oklahoma.
And to this day, I can't tell you exactly why.
My theory is that when my dad was in college, he did like a semester abroad at a university in Oklahoma.
I think in Edmonton, I believe.
I don't remember eastern Oklahoma.
I'm sorry, Oklahomans, that I'm unaware of your geography.
Just threw them under the bus.
And I think he just thought, well, that's America.
Like that's Oklahoma is America.
Breadbasket.
So if we go to America, then we're going to land in Oklahoma.
By the way, he's right in a lot of ways.
But it only took us about a year to realize, oh, there's so much more about America.
And so, like so many Iranians, we headed west and ended up in California, but in northern California, not in Southern California, different Iranian diaspora.
Where?
In the Bay Area.
Okay.
There's a big community there.
Well, the Bay Area, it's like two different communities.
So the first Iranians who fled, the wealthy ones who like took their money with them, all settled in Los Angeles.
And so there's a reason we call LA Terrangelis, you know.
But then the sort of intellectuals, the second wave, the post-revolution people who got out, they all settled in the Bay Area.
So it's a vastly different community in California, the Northern California Iranians and the Southern California Iranians.
But for today to leave and escape, that doesn't make sense, though, because I'm assuming your dad was not a fan of the Shah, right?
No, he was not a fan of the show.
So how—that is a very strange—kudos to your dad, by the way, for making that decision.
But that's— Foreknowledge?
Yeah, because that doesn't make sense, though.
That doesn't make because the level of hate Today's had for the Shah was so massive that they all wanted anything but the Shah because obviously, you know, the whole, look how rich he is.
Look at the 2,500-year celebration he put together.
Anything is better than the Shah.
I'm surprised that he left.
I think for my dad, the two-day politics was married to a real anti-religious, hardcore atheist view.
Yeah.
Like I always joke that my dad was the kind of atheist who always had a pocket full of Prophet Muhammad jokes that he would pull out at inappropriate times.
You know what I mean?
Like he was a very kind of virulently anti-religious person.
How old were you the first time you read Communist Manifesto?
Really?
I'm actually curious.
I mean, honestly, it's probably not until I was like 13, 14.
Okay, so you read it here.
You didn't read it in Iran.
No, that was like the Bible for Two-Day Party.
You know, you had to read that to get an understanding about bourgeoisie and all the other guys.
Anyways, okay, so your religious ideology, like how religious beliefs, you've kind of gone through a little bit of, if you don't mind sharing that with the audience.
Well, so, you know, we grew up culturally Muslim the way that so many people are culturally religious around the world.
It was just kind of part of who we were.
It was part of our identity.
And, you know, we would go through the rituals and the holidays and all that stuff.
But when we came to the U.S., I think my father thought, aha, well, now we don't even have to pretend anymore.
Like we don't have to pay lip service to any of that.
You know, we'll put the Quran away and roll up the prayer rugs.
And that's the end of that.
My mother, you know, was raised a little bit differently.
She was raised primarily by her grandmother.
Her parents were famous actors, you know, in Iran, which in Iran is kind of another way of saying prostitute.
And so she basically raised by.
Just so you know, he's right.
She was basically raised by her very strict grandmother.
And so, you know, my mother would pray every once in a while and we would do some of the holidays.
But the more we stayed in Iran, the more I grew up, I'm sorry, in the U.S., the more I grew up in the U.S., the more and more we systematically stripped our lives and our family of any kind of religiosity.
But you have to understand, you know, I was seven when my country was handed over to religious fanatics.
And I remember it.
I was there on the streets.
I watched it happen.
And it, I think, instilled in me at a very young age this deep fascination with religion and the power that religion has to transform a society for good and for bad.
And the way that religion can be used as a way to make change, but to also identify yourself, to create groups and in-groups, out-groups.
I got really fascinated by legends and mythologies.
I was just a weird boy.
Like I was a weird boy.
I was interested in religion, but in a family in which there was no place to really express that in any meaningful way.
Was your dad, now it may make sense to me.
Was he a Mossadegh guy?
I'm assuming he was a Mossadegh guy.
Okay, so that makes sense.
Oh, of course.
So Mossadegh is like the original Bernie Sanders that the Shah kicked out.
I've never heard of that.
I would say he's the Bernie Sanders.
Mossadegh was Bernie Sanders, and then eventually what they did with him is with the help of the stories are the help of CIA, the same way they got rid of the Shah with the help of CIA and Kissinger and Carter, the same playbook they used with Mossadegh.
Well, a little more aggressive.
They actually put him in a village and just the Mossadegh Revolution was in 1953, where once again, Iranians rose up, kicked the Shah out of the country.
This is the third time we've done this.
But not the young Shah, the father, the Zahan you're talking about.
No, no, no.
This is Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
53.
That's right, that's right.
This is Muhammad.
Yeah, the same Shah that left in 79.
We threw him out and replaced him with this nationalist government.
At the head was the prime minister, Mohamed Mossadegh, had very radical sort of democratic nationalistic ideas, one of which was to nationalize Iran's oil.
Like, why are we giving away our oil to the British in exchange for rent?
Like, literally, that's what it was in exchange for.
Like, they rent the land and then extract the oil and keep it.
And so he nationalized the oil.
The British were obviously devastated by that move, but this was post-World War II and the British were just this powerless island now.
You know, the empire was gone.
So they asked their good friends, the Americans, for help.
And this was when the CIA had first been created.
It came from the OSS from World War II, but now the war is gone.
So now we have this intelligence apparatus.
What do we do with this intelligence?
Nobody had any idea what to do with the CIA until a very clever, clever agent by the name of Kermit Roosevelt.
The, I believe, grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, I think, or grandnephew of Teddy Roosevelt, came up with this great idea.
And it was, hey, why don't we put the Shah back on the throne?
I can do that.
Give me four guys and a suitcase with $100,000.
And that, as absurd and as like Ocean's 11 as that sounds.
Economic hitman.
It's just.
That was it.
There were like four guys.
There's a boxer, a communications nerd.
I mean, why isn't this a movie?
Kermit Roosevelt, who's like this 97-pound Coke bottle glasses-wearing nerd.
He looks like Joe Montana, by the way.
And a couple of other people.
With a mustache.
No?
Does he not look like Joe Montana?
He looks like an elderly Joe Montana.
A little bit skinny.
Right there.
Teddy Roosevelt.
And it took them a couple of months.
And they went to Iran.
And in a couple of months, they created a fake counter protest, removed Mossadegh from power, put the Shah back on the throne.
And the British said, thank you very much.
We'll take the oil back now.
And the Americans said, no, yeah, we did all the work.
I think we're just going to stay.
And that was the birth of the problematic relationship between the U.S. and Iran that then led in 79 to the anti-American revolution.
Do you know the 25-year contract between that?
Do you know the story about the 25-year contract?
Okay.
Can you pull up the 1954 oil-Iran contract?
Just type that in.
It'll come up.
This is so interesting with everything you're saying where all the timing is not making sense.
There you go.
The consortium agreement of 1954.
Zoom in a little bit for us to read this.
They signed a 25-year contract.
So the consortium agreement of 1951 provided Western companies with 50% ownership of Iranian oil production after its ratification in 1954-79.
Despite the numerous negotiations and offers, the Shah of Iran refused to extend the agreement, which originally and clearly postulated that the consortium, he had the right to prolong at least 15 years, three times five years.
Anyways, this thing is expiring in 1979.
So check this out.
53, Mosadegh, 54, they signed a contract.
25 years, the ownership, I think, is through with France.
I want to say, obviously, UK, US, and there's one other country in there.
I don't know if it's Germany or...
Oriel Dutch Shell.
Oriel Dutch Shell, yeah.
Yeah.
So they team it.
And then there's a meeting, which, by the way, this would be a very interesting documentary to watch.
I watched this.
I couldn't believe it.
There was a meeting in the South or Central America by four leaders in 1978 or 77, deciding on how to make the Shah fall.
And because they knew the Shah specifically kept saying, I'm increasing prices.
I'm increasing prices.
Once this expires, obviously they don't want him to have that kind of power.
Boom.
With the help of that, the next economic hitman comes in.
We got to replace the Shah.
Iran's been used by people of the West for many, many years.
Anyways, okay, so interesting background story.
So from that, you go, you become a Christian, I think, for four years because you, I want to say you were a Christian for four years at 14 years old.
Yeah, 15 years old.
So, I mean, you know, I was fascinated by religion and spirituality.
No real place to explore that at home.
A friend of mine invited me to a Christian youth group in high school.
And I was like, all right.
And, you know, it's like singing and games and like wholesome fun and entertainment and camping trips.
It was awesome.
And also the gospel story, which is a pretty good story.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the story of Jesus.
We have a Jew, two Christians, and an atheist trying to get back to being a Presbyterian again.
I mean, look, again, wherever your spiritual views are, the story of the God of heaven and earth coming down in the form of a baby and then dying for everyone's sins.
And then all you have to do is believe that story and you'll never die is a great story, right?
And when you're 15 and you hear that, you're like, that's a good story.
So I fully 100% converted to this very conservative brand of evangelical Christianity and then spread that story to pretty much everyone I knew until I went to college and decided I'm going to study this stuff because it's so great.
It's so fascinating.
Who was the teacher that messed you up in college?
Who was it?
Was it a girlfriend or a teacher?
He was a teacher.
I went to a Jesuit university and it was the Catholics that screwed me up.
The Jesuits who were like, oh, yeah, you believe that stuff?
Jesuits, did it?
Yeah.
The Jesuits who are sort of the intellectual intellectual priesthood in the Catholic Church.
Talk about Santa Clara.
Yeah, Santa Clara.
Yeah, well, modified Jesuits, but like liberation theology Jesuits, you know, that like that, that hardcore Jesuits.
They're the ones that turned you off from Christianity after being such a hardcore believer?
It's not that they turned me off of Christianity.
It's that they taught me the truth of the gospel message.
They told me about Jesus the man instead of Jesus the Christ, right?
They told me about the historical person who walked the earth 2,000 years ago and said these things and what the context of what he said meant at the time and how we should read that today as opposed to the sort of spiritualization,
you know, the metaphysical aspect of the things that he said, the way that his incredibly radical, revolutionary words and thoughts were defanged by the first church and turned into wishy-washy spiritualism or what we now call Christianity.
They gave me an insight into the original idea of what he was talking about.
How different are those two ideas, Jesus the man and Jesus who became the Messiah?
I mean, Jesus the Messiah has no concerns for the cares of this world whatsoever.
His only concern is the world to come.
What does it matter what you eat in this world?
And what does it matter how you dress?
The only world that matters is the world to come.
And focus all your attention on that world and not the vagaries of this world.
That's Jesus Christ.
Jesus of Nazareth was a radical revolutionary whose sole focus was on the suffering of the people on this world right now and the power structures that were creating that suffering.
Jesus Christ is everyone's the same.
We're all equal.
There's nothing between rich and poor.
Everyone's the same.
Jesus the man said, no, the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
The hungry will be fed, and those who are fed will go hungry, right?
