March 1, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:13:35
The Future of IRAN! X Space
Stéphane Molyneux dissects Iran’s 2023 protests—millions crushed by executions in hospitals—and contrasts them with U.S. interventions in Iraq/Afghanistan, arguing Iran’s ethnic unity justifies external support despite past failures. He debunks nuclear threats (60% enrichment ≠ weapons-grade) and critiques the 1953 CIA coup, framing Mossadegh’s nationalization of BP as economic sabotage, while blaming the Islamic Revolution’s violence on Marxist-Islamist purges. The debate shifts to diaspora hypocrisy—supporting India’s oppression while opposing Iran’s—and evolutionary moral trade-offs, ending with calls for global solidarity over ethnic loyalty to dismantle tyranny. [Automatically generated summary]
Stéphane Molyneux from Free Domain, and I hope you're having a good day.
A reasonably good day, I suppose.
A reasonably good day in this time of war and other kinds of conflicts.
And I certainly, of course, have my own thoughts and comments about what is going on in Iran at the moment and has been for the last day or two.
And I do have people who want to talk about it.
And I'm all ears.
Go ahead, my friend.
I had a few items that I was hoping to be able to discuss with you.
IQ is top of the list.
And sorry if I missed the intro just now.
I don't know what you said just before.
No, it's fine.
Don't worry about it just yet.
Dive in.
Don't worry.
Okay.
So I was hoping to talk to you about remigration, what the United States stands to benefit from this.
And by that, I would hopefully we will focus on the people.
Well, we don't really care about the U.S. government or the Israeli government.
There was a call you had with the previous caller about Iran, and he started talking about messianic regimes.
And that conversation went south, which was unfortunate.
But if I may start with the IQ thing, and then hopefully we can sort of get into these other subcategories.
With IQ, if you recall, we talked about 10 years ago in 2016.
During that call, you mentioned to me that the Iranian IQ average was 87.
And at that time, that was entirely new to me.
I had not even looked into this topic.
I saw your tweet a couple of days ago, or was it last night, I think, you had said the main difference between Iran and Iraq might be the fact that Iran has an IQ average of 104 to 106 versus Iraq, which is, I can't remember the figure, it was in the 90s, I think.
Now, I have done all of, I don't know, 45 minutes worth of research just recently.
So I'm no expert by any means, but I am familiar with IQ testing.
I've taken the IQ test multiple times myself, and I did watch your entire playlist.
And just as a quick aside, is that playlist still available for your viewers?
If somebody wants to watch just the IQ interviews that you did, I remember there was a playlist of about 20 videos.
Is that accessible?
Yeah, it's called, yeah, the website or the URL is FDR for free domain radio, FDRURL.com slash IQ.
FDR URL.com slash IQ.
For those of you who don't know, I interviewed 17 sort of world leading experts in the field of IQ from all over the political spectrum just to make sure that I had valid information before dipping into such a contentious topic.
Perfect.
Thank you for that.
I do want to go and watch some of those videos and hopefully translate some of them to Persian, if you don't mind.
Okay, so in the 2016 call, you quoted, I believe you were referring Richard Lynn, or referring to Richard Lynn's 2010 page.
Yeah, can we, I mean, I have honestly have no memory of a call from 10 years ago out of the thousands of calls that I've done.
So if we could just deal with the current state of things, because if you want me to reference a call, then you knew that you were coming in ahead of time, right?
So if you want me to reference a call, you should email me and say, I'm going to be referencing a call from 10 years ago so that I have a chance to listen to it and to the context and all of that.
So given that you didn't do that, which is fine, it's not like you have to do that, but that means that there's no point referencing a call that I don't recall.
So if you could just deal with the more current stuff, I would appreciate that.
No, absolutely.
That's fair enough.
I'll just refer to the actual research.
So the 87 figure, I believe, came from 2010.
Richard Lin has a 2010 paper in which he estimates the Iranian IQ to be 87, I believe.
Richard Lin also has a 2019 paper in which he kind of goes down and he estimates it to be 80.
Now, the tweet recently from last night, I think, 104 to 106 is what you had said.