Those who have will have it taken away from them, and those who don't have will get it.
That's not we're all the same.
That's the reversal of the social order, right?
That's the top and the bottom switching places.
Is that more of a socialist component?
Is that like a Robin Hood?
Who would he be in the Jesus, the man, in a metaphoric context?
I mean, I think he's got more in common with Che Guevara than Robin Hood.
I mean, again, Jesus, at no point in any of the Gospels, does Jesus talk about everyone is equal.
Everyone should have the same.
That's not a Jesus line, right?
That the world that I see is one in which everyone has the same.
That's socialism.
The world that Jesus talked about was quite a violent world.
It was a revolutionary world, and it was a world in which the first became last, and the last became first.
Like, that's not a popular viewpoint amongst the people in the category of first.
It's interesting, though, that so the Jesuits in Santa Clara made you look at Jesus as the Messiah and the individual.
So then you went through the journey there, and then how did that bring you back to Muslim?
Well, so the kind of evangelical Christianity that I had ascribed to is very rigid.
And at its core is this idea that the Bible is literal and it is inerrant.
And it takes 10 minutes of research to discover that both of those things are total bullshit.
Like the Bible is riddled with errors.
I mean, riddled with the most basic, most obvious contradictions and errors.
And that the idea that it should be read literally, you know, makes no sense at all.
And so once you start understanding the chasm between the man Jesus and how he became the Christ of Christianity, it's really hard to continue to follow the Christ of Christianity any longer.
And so would you give some examples of that, by the way?
Like the most palpable errors that you would just notice immediately?
Yeah, sure.
So Matthew, Mark, and Luke say that Jesus was crucified on a Thursday, and the Gospel of John says it was like a Sunday.
So in other words, it was before the Passover, and the Gospel of John was after the Passover.
You know, Matthew has Jesus, for some strange reason, going to Egypt, whereas Luke has the same birth story, says nothing about Jesus.
In Matthew, Jesus is born in what we would now recognize as probably 10 AD-ish, 8 or 10 AD.
And in Luke, Jesus is born in what we now recognize at about 4 BC.
So, you know, there's all these contradictions.
It's just very obvious, clear contradictions.
The reason I ask that because the obvious question is whether it's the Bible, whether it's the Torah, whether it's the Quran, should these books, these relics, be taken literally or metaphorically?
Not only should they be taken metaphorically, they were never, ever, ever intended to be read literally.
Do you think the authors, the author of Luke, who says that, you know, in the year, you know, I guess it's 6 AD, there is a census in Rome.
And the census requires everyone in the entire Roman Empire to stop what they are doing and travel to their father's homeland so that they could be properly counted for the taxation purposes.
And so Joseph, who lived in Nazareth, had to travel to Bethlehem in order to be counted because his parents' family was from Bethlehem.
Okay, there is no census of the entire Roman Empire in 6 AD.
There's a small census in Syria, but where Jesus lived did not encompass that census.
Census law under the Roman Empire is as clear as it gets.
You get counted where you live.
The purpose of a census is taxation.
So we're here to count your stuff.
How many people are you and where's your stuff?
The idea that every once in a while everyone in the largest, greatest, richest empire the world had ever known would have to stop what they were doing and travel for months at a time to wherever their forefathers were born in order, and also bring their stuff, I guess, in order to be counted there is patently absurd and unhistorical.
Now, here's the important thing to understand about what I just said.
Not only does it screw up the entire Christmas story that you tell your kids every day or every Christmas, but Luke, who wrote that, knew that that wasn't true.
He was living as a citizen of the Roman Empire.
His readers for generations read that and knew that that wasn't true.
That's not how the census works.
I've gone through many censuses and that's not how it works.
They didn't care because the idea, the notion that what was being read was meant to be read literally would never have even occurred to them.
The idea that scripture is a thing to be read historically and literally was born of the 19th century.
It's only been about a couple of hundred years since the very notion of biblical literalism has existed.
And it's existed as a result of the scientific revolution, which said that a thing can only be true if it could be demonstrably proven true, if it could be historically proven to be true.
That's what true means now.
That definition of true did not exist in the ancient mind, right?
True had nothing to do with facts.
True had a much deeper meaning.
The truth of the Nativity story is that Jesus was born in the city of Bethlehem because that's the city of David and Jesus is the new David and he is going to recreate the kingdom of David.
And so therefore he has to be born in Bethlehem.
When everyone knew he was born in Nazareth, his name was the Nazarean.
That's what his name was.
So, you know, it's only we in the modern world that have created this kind of fake and totally unnecessary filter through which we force all of our scriptures, the Quran, the Torah, the Gospels, all of our scriptures to succumb to our particular definition of what is true without realizing that that definition of true is barely 200 years old.
And are you saying that the same rules apply to the Torah and also the Quran?
All gospels.
So it's all metaphorical.
What we call gospels are what we refer to as sacred history.
And we use that term sacred history specifically to differentiate it from actual history.
And by the way, that is not to denigrate sacred history.
It's to understand it for what it actually is, right?
There's a message that is being given to us over thousands of years.
And that message is important.
But you have to filter out the modern conceptions of how we understand, you know, facts and truths in order to actually get to the heart of what that message is.
Last question on this.
Would most religious scholars tend to believe what you're saying?
Because I'm sure there's a large sect of religious scholars and people of faith, whether it's Muslim, Jewish, Christian, of every sect, that'll say, sorry, Reza, this is the literal word of God.
And thank you for your opinion.
But I'm sticking to exactly what the Bible says.
So there's people of faith, and then there's religious scholars.
How do those two come to terms with what you're saying?
Well, among religious scholars, what I just said is the most basic element, like fact number one, the thing you learn on day one, right?
Nothing else that you do can happen until you understand that basic fact.
That it's metaphorical.
Well, that it's sacred history.
Gotcha.
Right.
So you can use figurative language, metaphorical language.
You can extract history from sacred history.
There are ways that we can do that.
Like we can look at the gospels and say, these are the things that are most likely to be traced to the actual historical Jesus and these are the things not.
And there are centuries of methodologies that we can use to rely on to get a very accurate picture of the difference between the two.
People of faith, no, no, people of faith do not think in those terms, right?
For people of faith, the scripture is God-breathed.
It's divinely inspired.
And if it comes from God, then it must be perfect in all ways.
And so what does historical context have to do with it, right?
Jesus is literally God speaking to all humanity.
So who cares where he lived, who he was actually speaking to, what the political and economic situation of the world in which he lived and how it shaped him.
What does that matter?
He has no context.
God has no context, right?
Okay, so he just, for three decades, he lived in first century Palestine.
Irrelevant, irrelevant.
He's not talking to his fellow Jews.
He's talking to you and me.
So context has to be stripped from scripture for it to matter.
And scholars say the opposite.
So I have a direction I want to go, but I don't want to go off this topic until everybody here is comfortable moving away from this topic.
It's within this topic, but I want to go to a different place.
Do you have something to say, Tom?
Yeah, I think there's a couple things here, and I think you're taking a very – academia has done a very good job, I think, of – I don't know if it's a good job.
It's been very effective at driving down through the elements, the elements of history, and finding what they claim and believe maybe be your errors of interpretation or misunderstanding of historical context at the time.
You're talking about the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
You have a tax collector, Matthew.
You have an early world position in Luke.
You have a student, a Jewish student that almost became a rabbi in John.
And then you have just kind of the common Jewish man, Mark.
And so they all are slightly different.
And what surprised me is you approaching it and saying, is that there is a Jesus man and Jesus Christ.
And this was where you went from, I would have supposed a Baptist or Methodist youth group, at least you were describing that.
Evangelical, evangelical or what non-denominational community church, American community church movement from 1980s, right?
It's what you're describing.
So it's pre-megachurch and it's pre-secret sensitive and it's the pre-self-identified Christian adopting all of the world influences into their into their now diluted biblical worldview.
Okay.
So you commented that Jesus had no concerns of this world and things about equality.
I think it was very consistent, even in Roman historical writings, that his message was, you're equal in that you all have one, you owe this earth one death and you have a soul.
And at that, that was sort of the table stake for everybody.
Yet there was inequality in classes and cultures and how people were treated and discriminated against and things like that.
But I think Jesus was very clear that he started there.
It says, hey, you have one soul, you owe this earth one death.
And then to say there's no concerns of this world, you know, he was, I think, very, very clear.
He said, listen, you know, religion that God our Father finds faultless and true is this.
Take care of widows and orphans in their distress.
So there is not a socialist, but there is a charity there.
So I'm kind of curious as to where you go from a non-denominational upbringing through the lens of the three universities that have decidedly different Catholic approaches, which we're talking about, Boston College, Notre Dame, and Santa Clara.
They're very different.
You have the literalists and you have the Jesuits, correct?
And that was your college experience.
But I think somewhere between the two, it kind of feels to me that I'm just trying to figure out how you bridge from that to the college perspective.
And the college perspective was the Catholic Church, which was an inversion, the first century Catholic Church.
People thought Peter was the first pope, not correct historically, you're nodding yes, found to be.
And then that created a government church.
So the Catholic Church was nothing more than some Christian tenets applied to basically Rome, built in the middle of Rome.
How odd.
And then enabling the monarchies of the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries to do a bunch of things.
And so I just think you've got several islands here you kind of go to.
And I was just trying to find the thread that led you to say, okay, you know what?
I am no longer a Christian by, okay, flawed man needs a path to heaven.
That path is the perfect Christ that gave a sacrifice for me.
I was trying to figure out in your description what that stepping off point.
Well, first I should mention that I went to Santa Clara and then I went to Harvard and Santa Barbara, not Notre Dame or I'm well aware of the thread of the thread of teaching that goes from Jesuit, Boston College, Notre Dame, and Santa Clara.
And they're very different interpretations and very different delusions that happens in academia.
And you were a student at Santa Clara, so that's what you have been hosed off with.
No, absolutely.
Here's, I think, the sort of the most basic way of answering a very complex question.
The sort of foundational view about Jesus amongst the most mainstream Christianity is that he was fully man and fully God, right?
That's the great mystery of the incarnation, that he was 100% man and he was 100% God.
The problem with Christianity, especially the way that it was introduced to me, is that it ignored the man part.
Or when it did focus on the man part, it was simply to buttress the God part, right?
That's the only reason that you talked about Jesus being thirsty or Jesus being tortured.
What was the word you just used?
I never heard that before.
It buttressed his divine, like it was there just to support his divinity, right?
He was a man.
We can talk about him as a man, but only insofar as talking about him as a man makes the fact that he's God that much more extraordinary, right?
Like, look at the things that he did when in fact he was God, you guys.
What I wanted to do was say, okay, fully man, fully God.
Let's remove the God part from the equation for a minute and let's actually deal with the consequences of what it means to say he was fully man.
Because if he's fully man, he lived in a very specific time and place.
He was, like all human beings, a product of that time and place.
It shaped who he was, it shaped how he spoke.
When he spoke, he wasn't speaking into the ether, he was speaking to someone in front of him.
He had an audience in front of him.
So who was that audience?
And what was that audience like?
And what was that audience expecting?
When he used certain words to speak with them, had other people used those words?
What did those words actually mean?
When Jesus said the kingdom of God is on earth or the kingdom of God is in you or the kingdom of God is coming, his audience had heard the phrase kingdom of God a million times.
So as a scholar, you can't say with any confidence what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God unless you know what his audience meant by the phrase kingdom of God.
And what his audience meant, what his audience heard, what Jesus meant when he said those words was a new world order.
Because right now, the king is Caesar.
If I'm to re-establish the kingdom of God, which is the sole function of the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible, you have one job if you're a Messiah, and that's to recreate the kingdom of David, the kingdom of God.
Well, you can't recreate the kingdom of David when sitting on top of it is the kingdom of Rome.
So without question, every Jew, every poor, impoverished village Jew, because that's all he ever spoke to, who heard the phrase, kingdom of God, heard liberation from Rome, every single one of them.
So when we as scholars look at Jesus preaching about the kingdom of God, we understand that what he is preaching is liberation from Rome.
When we as religious people 2,000 years removed from all the history and context, and as people who stop even thinking about Jesus as a human being, a product of his time and place, someone privy to context, but as an ethereal, eternal, everlasting, ghostly, celestial being with no context whatsoever who isn't talking to impoverished Jews.
He's talking to you and me.
Kingdom of God means something completely different.
It has nothing to do with the liberation of Rome.
And so we strip Jesus' words of all of its complexity, its politics, its historical context.
We spiritualize it.
And in spiritualizing it, it does something very, very useful, to Patrick's point.
It does something very, very useful, which is that it now becomes the foundation of empire.
Jesus isn't talking about this world.
He's talking about the next world.
So you can do whatever the fuck you want to in this world, right?
You know, the first will be last, the last will be first.
Well, that's in heaven, not on this earth.
I don't have to worry about that.
I don't have to worry about any of the implications of this radical teaching that resulted in him being hunted down like a rebel, arrested by the state, and executed for treason.
You know, like, let's just acknowledge that for a moment, right?
I mean, you don't get executed for treason because you're like, be like the birds of the sky.
Don't worry about the things of this world.
That's not how you get executed for treason.
I can fully appreciate, by the way, what you're saying, distinguishing between the man and God.
And I know Tom is a man of deep faith.
I'm sure he wants to ask you a question.
I just, one specific question that you brought up.
You said he was only talking to Jews.
I just want you to just hone in on that for a second.
Two-part question.
Was it only Jews around him?
Straight up.
And then number two, in your expert opinion, did Jesus mean to start a new religion?
The most important thing, the most important fact to understand about Jesus when trying to figure out who he was and what he was talking about is that he was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews.
This was not a new religion.
There was nothing new about what he was preaching.
It was Judaism.
And he was preaching it in Jewish terms.
He was preaching it in Aramaic.
Was he speaking Hebrew, Aramaic?
What was he speaking?
Hebrew was an educated language.
So he may have understood Hebrew when it was spoken.
Like when if someone read the Hebrew scriptures, he probably could have understood it, but he wouldn't communicate in Hebrew.
He would communicate in Aramaic, which is the language of the poor.
And he was speaking to other poor Jews.
He was a poor Jew preaching Judaism to other poor Jews.
Once you understand that, and that's not disputed, right?
That's sort of a very basic understanding of the gospels.
Once you understand that, then it opens a door to understanding what it is that he's actually saying.
How would these poor Jews understand these words?
He's not talking to you.
He's not talking to me.
He's not preaching Christianity.
Because it wasn't invented yet.
Because it wasn't invented.
He's a Jew preaching Judaism to other people.
What was so radical about what he was preaching to Jews?
Because you've used that word.
He was a radical.
He had all these crazy ideas, but if he was preaching Judaism to other Jews, what was so radical about that?
Well, Judaism, like all religions, comes in a hundred different flavors, right?
We've already talked about it with Catholicism.
The Judaism of first century Palestine had a bunch of different flavors.
There was the temple Judaism, the Judaism that was controlled by the Jewish authorities that was involved, that involved very restrictive, extraordinarily expensive temple rituals that all Jews were forced to do at least once a year, if not more.
And that was a business.
It was a business decision.
Governed by the Pharisees.
Governed by the Pharisees.
Yeah, and the Sadducees.
And they controlled the temple.
And since the temple was the source of salvation, they controlled salvation, right?
They could tell you that you were a Jew or not a Jew, right?
Because they controlled the thing where God literally dwelled.
Then there was this sort of Pharisaic Judaism, which eventually becomes what we know as rabbinic Judaism, right?
The Judaism of the law, right?
The scholars, the thinkers, the debaters.
And that, like, as you can imagine, ran the gamut, right?
Very conservative views, much more sort of innovative interpretations of the Torah and the law.
And then there were thousands upon thousands of charismatic street preachers like Jesus, many of whom called themselves Messiah.
Many, many.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
We know, I say in Zealot, we know the names of at least 12.
If we know the names of at least 12, then there were 1,200 of people who said that they were the Messiah at the time.
Who said they were the Messiah, who led messianic movements, who had far, far more followers than Jesus ever did, and all of whom were killed as a result.
Here's what I'm going to do.
Tom, do you have any questions back or rebuttals back?
Because I want to go a different direction right now.
Yeah, maybe it's time we just go a different direction.
Okay, so here's what I'm going to say to you.
So question for you.
Do you believe the story of virgin birth, Mary?
What are your thoughts?
Like, do you believe in the credibility of that story?
Do I believe it's a fact or do I believe it's truth?
Do you believe?
Well, what's the difference?
That's the key.
Okay.
So what's the difference?
A fact is a thing.
It can't be debated, right?
A fact is a thing that can be scientifically verified.
That's what we now understand.
A truth doesn't necessarily have to do with fact.
Truth is a far deeper.
Well, both ways.
What do you think about it?
No, there's no fact whatsoever about the virgin birth.
It exists in one section of the entire gospels.
No one else mentions it.
Matthew doesn't mention it.
Just in Luke.
That means 90 AD, so 60 years after Jesus' death.
We can go back to the writings that we find a little bit earlier.
There's some writings of Paul in the 50s.
Virgin birth is never mentioned in those writings.
The virgin birth was a problem that arose out of Paul.
Because Paul, who never met Jesus, never spoke to Jesus, had nothing to do with Jesus whatsoever, but who claims to have had this experience of the risen Jesus long after Jesus died, in which, according to him, Jesus makes him the sort of the 13th apostle, right?
An apostle was somebody who walked and talked with Jesus, and there were 12 of them.
And Paul, who neither walked nor talked with Jesus, says that the risen Christ turned him into the 13th apostle and gave him this new message.
And Paul goes around and he starts preaching this version of Jesus that the apostles had never heard of before.
Jesus wasn't even a man in Paul's view.
Jesus was born of pure light.
He is a new genus of being.
He came to earth as this sort of begotten, the only begotten Son of God, in order to deal with original sin.
Again, Jesus never mentioned anything about original sin.
It's not in any of the gospels.
In Paul's imagination, when Adam and Eve fell, all human beings were born in sin, and Jesus' death cleared that sin for everyone for all of time.
This is Paul, no one except Paul had ever said or thought anything like this.
It was the first time these words were ever written.
It's now basic Christianity.
But here's the problem.
If everyone who is born is born of sin until Jesus is born and rids everyone of sin, then Jesus can't be born.
Paul himself never said Jesus can't be born.
He just let the contradiction live.
But then later on, by the time you get to the 90s, in answer to criticism, in answer to critics saying, wait a minute, what are you talking about?
Like, then it doesn't make any sense.
He himself was born, then he had sin.
Was this new idea that, no, no, no, Jesus wasn't born in the same way.
He was born of a virgin.
It's mentioned once.
It's mentioned in the year 90.
And there's no reason to think that it's anything other than what it sounds like, an answer to a problem.
So in other words, for you, your interpretation is that that's just a fictional story that's being told about it.
It's sacred history.
But the same can be said about the Quran.
The same thing can be said about all the books.
That's right.
And that's what you're saying.
So in other words, all the books, just to be fair, from your point, and you see yourself as an atheist or you're a Muslim?
Oh, no, no, I'm a Muslim.
I'm a person of faith.
So you're a person of faith, so you believe in Prophet Muhammad, you believe in his book, you believe in the Quran.
I don't believe in Quran.
Again, that's the wrong way of putting it.
These are not things to believe in.
They are signposts to the thing to believe in.
Scripture as sacred history is the attempt by individuals who have confronted an extraordinary experience and who have, using the limited means at their disposal, attempted to record that extraordinary experience, often in poetic and symbolic language, deep, meaningful, mystical language,
so that they can preserve it for generations to understand what's happening.
So you're also a man of faith.
So you're also a man of faith.
Okay.
So to you, the risk you're taking is, I'm risking believing the Quran, not the Bible.
That's your risk, right?
I mean, faith is believing in something you have not yet seen.
There's a lot of criticism on the book of Quran.
There's a lot of criticism on the Muslim religion, a lot of criticism on the religion you represent.
Your risk is, I think afterlife is, my bet is I'm going to take the route of being a Muslim versus my routing.
I see where you're coming.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
When you study the religions of the world, it becomes impossible to take any one of these religions all that seriously.
And there's two reasons for it.
One, because you instantly recognize the religious patterns, the sort of phenomena that they all have in common with each other, that they're all saying basically the same thing.
And more importantly, they're saying it kind of in the same way, right?
A lot of the same myths are just kind of repurposed.
The myth of Jesus' resurrection is just the myth of Mithra's resurrection, right?
The Shraushant in Zoroastrianism is a salvific character whose mother magically gets impregnated and gives birth to a messianic figure who brings in the end of the world.
That's a thousand years before Jesus, right?
I mean, these are just the same stories over and over and over again.
However, they are interlinked in the sense that they are trying to express something that as a person of faith, I believe is real.
And that is that there is something beyond the material realm.
There is a real transcendent reality beyond the physical world that we are lost in.
It's faith.
It's faith.
So it's a risk.
It's absolutely a risk.
Okay, so the risk, so there's a part of me that's sitting here listening to you for the first hour.
You sound more atheist than you sound Muslim.
Okay.
You sound more atheist.
You definitely don't sound Christian, obviously.
You're given the arguments of atheists.
It's like I'm listening to Chris Hitchens debate his brother or I'm listening to an atheist give their argument.
That's the part.
So that kind of comes back to saying, well, why do you choose to be a Muslim?
Why do you choose to follow the Quran?
If you're such a scholar and you're educated and you got these four degrees, shouldn't an educated man like yourself who's dealing a lot on facts not risk believing any religion and rather just be an atheist?
You are.
And a minute ago, you just said that when you look at any of the world religions, that there's flaws and there's issues and there's lunacies and then there's repeated myths.
So how did you choose one rather than just being a scholar of the fake?
That's a great question.
Say, hey, I'm the scholar of the fake.
Here's all my books.
I'm going to delve into certain characters, Baskerville and others like this.