I'm not sure where you got that from.
I did find something that says 104, and I did write down the link.
I don't know if you want me to mention the actual URL.
I mean, if it's relatively easy for people to get to, if it's got, you know, 15 characters like a forehead on a keyboard, then probably less so, but it's up to you.
International-IQ.
International IQ test, there's dashes in between.
I have personal objections to both of these high ends of the range, 104 and all the way down to 80.
If I may quickly tell you why.
I think 104 or to 106 might be a little too optimistic.
And I say that because when I looked at the sources of this web page that I just mentioned, and I went to their sources and their methods, they said this is user data submissions.
And they host their own IQ test, which I was able to access.
I didn't take it.
But the question's loaded.
So I assume you take it and then they give you the response and so on.
Now, you and I both understand, of course, and everybody does, that this is a biased sample.
Iranians who are willing to entertain the question of IQ and race willingly land on a website, speak English, in order to access the questions and are reasonably confident in themselves so as not to be scared by the IQ test.
This is already a very biased sample.
So while I don't doubt that many Iranians, especially living outside of Iran, do land fairly high on the IQ spectrum, I don't think the 104 average for the entire country is realistic.
On the low end, I also object to the 80 and 84 stuff because, well, two things that I noticed about Richard Lin's research is he does not make a distinction between races in Iran.
So reporting IQ nationally in a country like Iran is just about as meaningless as reporting the American IQ as opposed to European IQ in the United States versus black American IQ.
And we understand this.
People who have watched your videos should understand this.
In Korea, it would be perfectly fine in a homogeneous society of 99 or 98% Koreans living in Korea.
You could probably have a very easy time obtaining a random sample.
In Iran, it depends.
If you go to Iranian Khuzestan, which is in the southwest, you're dealing with people who ethnically have a lot more to do with Iraq rather than somebody living in the central regions of, let's say, Tehran or Isfahan.
So that's one thing.
Also, Richard Lin sort of differs by himself.
He varies in what he is reporting by some seven points, I believe, in a matter of just under a decade.
And I don't think Iranian genetics have changed that much in 10 years, if any.
So if your results are that different, I have to guess that maybe the sample size was either biased or maybe just very small.
So we shouldn't see that drop of however many points in just nine years of IQ reporting.
Do you want me to pause here and just turn this into a personal?
I really appreciate this opportunity, by the way.
Oh, that's fine.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so that's the IQ stuff.
And then the last thing I'll say about ethnicities and the makeup of Iranian demographics.
Iran is 60% Persians.
I understand annoyingly that a lot of Iranians think that Persian and Iranian are interchangeable and they just say I'm Persian, even if they're not.
Just to make it very simple for people who don't know anything about Iran, just think of the United States.
A black person born in the US may refer to himself as American.
So he is black and he's American.
Not every American is black, of course.
Same idea.
All Persians are Iranians.
Iran is a nationality.
All Iranians are not Persian.
So chances are you may have seen, and this has turned into a racial meme, which is some very dark-skinned guy turning in a taxi back around to the passenger saying, I am Persian.
Let me tell you, I am Aryan.
So on and so forth.
If you have come across that sort of a cartoon character, most likely you were dealing with, I don't know, somebody from Balochistan, or Balochistan is southeast next to Pakistan, or somebody from Khuzestan, who are, again, they speak Arabic, a lot of them, and they speak Farsi too.
But ethnically, they're well repeat what I said, but those people are Iranian.
They're not Persian.
They are Arab Iranian, or they are Baluch Iranians.
And we have several of these groups.
So just keep that in mind.
The research that I wasn't able to find for this call, and I really tried, and I'm sorry that I failed.
But did I lose you?
No, I'm with you.
Yeah, there was a research paper from, it was an old one.
It was in the 1950s.
And annoyingly, I cannot find it.
It was a researcher who had traveled down to the Khuzestan region, the oil-rich Khuzestan of southwest, which Saddam wanted, by the way.
When Saddam attacked Iran, specifically, he wanted to annex Khuzestan, because that's where Iran gets almost all of its oil.