But you know what?
No, I'm going to stop and I'm going to choose one.
How do you get there?
So, yeah, this is a great question.
First of all, let's try to rid our minds of these categories like atheist, Muslim.
Well, if you're clearly not a Christian because you question certain aspects of the Bible, bullshit.
There are hundreds of millions of Christians who would agree with everything that I just said and would, I mean, priests, the priests who taught me these things, right?
They're not just Christians.
They've given their life.
They're dedicated their entire life.
Well, to be fair, a lot of things are weird.
The Pope is saying certain things right now that the Catholic Church wouldn't have agreed with 20 years ago.
And Catholics, unfortunately, have to be, are forced to agree with them.
Not forced?
Well, because he's not going to excommunicate you.
When I say forced, if you want to be part of the church and the pope says it, oh my God, I'm either going to have to leave my rituals that I've been living for the last 48 years and go be a non-denomination or go be something else or just say defend the pope.
Just to be clear, that's only if the pope threatens discommunication.
If the pope says, this is now belief, and if you don't believe it, then you are excommunicated, then yes, you're forced to believe it.
But the pope doesn't do any of that stuff, and the pope is Christian.
And so if he's not a different kind of a Christian today than 20 or 30 years ago.
Okay.
There is no such thing as Christianity.
Let's start there.
There is no such thing as Islam.
There is no such thing as Judaism.
There is no such thing as Buddhism.
There is only Christianity's Buddhisms, Islams.
Christianity is whatever a Christian says it is.
Buddhism is whatever a Buddhist says it is.
There is no mechanism for me to say, you call yourself a Buddhist.
Okay, but you don't believe this interpretation of the person is what you're saying.
You're not really a Buddhist.
So let's start there.
That's the important thing.
The second thing that I think is really important to understand is that religion, all religions, are far less a matter of beliefs and practices than they are a matter of identity.
And that's true of every religion in the world and every part of the world.
70% of Americans call themselves Christian.
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
70% of Americans follow the teachings of Christ.
70% of Americans go to church on Sundays.
70% of Americans read the Bible on a consistent basis.
The vast majority of that 70%, when they say, I am Christian, they are not making a faith statement.
They're making an identity statement.
And that is true of Buddhists and Jews and Muslims.
What we people on the outside tend to do is think that religion is just about the things that you believe.
And if you don't believe what the mainstream believes, then you're not really that thing anymore.
I don't disagree with that.
I'm with you there on the identity part.
Actually, fully to the question.
Wait a minute.
There's some fundamentals here, right?
And if a person says I'm a Muslim or a person says I'm a Christian, you dive into it a little bit.
And more often than not, you're going to find some worldview creep in where they've made their own designation.
When you take a look at the 70% of people in America that say they're Christian, there's only about 15% of those that have what you would call a biblical worldview.
And these are not the Amish in the middle of Pennsylvania adopting nothing of modern technology.
These are people that have an authentic biblical worldview.
And at the same thing, there's people that say, well, I'm Jewish.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Are you a Zionist as a political state Jew or are you authentic?
So I think identity is like, you're correct about it, but we need to kind of wash that a little bit because I can say I'm a southerner.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Listen, I'm sorry.
I'm a Bostonian.
What is a Bostonian?
I'm sorry, I'm a New Englander.
We have all these labels.
Do you know what?
We just kind of take it as it is.
I'm a Midwesterner, right?
You have all labels that happen all over the place.
And you can't take a broad brush and just sweep everything out, Reza, because you're correct about the 70%.
You are correct about the 70%.
But within that, there are people that do have a biblical worldview, whether they be Jews, whether they be Muslims, whether they be Christians.
Are they the real Christians?
Because they have the biblical worldview and the other 45% aren't?
I think, well, you know what?
A cleric would tell you that it is my job, and I'll speak to your faith, that it is my job to ensure that I teach and I help people to calibrate what is the authenticity of their Muslim faith and the principles and tenants.
And who gave him that job?
And who gave him that job?
He went to school and he learned a bunch of things.
And now he also has the scripture that they have, and he can either choose.
I have that same scripture.
That's exactly right.
You can be north of London and you can be a radicalized cleric.
What I don't want to do is the following.
Here's what I don't want to do.
And by the way, there's angles I can take with Virgin Mary and the Quran and what the Quran says about Virgin Mary and what many Muslims think about Virgin Mary, and we can go that angle.
But the part I was going to go with you on the Virgin Mary side, that even in the Quran they talk about is the chances of somebody being born.
Because you know, a lot of people made that claim back in the days because it's embarrassing.
Oh my God, you know, you're having sex prior to this, prior to getting married.
And then for the chances of that son ending up being Jesus, that's a one in a trillion type of a number.
That's just a very random method.
I'm a math guy.
Very random mathematical number to come up with that.
So the faith part with that is it's tough to kind of fight against that part.
But let me come back because the question was still not answered.
Yeah, let me come back to the question.
So if your arguments, I'm listening to you, very critical of the Christian church in a very non-critical way.
The way you're doing it is a way a scholar would do it, where the average person listens to that and they say, oh my God, what do I say to this part here?
But I'll flip it and I'll say, dude, you sound like an atheist.
And I can respect that.
If you're an atheist, you're an atheist.
If you're going to say, look, my risk I'm taking in life, I'm taking a risk that Quran's the book.
I'm not taking a risk that I'm going to be a Christian.
I'm taking a risk of I'm going to be a Muslim.
No problem.
Let's get past this part.
I'm going to go to the next part on question.
If you want to answer the atheist Paul, you will answer this well here in a minute.
But here's what I want you to be thinking about.
How do you judge a great parent?
How do you judge a great parent?
By their actions.
By their actions.
Yeah, by how they raise the things that they do.
That's how I judge every person.
Okay.
Things that you do.
Is it fair for me to judge you based on, like if I see you, my imagination, I've never met your mom.
I've never met your dad.
This is our first interaction to get us to the audience.
We've never had dinner together.
I don't know your story except for what I've read, right?
I see a part of you that's your dad, and I see a part of you that's your mom.
I see the rebel in your dad, okay, where he's a rebellious guy, and he's, I see the atheist arguments of your dad when I'm listening to you, okay?
But then I see also your loyalty for your mom's side, and then your own independence, right?
I'm going to go take my route, and here's what I come up with.
Listen, mom, dad, salute you on this side, pop.
Salute to you, mom, on this side.
My dad never fails to remind me that Khomeini was a big mistake.
He called it, right?
You talk about that regularly.
But if we're going to judge a product based on its parents, product, parents, parents, good job, you raise a good citizen.
He's done well for himself, right?
I think it's also fair to judge a religion based on what it produces, okay?
Based on what it produces.
So let's go away from, I've sat and debated with guys who know every single scripture in the Bible, but nobody follows them.
They're very small.
And I've sat and talked to people that are generalists who have a lot of people that follow them because of their messaging.
This is not a debate of we would need two days to go through scripture said this.
What's your rebuttal to this?
And what about this?
And what about that?
We'll be here for days.
Two hours is not enough.
But if we were to judge a religion based on what it produces, if you had the choice to choose a country, and you can't say none, you have to choose one.
If you were to say, you know, a country's, we're starting a country together.
What religion would we want to start it with?
What religion would best be a good religion to be?
That's a fun question.
The one to start a country with.
That's a really fun question.
I'm curious.
Okay.
So let me answer the first part.
Please feel like I left you hanging because you ask a professor a question.
He has like 40 minutes of prelude to it.
But to just get to it, I am not an atheist because I think atheism is an intellectually vacuous position.
I think it's unsophisticated.
I don't think it's smart.
An atheist, a true atheist, right?
Someone who is truly an atheist is a materialist.
A materialist believes that literally nothing exists, that nothing can exist beyond my empirical experience of that thing.
That to me is the height of hubris and absurdity, right?
The idea that all that exists is the material realm and nothing beyond it is just, I would say even scientifically absurd.
Now, what is that other thing?
Who knows?
Okay.
Let's just give it a word.
Because that's all the word God is.
It's just a word.
It's not a thing.
It's a word.
And like all words, it has a thousand connotations.
It represents a bunch of things.
But in its simplest form, let's just say what we mean when we say God is that which is beyond, that which is beyond the material realm, the thing.
The question then becomes, can I access that thing?
Do I have the ability to commune with it, to communicate with it, to experience it in some way?
And that's a personal thing.
I've accessed it.
I've communicated with it.
I've experienced it.
People who do yoga, people who climb mountains, people who surf, and yes, people who are Christians or Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or whatever can tell you a very similar story.
Yeah, I'm not going to prove this intellectually.
All I can tell you is that there is something beyond and I have touched it.
I have felt it.
So then the next question is, do I want to know it?
Was it enough that I climbed that mountain and was like, wow, and then I went back home?
Or do I want to know it now?
Well, if you want to know it, it so happens that there are thousands of years worth of systems, languages.
That's what really religion is all about.
It's just languages.
Languages are made up of symbols and metaphors that help you experience, communicate that experience, make sense of that experience.
And you can pick any language you want.
It is irrelevant what language you choose.
Just different symbols.
It's like saying, what's better, French or German?
What are you talking about?
They're both expressing the exact same thing.
Just pick one.
The Buddha very famously said, if you want to strike water, you don't dig six one-foot wells.
You dig one six-foot well.
Islam is my six-foot well.
But the important thing that's hidden in the Buddha's words there is that the well is irrelevant.
The well is nothing more than the means to get to the water.
And guess what?
The water that you're drinking from is the water that every well is drinking from.
So pick a well.
Pick a well that works for you.
In my case, for a whole host of reasons, my culture, my background, my identity, my comfort, Islam is my six-foot well.
And particularly Sufi Islam is my six-foot well.
It's the language that I use to make sense of a thing that is inexpressible.
It's a language I use to talk about a thing that's impossible to talk about.
And it's a language that other people understand so I can communicate with them.
They get it.
We can talk about that experience.
But to say that I believe in the well is stupid.
People who say, I believe in Christianity, I believe in Islam, I believe in the Quran, I believe in the Torah are doing it wrong.
Those are not things to believe in.
They're your well.
They're the thing that points you to the thing to believe in.
And so as someone who wants a deep and meaningful spiritual life, who has experienced transcendence and wants to experience it more and understand it more, I've chosen this particular well.
Which is your risk?
We've taken a risk.
Everybody's taking the atheist takes a risk.
The Christian takes a risk.
Now, to the question, yeah.
So let me preface the question so if the audience, Jesus has a clip, we could start a new country.
Which religion would be the best religion to start the country on?
Which religion would be the best religion to start a new country?
This is a really, really good question.
Because on the one hand, no religion has a monopoly on democracy.
The idea that democracy fits better with like Christianity than it does with Islam is demonstrably false.
But the one big advantage of Christianity is that it has fully and completely married itself to capitalism.
And so if you were going to start a country that required economic success, capitalism is the right way to do it.
So I would say, yeah, probably some kind of Protestant, some kind of Protestant version of Christianity would be a great start.
But I will say one thing.
Democracy, true liberal democracy, isn't dependent on secularism.
Secularism does not a democracy make.
Pluralism is what makes democracy.
The whole point of a democracy is that individuals get to vote on things based on their own personal ideas and beliefs.
And whether you like it or not, for the vast majority of humans on earth, their personal beliefs and identities are enwrapped around religious identity.
So to say that religion should not have a role to play in democracy means that there's no democracy.
That's what that means.
The question is, can you have the proper safeguards in place to make sure that people who do not adhere to that majority religion or to religion at all are equally protected from having their rights infringed upon by the religion of the majority?
That's what the United States was supposed to be with the anti-establishment clause.
But We are 350 million people, of which 150 million of us are right-wing evangelical Christians who believe that the country is a Christian nation and should be based on Christian principles and laws, and that non-Christians would have a sort of secondary role, you know, as second-class citizens in that kind of country.
Well, that's legit.
That's like half the country.
That's a serious threat.
So all religion can threaten democratic institutions.
But if I were to start all over again and it had to be founded on a religious tradition, I think I'd probably pick Protestant society.
So in other words, you're a capitalist Protestant who chooses to argue socialist Muslim.
What a strange life.
That's about right.
So listen, man, the way I want everything to be is a Protestant capitalist because it takes me.
But do you know, first of all, I appreciate you for being honest because you could have taken that and manipulated it and taken many different angles to kind of make the argument better for you.
But you took the argument and just straight up said what would make you feel safer.
Why didn't you say Muslim?
Why not start a country and it being based on Islam, Muslim being the original foundations of the country?
Again, so Islams, right?
There are multiple, multiple.
And a socialist.
Why not create a country based on, you know, like the Judeo-Christian?
No, we're going to be Muslim.
We're going to follow Prophet Muhammad.
We're going to have a socialist nation.
Why don't you start a nation based on that?
I would also excise the phrase Judeo-Christian from your language right away.
That's a bullshit phrase invented by white Protestants in order to bring Jews into the fold.
No Jew uses the term Judeo-Christian.
And the contradiction between those terms is hilarious.
The whole point of Christianity is that there's no more need for Judaism because one Jew said so.
So it's just Judeo-Christian is just this bizarre fake term to basically mean white.
That's what it means.
It means white.
Stop using it.
You just triggered my friend over here.
Wait, what was the question?
I'm sorry.
So you know how America is built on a Judeo-Christian.
Why not start your country where you're not?
America is built on Protestantism.
Let's be very clear.
Quran, Prophet Muhammad.
Actually, socialism.
Tell me.
When you go back and take a look, basically the founding fathers were deists more than anything else.
Deism is a form of Protestantism.
Deism is Protestantism.
That's what it is.
I think if you want it to be, it can be.
If it helps your argument, it can be.
But when you hear people saying, well, you know, go take a look at the things that are at the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial.
And I've heard that over and over and over again in various speakers who are Christian pastors.
There are no scriptures carved in those things.
There are none.
And as a matter of fact, it was Thomas Jefferson who built, and as a scholar, you probably know this, you know, the Virginia, the Virginia religious clause where he listed everybody and he used the word infidels because he thought that all people should be protected in America to have the freedom, freedom of expression.
But this was a, these were deists that applied certain things.
And if you look at Jefferson, goes back to France before he gets his writings.
Hamilton came from frickin' St. Croix, right?
But all of these come together, deism that may have been influenced by Christianity.
But first and foremost, they were deists, not Protestant pastors.
No, they're not pastors.
They're not religious scholars.
Nor were they Protestant scholars.
They weren't Protestant scholars.
They weren't scholars at all.
But what this argument that you hear all the time that the founding fathers were deists is, A, absolutely correct.
And deism. is a movement that arises out of Protestantism.
The primary purpose of Protestantism is to say that we don't need an institution to interpret the scripture for us.
We can interpret it on our own.
That means we value the scripture.
We don't think the scripture is false or unnecessary.
It's just that I don't need an intermediary between me and the scripture to tell you what it means.
Hence, Thomas Jefferson pulled out his scissors and said, I don't like this verse.
And he just cut it out.
I don't like this section and he cut it out.
Deism isn't some brand new religion invented by the founding fathers.
It is a natural progression from Protestantism and its thousands of thousands of sects, from Quakers to Shakers to Methodists to Baptists.
Deists were just one of the many, many, many interpretations that arose out of it.
We can move on and disagree because deism has its roots in basically all men seek.
That when you find Native Americans that they encountered when the Iroquois, when they first came here, they said, isn't it interesting that the Iroquois seem to seek this creator, this God?
And sometimes it's Roth, the sun god of the Egyptians, sometimes it's other things.
Deism, I thought, had its roots in all men seek, not in its, and recognizing men, meaning all civilizations, all living humans, ultimately are seeking.
Isn't it interesting when we encounter them that they have their way of seeking this thing, this creator, whatever they want to call it.
We can move on, Tom.
We can move on, Tom.
So going back to it, so if America is a Judeo-Christian nation, okay, I'm going to keep saying that to you because Avayin Netanyahu says the same thing.
But okay, you let's quote a religious fascist.
That's a great idea.
So for you, why not start a country based on the Quran, following Prophet Muhammad and socialism?
Well, I think like I said, it was the issue of capitalism that I think is the biggest thing.
You're a capitalist.
We're all capitalists, man.
Look at you.
You're a capitalist.
We're all capitalists.
I'm a proud capitalist.
I don't know if you're a proud capitalist.
I will go.
I'm a moral capitalist.
I do not believe in the invisible hand of the free market, if that's what you're asking.
I don't worship the invisible hand.
I don't know the difference between a capitalist and a moral capitalist.
You're talking criminals.
That's what you're talking about.
I mean, I'm with you.
It's like saying I believe when people say, I don't believe in pedophilia within the churches.
Well, you think I believe in that?
So of course I support moral capitalism.
No, but I believe.
So you're a capitalist.
I bet that you have a almost religious-like faith in the power of the free market to set its own agendas and regulations and limitations, and that if you just leave it alone, it will take care of it'll take care of you.
I used to until I studied China.
Okay.
I used to until I studied China.
Because when I studied China and I realized in the 80s, they only had four law schools and it was a doggy dog type of an environment.
You start realizing you need law and order and some regulation.
It's the over-regulation.
I have a challenge with where the bigger companies use lobbyists and politicians that are broke to buy them to create laws to make it tougher for the smaller guy to compete with them.
That's the problem.
I have just chrome.
That's what I would say.
So you're a capitalist, so that's good.
I will say the one thing that I've always really Twitter's going to trend today saying Reza Astan said he's a hardcore capitalist.
Yes, exactly.
I'm no longer on Twitter, so I couldn't give a shit.
Why are you no longer on Twitter?
I deactivated all of my social media accounts as part of my choice.
So you're not in the penalty box or something.
No, no.
It was part of my kind of my New Year's resolution to my wife.
Although I did it.
Four days ago?
No, I actually did it early.
I did it in November.
I went a little bit early.
As soon as Musk was like, I'm letting Trump back on, I was like, well, all right, that's enough for me.
Was that the trigger point?
I mean, I was going to do it January 1st as part of my New Year's resolution, but I was like, fuck it, I'll do it November 19th.
Do you believe that?
I know we're going off topic here, but I'm not going to get the questions answered.
No, we're going to.
I swear to God, I got 30 minutes left.
You guys keep taking things different directions.
But you constantly hear this is the third time trying to get the questions answered.
Yeah, well, you brought it up.
No, I ultimately Twitter then you went with a question about Twitter.
Hold on, Tom.
Here it is, Markle.
There's no way in the world.
Do you believe short?
The Ayatollah of Iran should be on Twitter, but Donald Trump should not.
I don't think the Ayatollah of Iran should be on Twitter.
No.
But he is.
Trump was off.
Well, again, Trump is an insurrectionist who tried to destroy American democracy and uses his Twitter to actively promote violence, actively promote violence against his enemies.
There's no room on Twitter for someone like that.
Doesn't the Ayatollah do the same thing, but much worse?
Well, the Ayatollah is on Twitter in charge of a fascist, a religious fascist regime that murders children and uses his Twitter account in order to promote propaganda and lies about what he's doing.
He doesn't belong on Twitter either.
Yeah, why would he still be on them?
Actually, the fuck down.
No, no.
Guys, I think it's very important to realize where he's at.
He's saying neither should be on.
His position, it's better to ask why do you not believe both should be on than why khome is on.
Go back to your question.
So I'm going to stay on this question.
Guys, cool, go ahead.
Because I got 30 minutes before I get on my Mac 7 call.
So, okay, so why not start a country based on socialism, Muslim, book of Quran?
I will say the one thing that I do, I'm fascinated by Islamic finance, right?
This idea, and Jewish finance is the same way, that the prohibition against interest and usury, that there are ways to do that.
And there have been a number of very successful ways of doing this where the way that it works is that instead of loaning someone money to start a business, you invest in In that business.
And so there isn't any interest that you're owed, but you are owed dividends from the business.
That's how most Islamic financing things work.
And the idea there being that, hey, we're all in this together.
It's not like I loaned you $100,000, your business collapsed.
Too bad.
Where's my money?
But like most things, it has been absolutely infected by Western capitalism.
So that you can say we're not charging interest and so therefore staying Islamically compliant, but this investment comes with fees that are essentially interest and that make it very, very difficult for these small businesses to actually function.
If you want to start a, I mean, I would took your question very, very literally.
Like I'm starting a country from scratch, right?
Which requires an enormous amount of economic stability and buildup.
How would I do that?
Well, I would need capitalism.
And Islam is not exactly conducive to capitalism.
Neither is Judaism.
But Protestantism, it's not just conducive to capitalism.
It is capitalism.
Radical individualism.
You have been, and not all Protestantism, but like in Calvinist, evangelical, you know, Presbyterian Protestantism.
You've already been predestined.
You've been prejudged to be successful.
If you have money, it's because God likes you.
That's why.
If you don't have money, it's well, you should really look at yourself and figure out why.
Those are, you know, immoral ways of thinking about money.
But if I'm starting a country from scratch, right?
And I want this thing to last, yeah, I'd probably start with a good dose of Protestantism.
How about now that everything's established, raising your kids?
You got three sons.
Okay.
Three sons and a daughter.
Oh, you have a daughter.
Okay.
Iron says three sons.
You got updated.
Pandemic, basically.
Congratulations to you.
Thank you.
We also have four kids, two, two.
But going back to it, now that you have the kids, it's different to start versus where you want to be once you have a family.
Why not raise your family, your kids in a Muslim nation rather than in a U.S.?
You have a choice right now.
Just like your mom and dad chose to say, let's get out of here.
Let's go to a different place.
I know your wife's a Christian, so you could say, well, my wife is a Christian, so it'd be tough to go to a different place.
But why choose to raise your kids in a Judeo-Christian country like America?
Why do that to yourself?
Why put yourself out of your misery?
Just go to a different place.
Go to Indonesia.
Why be here?
Well, I don't, first of all, I don't know if I would think about it in those terms about like, you know, raising them in a Christian country as opposed to a Muslim country, as opposed to a Jewish country.
What I do is I raise them to be multi-literate in all the languages, all the religious languages of the world.
My kids understand, both at a spiritual level and at an intellectual level, that religion is a language made up of symbols and metaphors that are communicating very similar sentiments.
What matters is the sentiment.
I want you to be spiritual.
I want you to know that there is more to life than just what you feel or smell or taste or see, that there is more and that you can access that thing.
You can strive for transcendence and use your own means of doing it.
Find out what's most comfortable for you.
One of my sons a few years ago, after a very raucous Rosh Hashanah celebration, just flat out declared himself Jewish.
Was like, this is fun.
This is way more fun than anything else that I've done.
I want to be Jewish now.
At a Rosh Hashanah celebration?
I've been to many Rosh Hashanah celebrations.
I've never been like, this is the best party I've ever been to.
Come to all the apples and honey you could eat.
Come to West Hollywood.
He said it was raucous ones.
It was a raucous one.
West Hollywood, yo, West Hollywood.
Wow.
And, you know, we.
Lakas for everyone.
A couple of years ago, we went to Israel as a family, and the whole time he was like, my people.
I'm amongst my people.
I have another son who has, I bought him a kid's version of the Ramayana, which just blew his mind.
The idea that God can exist in multiple avatars and that each avatar has a different thing to it, like this, for strength and for wisdom and for power.
So Hinduism, he is all about Hinduism right now.
I mean, he radically believes in reincarnation, radically believes in karma.
I have another kid, another boy who I'm pretty sure is the reincarnated Buddha, but that's a whole different story.
And we go to mosque, we go to church, we go to synagogue.
We took our kids on an 80-day journey around the world.
Literally, we circled the globe in 80 days and went to ancient religious places, modern religious places.
That's great.
You know, what's very important, if you want to raise spiritual kids who aren't religious fanatics, teach them about all religions.
They have the ability in a way that adults whose minds are fixated to differentiate between the external aspects of a religion and the internal religion.
Confuse the hell out of them is your approach.
On the contrary, it confuses adults.
It makes perfect sense to kids.
It makes perfect sense to a 10-year-old.
What kind of school do your kids go to?
What kind of school do your kids go to?
I mean, they go to a nice private school.
But no, no, like, is it a Christian?
Is it Catholic?
Is it a secular?
Okay, got it.
A 10-year-old can understand intuitively that the rabbi and the imam and the priest are saying the same thing.
They're just using different symbols.
And the symbols even look kind of familiar.
It's we, we right here who can't figure that out.
Like, what do you mean?
Like, they're different religions.
They say different things.
They have different ideas.
Like, they read different scriptures.
And, you know, they, they, it's like.
But are they saying the same thing, though?
Because, like, I guess my question is, like, can all religions be correct or can only one be the correct religion?
Remove the idea of correct and incorrect, right and wrong when talking about religion.
They are signposts.
All religions are signposts.
To say that Christianity is more correct than Islam is to say that French is more correct than German.
What the hell are you talking about?
It's the thing that you are expressing, whether you say it in German or whether you say it in French, doesn't make it any more correct.
You're saying it's a means to an end and the end is worth.
It's a means to an end.
Religion is not an independent phenomenon.
Religion is an amalgamation, a collection, a system of ways of thinking about the world, many of which has been constructed over thousands of years and often very sort of under control, right?
By institutions.
This is what it means, and it can't mean anything else.
Yeah, but I think that's the problem is that nobody interprets it like that.
Like, that's actually a great way of looking at it, whether it's like how you use the example of, I'd rather dig one six-foot well to reach the water versus six one-foot wells.
I can appreciate that.
Here's what I would say is you think that nobody interprets it that way because people are not as conscious of it.
Two-thirds of American Catholics believe or disagree with the Catholic Church when it comes to abortion and LGBTQ rights, but they call themselves Catholic.
But wait a minute, abortion, LGBTQ, those are like fairly set things in the Catholic Church.
It's like you believe this if you want to be with us.
Well, I want to be with you, but I don't believe those things.
And there's no contradiction there.
They don't stay up all night thinking about these things.
They don't write books about it.
They don't come on podcasts and talk about what that actually means for two hours.
It just is.
And that's true for all religious people.
I think a lot of unreligious people, people outside of religion, you know, the Dawkins and the Harris's and the Hitchens believe that religious people are like automatons, right?
They're like the old-fashioned, you know, IBM computers, right?
You remember the little sheet with the dots on it and stuff?
That's what scripture is.
That it's like we're an automaton and the scripture is the program.
And the scripture, you read the scripture and it goes boop, And you do the thing in the scripture.
That's not how it works, man.
That's not how it works.
Scripture without interpretation is just words on a page.
It requires an individual to encounter it for it to have any meaning at all.
And by definition, the minute an individual encounters that scripture, it goes through the filter of his entire experience, his entire identity, and it comes out different on the other side.
That's why two people can go to the exact same scripture and walk away with two radically different points of view.
In American history, not two centuries ago, both slave owners and abolitionists not only use the same scripture in order to justify their viewpoints, they use the same exact verses.
That's what scripture.
You know, you know, I got to tell you.
So a couple things.
Very interesting point.
I agree.
Somebody can go watch a movie and have, yesterday I was telling the kids, I said, hey, how is it that both of you guys have the same parents, yet you're two completely opposite people, right?
There's the same things being taught.
You're taking two different messaging.
There's a part of that that's correct.
I have twins, but there's a part of it as well as on how it's being taught, messaging, received, all of that.
Part of it is on the person's individual personality.
You know, the reason why I asked that question about, you know, country starting all that other stuff, sometimes we spend time debating things that is just purely opinion.
Here's what I think.
Here's what I believe.
Here's what I think.
I think that's story.
There's only one time.
Paul said this.
And to Paul, Jesus is this.
And let me tell you, Prophet Muhammad and this and marriage and slaves and papa papa.
Great, got it.
You can debate that all you want as scholars, all that stuff.
And then you go to what produces results, what provides the most important letter for mothers' interests when raising kids, the S word, which is security, safety, a country that provides that.
They want to live there.
And then for somebody that's hardworking to be able to build the life that they want to build, whatever their life may be.
And then for someone to say, hey, I don't want the guy to be able to bully me.
You know, hey, this guy's bigger than me.
I don't want him to come and take advantage of me.
Can I be protected by the law so God cannot bully me?
So we need some laws.
And then, hey, the other countries that are attacking us, can we have a decent military so people just don't want to fight us?
Let's not have a military to kill people.
Let's have a military that prevents others from wanting to fight us.
And then at the same time, allow me to have whatever religion and beliefs that I have.
Leave me alone.
If I'm a Muslim, leave me alone.
If I'm this, leave me alone.
Like some people say, Khamenei should be on Twitter and Trump should be on Twitter.
Your argument is an argument of, no, I think both of them should be off of Twitter.
My argument may be I think both of them should be on Twitter for somebody to be able to make a decision and say, I can't even believe what Trump just said.
I can't believe what Khamenei just said.
I can't believe what Putin just said.
Now, there are some that are inciting, let's go kill, let's go do this.
That's a different story.
You're breaking the law that we're talking about.
Let's go to the last topic that we have here before we wrap up.
Iran.
You and I are Iranian.
And when I tell a lot of friends that, you know, Reza's coming on, I had 50-50 split, what people say.
That's about right.
Oh, my God.
Let me tell you, don't do it because I'm going to tell you they're going to target you, these Muslims.
You got to be careful.
Call out Christianity.
Nothing will happen to you.
Call out Jesus.
Nothing will happen to you.
Call out Scientologists.
Something may happen to you.
Call out a lot of, but there's one thing you don't go.
You know, you just don't go.
It's kind of like the movie Tropic Thunder.
What does he say?
You never know.
Nobody go for Tar.
The point is, you don't ever bring and argue the Muslim religion, and there's risk to it.
By the way, I've brought gangsters, mobsters, Samudu Bulgarvano, and everybody will say, you cross the line with Muslims.
They are fanatics.
They will come after you, et cetera, et cetera.
Then some of the people said, you know, hey, let me tell you the fact that you're bringing him.
I think you're going to enjoy the conversation.
You guys are not going to agree on everything, but I think you're going to enjoy it.
He's reasonable.
Some of the stuff he says is crazy, but you're going to enjoy it.
Which, by the way, to be fair, I've enjoyed this conversation a lot.
And some of the people that know that I'm a capitalist, why would you give this guy a platform?
This is my desire.
I enjoy this.
I walk away today saying, what a great way to start the day.
But the one thing a lot of the Iranians will say, they'll say, Patrick, he's a NAIAC.
He's a NAIAC.
Tori Mituni, how can you talk to a person from NAIAC?
Do you realize he represents Iran and he is a spokesperson for those guys and they defend and they want the nuclear deal because it was them that started the nuclear deal?
Go look at the website.
Who sits on their board?
Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, you know, Kamala Harris, all of these guys.
You have to be very careful dealing with NIAC.
Now, for people that know who NIAC is, Americans don't say NIAC.
Americans will say NIAC, which is what?
National Iranian Association of American Council.
American Council.
And so that's what NIAC stands for.
So you're on the website.
You have your picture now.
No, I'm not on the website.
Maybe they removed it.
You're on a website saying that you supported NIAC.
I can text it to you and show it to you on some of the places.
But tell me your position with NIAC and Iran and where you're at.
What the fuck about NIAC?
This whole thing is so stupid.
Well, people are asking, just so you know.
People are asking because they've been brainwashed by a purposeful, deliberate, well-funded, well-coordinated disinformation campaign that seeks to paint all progressive Iranian voices as regime supporters.
My writing, I've written, spoken, been on TV.
I mean, I have two decades of me on television talking about what I feel about this regime and what I think needs to happen to it.
I have repeatedly called for its downfall.
I have repeatedly called it a murderous regime that belongs in the dustbin of history.
My advisory role at NIAC, which I used to have, is because I am an expert on religion and politics.
So I advise the Plowshares Fund.
I advise NIAC.
I advise the fucking State Department.
I advise actual congresspeople who are making these decisions about what to do with Iran.
I'm an expert in Iran, so I advise those groups.
I have no loyalty or membership to NIAC.
I'm not here to speak for NASA.
To be fair, you don't advise the other side, though.
You're strictly advising the progressive side.
You're not advising.
Which they support the nuclear deal, which you support as well.
100% support the nuclear weapons.
So, you support negotiating with a nation that says mariq bar homri call, death upon America.
You're comfortable negotiating with a country that hates us.
I'm sorry, who do we negotiate?
We only negotiate with countries that love us.
Is that how negotiations work?
Have you heard of the phrase diplomacy?
But diplomacy, diplomacy.
There is no negotiation with a country that actually agrees with you.
But we negotiate with countries that disagree with you.
I totally get that.
But for the most part, the countries we negotiate with that disagree with us, they don't say death upon Americans.
Iran says death upon Americans, the top of the Iran.
This is not even the people on the streets.
Gives a fuck.
So what?
So give $150 billion?
That's a valid concern.
That's a valid question.
First of all, it's their money that we are releasing in exchange for removing nuclear weapons from Iran.
How do you suggest we remove nuclear weapons from Iran, Patrick?
Okay, I have ideas for you.
I can give it to you.
Not to remove nuclear weapons.
First of all, do you believe, no matter whether we give them the money or not, they're not going to continue working on nuclear weapons?
They literally didn't.
But hold on, hold on.
Nope.
We're not going to move past this until we establish the facts.
The JCPOA, which was negotiated by the United States, Russia, China, the Security Council, and Germany, which is extraordinary.
The idea that those five countries came together and the European Union and agreed on anything, let alone agreed on this absolutely remarkable deal under the Obama administration to remove all the enriched uranium out of Iran.
There is zero doubt that that worked.
Zero.
The IAEA came out in no uncertain terms and said within 12 months of that deal being put in place, Iran no longer had the enriched uranium to create a nuclear bomb.
Within 12 months.
You have to be naive to believe that.
Okay.
You have to be naive.
But fair enough.
Let's buy into the naivete and move forward.
Okay, let's just say you're right.
Let's say you're right.
Let's not believe the people on the ground actually monitoring the nuclear.
To believe somebody that believes in the values that they do.
Yes, I don't believe that.
But let me go to the next part and ask you the question.
Let me go to the next part and ask you a question.
Let me go back to the next one and ask you the question.
Okay.
Your father was right about Khomeini.
Khomeini.
Fair?
Yeah, absolutely.
Your father was right.
So do you think Iran, and I know this is going to be hard for you to answer this question, don't go Mossadegh.
I'm purely talking Shah and the advancements we were making under Shah versus what happened to Iran under Khomeini, okay?
If we had a choice between the two, this is not the, you can't say, well, I would choose this.
I wouldn't choose either.
If you had a choice between how Iran was during Shah's era versus Khomeini, which would you choose?
Neither.
I knew you were going to say that, but you can't say neither.
Fuck that.
You cannot say that.
How do you mean neither?
How can you say neither?
Be honest.
I mean, I'm being serious with you.
You may literally have this idea about the Shah's age that is in your imagination.
I do not have an idea about Shah.
Do you remember the thousands of people that he slaughtered on the street, the tens of thousands of people who would disappear into education camps?
We replaced one murderous regime with another murderous regime.
And it's stupid to say which one would you prefer?
It's naive for you to say what you just said.
You said since you've left Iran in 1979 till today, Adam, ask you a question.
When's the last time you visited?
You said 2005, before I became famous.
You didn't use the word famous, but before I became known in a marketplace.
Okay, you haven't gone back since.
Under Shah, you could go back.
This is not about saying one did it right or one did it wrong.
Is your question which is more beneficial to me or which is better for Iran?
By the way, the Shah was more beneficial to the people.
You're saying Khomeini is more beneficial to the people.
Fuck no, that's not what I said.
So the question I'm asking is literally.
What is more beneficial?
You can't say neither, though.
You are telling me which murderous regime would you prefer, the murderous regime of the Shah or the murderous regime?
You cannot be that naive, though.
You cannot be that naive.
Listen, if you take it from that route, if you take it from that route, the Reza Shah Pahlavi, okay, and Iran, where they were, which by the way, for me, an imperialist model, I'm not an imperialist.
My model would be more what we have in America.
What I'm asking you is a simple question you can't answer.
During Khomeini, millions of people died from other countries.
Other innocent people died because of Khomeini's policies and his regime.
This is not Reza Pahlavi's other people died because of his regime.
You can't give that argument.
For you to say that I'm going to choose both of you.
If what you want to do is a fun intellectual exercise in which you are saying, gun to my head.
I can only pick the murderous regime of the Shah or the murderous regime of the Ayatollah.
Which one would you want?
I would say the murderous regime of the Shah.
Okay, so then because you got a gun to my head.
Not because I got a gun to your head.
Because logically, it makes sense to say right after Khomeini, you're probably not leaving Iran if Shah was still in Iran or not being in Iran.
You probably would, and I would probably, and I'd be probably miserable.
I wouldn't have rights.
I don't think you have this.
I disagree.
You would have chosen to leave to another country.
You would have chosen to come to.
I think you've got a nostalgia for the days of the Shah.
You don't have to have a lot of like make America great again.
But this to me takes you back to why NIAC gets the criticism that it does.
Because for you, you're saying give $150 billion to those guys, to Iran.
Is there money that you're going to be able to do?
No, it's running.
But you're saying is there money in it?
No.
You're putting words in my mouth.
Begu.
We have two options with Iran's nuclear program.
Two options and nothing else.
Two options, period.
We have a third option.
What's the third option?
I'll give you the third option.
Option one, we blow the shit out of it.
Option two, we use negotiation and diplomacy.
What's your third option?
Very simple.
It's very simple what you do with option three.
Option three is the same exact thing that happened in different nations.
Iran, Iran is going through a potential revolution today.
Hold on.
I want to make it clear.
Please.
I am talking about 2012.
I am not talking about 2022.
I have never said we should renegotiate the nuclear program now.
You're asking me, did I support the JCPOA?
Versus today.
Today, there's no country to do.
But negotiation today.
But let me make sure that Twitter loses its fucking mind.
I'm glad you clarified that.
I am not saying negotiation.
Fair now.
Was it right in 2012?
100%.
Let me make my point.
Let me make my point on what I'm thinking.
And I want to hear your rebuttal on this and your argument on this.
For me, it's the following.
Have you heard of John Perkins, the economic hitman guy, the author?
He's a hardcore progressive.
Very interesting guy.
I had him on two times.
I really like talking to that guy.
And it's very interesting, his arguments, what they did, you know, to cause nations to go down.
Do you think the current model and the government today in Iran is good for its people and good for the world?
Fuck no.
Okay, fair.
We're on the same page.
So is it fair to say that if we can figure out a way to help the Iranian people, not the government, the Iranian people to cause a fall in Iran, that's probably a good, noble thing for us to do.
That has been my goal for 20 years.
Fantastic.
Then if doing that, your mission of wanting to do that, which NIAC's mission is for the people, policy to help with the people, that doesn't align with the rulers and the president and the people that run Iran.
You guys don't share a common value.
You're wrong.
You're not.
So you're telling me, you're telling me the former minister Javad Zarif, like you're saying his ideal situation is to bring democracy to Iran.
No.
What you're saying is, can we pursue policies in the United States to help the people of Iran?
And have we been?
My answer is we have not been.
We have not 40 years of blanket sanctions has not helped the people of Iran.
It has only entrenched the government further.
And there's rings of academic data that indicates that.
The question is, does the, for instance, nuclear deal, the JCPOA in 2012, did that help, would that have helped the government or the people?
And there is very good, real, like meaningful arguments to be made that it would only help the government.
I disagree because there are much better arguments that it would only help people.
Why?
Goes back to your God, capitalism, the free market.
The Iranian people live in an oppressive, murderous, theocratic regime.
And as a part of American policy, we have decided that we're going to blanket sanction everyone in the hopes that eventually they'll rise up and take down their government for decades.
Four decades, we've been doing that.
Now, instead, the argument of the JCPOA was very simple.
A, we get to get rid of Iran's nuclear capabilities without launching.
Like giving them $150 billion.
Again, I want to make sure that you understand that this isn't my $150 million or your $150 million.
That's the only reason I said it.
It doesn't matter.
You're strengthening them.
What you are doing.
You're strengthening their government.
It's not about the money that you give them.
It doesn't give them about the liberalization.
You cannot be that naive to think the money goes to the people.
I'm not talking about the money going to the people.
What I am talking about is the policies that arise from the JCPOA, which requires the liberalization of Iran's economy.
What Iran, what the Iranian people need.
That's not going to happen.
What the Iranian people need in order to actually succeed in bringing down their government is access to the free market, is access to the rest of the world.
By giving money to the government?
You are conflating two different things.
Listen to me.
I'm not saying that the money in exchange for the nuclear weapons is what is going to free Iran.
I am saying that the policies pursued by the JCPOA have on top of it the goal of economic liberalization in Iran, which is why I argued 10 years ago that Iran should be allowed into the World Trade Organization, because then it would have to actually pursue policies that require economic liberalism.
You can't negotiate with unreasonable people.
It's impossible to negotiate with unreasonable people.
Do you know how much shit we send to North Korea right now?
Do you know how many billions of dollars in aid we send to North Korea?
Is there anyone more unreasonable than Kim Jong-un?
That's who we negotiate with, is unreasonable people.
Because the other option with unreasonable people is you just bomb the shit out of them.
I know you're a hardcore capitalist.
As a capitalist yourself, don't confuse the two with the Judeo-Christian nation that we're talking about here.
I'm not talking about North Korea here.
I'm talking specifically to Iran.
If you go back and you think about during the Shah era, when that place is safe, everybody around them felt safe.
Nobody around Iran feels safe right now.
In Iran felt safe in this shah.
Of course, they did.
Of course, it's called maybe you and your family did.
Yours did as well.
What are you talking about?
Your example is a perfect one.
The moment Shah Lev, your dad as a communist left, what are you talking about?
My father didn't feel safe in India.
Then why didn't he leave under the Shah?
Why did he leave Rah Khomeini came in?
Do you realize how much hypocrisy there is for that?
There's contradiction to that.
There's a lot of things that I'm saying about you.
I never honestly thought that you were going to sit here and actually defend the fucking Shah.
Are you kidding me?
You're defending Khomeini.
You're defending Iran.
You're defending all the people that died.
You chose 50-50.
Hold on.
Has anyone here actually heard me?
Indirectly, you are.
Indirectly, you are.
When I asked you between Nasha and the Khomeini, you said it's neither.
What are you talking about?
You're saying Khomeini and Shah are the same?
You have to be naive to say that.
I didn't say they were the same.
What I said was a murderous regime.
I left in 89.
I left 89.
Okay.
My family was actually the family that thought Iran was going to figure it out.
I'm part of that family.
If I would have left early.
If I had your father, I would have been like, hey, man, we're in the U.S. already.
I would have had a 10-year lead.
But my dad took 10 more years with mom because they thought that this thing's going to get figured out, right?
All I'm saying to you right now is the following.
I have four kids.
I would love to take my kids to Iran, to Jam Hospital.
I'd love to go eat at Obali, Jigad, Dukh, original Duke, I dream about Balal to, you know, what's that one park?
Park is Shahan Shahi.
It's a different name right now, whatever it's called, or go to Bandar Pahlavi.
It's not called Bandar Pahlavi anymore.
My mother said they're from Rasht and Bandar Pahlavi area.
It's my dream to go there.
I think, my opinion, by giving these guys, even if it's their money back, to make the government even stronger, you're delaying those people being free.
You're delaying it 10, 15, 20 more years.
Let's establish.
What's your goal for Iran?
My goal for Iran is to be a nation that is freer than it is today.
Okay.
Free such as— We have the exact same goal.
We do, but our approach is a different approach.
How do you think we get to a free?
Now, it's in 45 years.
It's been 45 years where we've done one thing.
All we have done for 45 years is sanction, contain, and isolate.
45 years.
Now, you tell me, have we gotten this much closer to the Iran that you're asking for?
So let me— You're saying American policy?
Yeah, American policy.
I understand fully what it is.
It's been sanctions, isolation.
By the way, can you tell Torina to tell the people to get on the Zoom?
I'm six minutes late.
I'm going to be there in four minutes.
Tell me, have we actually pursued your goal?
Have we pursued our goal?
So my answer is going to upset you, okay?
And just brace for impact.
Maybe take a deep breath, Usa, and then take it.
And then you're probably going to upset me as well.
But you know my answers.
These are my answers.
I think there are a lot of people in the world that want to keep Iran in the havoc that it is today.
Absolutely.
I think there's a lot of people that if they can't.
Saudi Arabia.
Israel.
It's not just Saudi Arabia or Israel.
There's a lot of people here.
It's UK.
It's a lot of people.
The last time Iran was very powerful, they became a little too powerful.
And they're like, wait a minute, pump your brakes.
My people are going to your place.
Elizabeth Taylor is dating Zahedi.
Frank Sinatra is coming and performing concerts in Iran.
The richest people in the world in the 70s are going to Iran for vacation.
The top three country in the world, countries in the world for vacation is Iran.
Are you out of your freaking mind?
They're killing it.
Guys, we got to kind of slow down.
They need havoc in the Middle East.
It's a necessity for some.
Financially, it's a necessity for some.
Politically, it's just like...
But we're talking about the Iranian people.
But let me, let me, it's the same way.
Has this policy helped the Iranian people?
The same way as many progressive, not you, or Democrats, would like to keep certain communities and sects poor because they keep winning that vote.
If they lose that vote, if they start becoming financially free, not these people are not going to be able to do it.
We're not getting off the subject.
We're not getting off the subject.
What I'm saying to you is I'm giving you my opinion.
I don't think they want to free it.
Having said that, my approach would be any possible way to give the power to the people.
Anyway.
How do we give the power to the people?
They need weapons.
In Iran, the people don't have weapons.
We're not going to ship weapons to Iran like it's.
You're asking me a question.
I'm telling you.
Let's talk about the realm of the possible.
No, no.
The realm of the possible is not logical.
What needs to be done is not on freaking black and white.
It's a lot of gray needs to get done for this thing to get done.
It ain't no black and white type of stuff.
You need a similar situation on what happened with Mosaddegh and what happened with the Shah.
As crazy as this sounds.
They've done this before to a guy that would be considered a Republican, the Shah, and they did it to a guy that would be seen as a socialist.
Mosad.
How do you think we help the people in Iran is by giving them weapons?
That is one of many different ways to do it.
One of many different ways to do it.
That's one of the ways to do it.
How do we empower those people to actually be able to remove their government?
By suffocating their government.
How do we suffocate that government?
Why do you think all these girls right now are willing to sacrifice their lives for what, though?
What do you think the women right now are doing in Iran?
What do you think they're doing it for?
They're sacrificing their lives.
Why are they for the war?
It's basic human rights.
Basic human rights, things like you and I have here.
Absolutely.
I support that.
And I support the more we strengthen their government, the less power we give them.
So the more money we give to the government, the less money we give to them.
The less power we give to them.
Right.
So you do realize that right now, the rich people in Iran are the people in government.
The mullahs with the robots.
I don't disagree.
So 45 years of sanctions has made the people poor and the government rich.
No, what they do is the government from the top says, see what America did to you?
Right.
See what America did to you?
Take it all.
No, no, see, we take it all and then, hey, you guys, send us more money or else we're going to keep saying Marc Bad On Ricardo.
We're going to keep saying America's the evil empire.
That's what they do.
No, it's not about American Empire.
It's about an existential threat to the world.
It's not.
Iran has.
No, no, Iran has money.
It's not like Iran doesn't have money.
The level of.
Again, again, let's not confuse things.
The nuclear deal was to get nuclear weapons capabilities out of Iran.
And it was, according to five countries.
You're strengthening the government of five countries.
It was worth giving them money in order to do that.
Now, here's the question.
Here's the question to you.
You're saying that for 45 years, the government has gotten richer and the people have gotten poorer.
And that's because the government has a monopoly on the black market.
So I'm saying, actually, let's invest in the free market.
Let's give the people.
You're naive to think the money goes to them.
The money goes to them.
You can't be that naive.
You have four degrees.
I don't have a degree.
The money goes to them if they actually have an ability to access it.
If they have access to the free market economy, if they have access to interdependent levels.
They have access to that.
If you're a business owner in Iran, let's say you're selling carpets.
Iran's business.
You're selling pistachios.
Yes.
You can't sell pistachios on the international market.
So that's not about the mullahs keeping all the money for them.
They can.
The fact of the matter is, and for a capitalist like you, I can't believe you're disagreeing with this.
I'm against the government having the power to bully its people, which is what it's been doing for 44 years.
You're for it.
I'm against it.
That's bullshit.
And say that I'm for it.
And what do you mean give them the $150 billion to the government?
Your argument is that.
If you're saying the argument is let them have their money, that's theirs, you're not thinking we're strengthening them.
I think we have a common mission, by the way.
My argument, I'm going to say this one last time, is that in exchange in 2012 for the removal of nuclear weapons capabilities.
You're believing them.
In exchange for nuclear weapons capabilities, which have the stringest investigative group, the IAEA.
Now, you can say, oh, fuck the IAEA, fuck the UN.
They all don't know anything.
Okay, well, then there's nothing really to talk about.
But the people on the ground who actually take the tests told us in no uncertain terms that it was working.
That's a fact.
The point is, separate that from this larger conversation that we're having, which is how do you empower the people in Iran to bring down their governments.
And it's a legitimate argument.
I'm not saying you're wrong or dumb for thinking that sanctions is the right way of doing it.
You're not dumb.
It's naive.
It's two different states.
What I'm saying is, there are two ways to do this.
You could either blanket sanction the entire country.
And as we know, 45 years of that has led to the government being more entrenched than it's ever been and the people at the top being billionaires and everyone else barely struggling.
Or any other thing, 45 years, any other thing.
And what is the other thing?
Well, it's quite easy.
There are mechanisms in place already that allow for an investment on the ground of the Iranian people themselves.
Access to the free market economy, which comes with rules.
Here's the problem with 45.
With rules.
The rules are World Bank rules, dude.
Rules are, okay, so if I negotiate with a murderer, you think he's accustomed to following the rules?
If I, if.
If I negotiate with a nation, with a government like this, you think they follow what's in a contract?
There's no way you believe that.
I understand that you have this mystical view of what the Iranian government is that exists in this kind of existential.
I just listen to what they say.
No, no, I just listen to what they say.
They're evil people who care about their own livelihood and they care about nothing else.
I do think they care about their livelihood.
The government people care about their wealth.
I do agree with you.
Exactly.
But I'm talking about its people.
That's what I'm talking about.
And what I'm saying is, right now, we have nothing but the stick.
We have no carrot at all in Iran.
There's nothing that you need to do.
You're not giving carrot to the wrong guy.
You're giving carrot to the guy that's got plenty of carrots.
He's been overdosing on carrots.
You're giving carrot to the economy.
No, you're not giving a carrot to the economy.
Here's how interdisciplinary is it?
I'm an Assyrian Armenian.
I'm a Syrian and Armenian.
Let me tell you what both sides will say.
You ready?
Here's a criticism.
Here's a criticism both sides will say.
And I want to wrap it up.
We'll go off.
If you're up for part two, three hours, I'm up for bringing you back.
You have no idea how much I've enjoyed it.
I'm being serious.
I'm being serious.
So I'll tell you this.
Armenian Assyrian.
Bed David, Borosian.
Bed David, Assyrian, Borosian, Armeni.
Okay.
You know, every time when people say, hey, you know, let me tell you what's going on.
Send money to this charity.
Send money to go help the Assyrians.
How come you're not giving money here?
And I'll send money.
You know what both sides of my family will say?
Never send money.
You know why?
Because it goes to the wrong people.
Because it never goes to its people.
You said it.
You know this reputation.
So if you and I are giving money, 150 billion, to the government, we have to be naive to believe it's going to end up to its people.
That's what I'm.
It's not going to end up to its people.
And that's the way it's something different.
Okay.
Anyway.
Hold on, hold on.
I need to say one last thing because if you probably know anything about me, you know that I get cut up and re-edited.
And there's an entire industry online meant to make me look in a certain way.
That's not us.
We don't do it.
I want to say something.
I want to say a final word here because it's very important.
And I'm hoping that this final word will make it.
I have absolutely nothing but loathing for the Iranian government, for the Islamic Republic.
It is a murderous, terroristic regime that slaughters its own children.
It has no legitimacy whatsoever.
It belongs in the dustbin of history.
The only proper response of this current revolution, and it is a revolution, is not for reform.
It's not for a little bit more rights.
It's to burn the whole thing down and start all over again.
And I wholeheartedly support that.
The question is how do we empower those young people?
How do we give them the tools necessary in order to burn it down?
That's the difference.
Next time, how about we do this?
Next time we just do podcasts on Iran.
Not religion.
So we're like, and it's just going to be you and I.
I also wrote a book, but I'm, and by the way, just so you know what you just said, that's a clip.
And we're going to put the entire clip of Iran, me and you going back and forth.
And your last part will be in it as well as a closing.
Just so I know so the audience, we don't play those games.
Please tell us about your new book.
The book is a biography of Howard Baskerville, who was a 22-year-old Christian missionary from Nebraska in 1907.
He got assigned to Tabriz, the city of Tabriz in Iran, to go preach the gospel and teach English.
And he showed up in the middle of Iran's first revolution, the constitutional revolution of 1905.
He showed up in 1907 in the middle of it.
This was the first democratic revolution in the entire Middle East.
It led to the first constitution and also a parliament in Iran.
The Shah launched a war against the constitutionalists.
That war kind of culminated in the city of Tabriz.
And at that moment, Howard Baskerville, this 22-year-old Christian missionary, gave up his missionary post and his American citizenship and joined the revolutionaries in this fight against the Shah for democracy.
They won.
They beat the Shah.
They exiled him.
They established the constitution and they established a parliament.
Iran was a constitutional monarchy for a very, very short amount of time until Reza Pahlavi, the father of the man that you're hero.
The father of the man that you weirdly seem to have some nostalgia for.
Father of the man.
Rezochon.
Reza Khan.
Yeah, he was declared a military coup on Iran, brought down the parliament, feared man.
This is where we are now.
The point is, there's this incredible story of this American Christian who is still considered a hero in Iran today.
Rob, link in the chat.
Link in the description.
Folks, go buy the book.
He has a track record of writing books that gets people thinking, talking, debating.
Reza, once again, truly, thank you so much for coming out.
I cannot wait for the next one.
This two hours felt like two minutes to me.
I appreciate you.
Let's come back.
Let's come back when we have a new eye on everything.