And what this research had done was he had given the IQ test to kids in school.
But deliberately, he had gone to a school where a lot of Tehrani or central Iranian or Persian engineers who worked in oil had taken their kids, and those kids were non-native, and they were going to the same school.
So he had given the IQ test to everybody, but then he had sorted it by these are Persian kids and these are local Arab Khuzestani kids, Iranian Arab.
I don't, God, I'm going to piss so many people off by saying this.
And he had reasoned that it looks as if the kids from central Iran, they score closer to 100 on average versus the local kids whose average seems to be closer to that of Iraqi national IQ average.
I can't find this piece of paper and it was, I wish I had saved it the first time I found it.
But besides these, I have seen 93.
I have seen 89.
If I had to guess, Stefan, I would, and this might be bullshit, but I think it's 90 to 100, somewhere there.
But it's very confusing.
And I didn't get past the first page of Google results.
Who knows?
I think 80s are too low of an estimate.
And I don't think it's 104.
That's just my guess.
And I'm no expert.
And I say this very humbly based off of just what I know.
Sure.
Okay.
I appreciate that.
And of course, there are always limitations.
I can provide my sources in the show notes.
And yeah, of course, I mean, there are limitations to all IQ researchers.
This is all very broadly defined and discussed.
Why would you think, or why do you think it might be possible that there are IQ disparities between Iraq and Iran as a whole?
Well, this one is a little hazy too.
Depending on who you ask, people will tell you that maybe as recently as 5,000 years ago, and some people take it all the way back to like 50,000 years ago, the belief is people in current Georgia, not Georgia, U.S., Georgia, you know, the country, they diverged.
A part of them started living in regions such as Iran or modern-day Armenia, and others went west and started forming European society.
So the belief is modern-day Persians share their DNA to a varying extent.
I mean, depending on the individual, it's many years now, so there is a lot of admixture.
But I had myself tested it, and I had that opportunity because I studied biology and I had access to a lab.
So my genetics are 13% European based off of what I tested myself.
So why it would be different between Persians and, let's say, the Iraqis, it's likely the different admixtures of Iranians having that shared ancestry with Europeans.
And then over the years, there was a lot of contact with the Greeks because the Greeks invaded Iran multiple times.
There was a lot of contact with Turkic populations from Central Asia.
And then obviously, most Iranians also have some amount of Arab, they have some amount of Russian, even, because we've had contact over long periods with all of these surrounding cultures.
Somebody living in southern Iraq would, I would guess, has more uniform blood or genetics, which is probably more heavily influenced by Saudis.
So that's my opinion.
Have you heard the cold climate theory of intelligence selection?
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah, Iran does, in fact, have changing seasons more so than, let's say, a more.
No, no, I mean, in the origins of the peoples, right?
So again, we're talking about broad generalities, and we're all intelligent enough to not point out that there are exceptions to broad generalities.
So we don't need to.
I'm not saying you would, but we don't as a whole need to do that.
So what is in general the if I'm not trying to quiz you, like if you want me to explain it, I'm happy to.
But what in general is the cold climate theory of intelligence selection?
Cold Climate and Cooperation00:07:09
I believe what you're referring to is the need to forecast and the need to have that complex relationship with your environment that forces you or your ancestors, say 10,000 years ago, to have to worry about shelter in the cold season and the changing mode of life.
That is to say, we can hunt now.
We won't be able to hunt four months down the road.
Therefore, we cannot just eat and party now.
We need to save and we need to worry.
And the theory is this worry about the future and having to abstract the future in your brain as if it's a reality now, that's the origin of intelligence.
Otherwise, if you're… Well, it's not the origin of intelligence because all races are intelligent, but it is a selection pressure for intelligence.
I'm so sorry.
Go ahead.
No, no, no, you go ahead.
Yeah, that's basically what I wanted to say.
And I do want to say this too, not for you, but for the benefit of many people who may have wondered about the Eskimos.
They live in just about the coldest darn place ever.
Yes, but it's a uniform environment.
So I think it's the presence of cold, but also the changing of the seasons both that requires you to kind of make changes and adapt and create that evolutionary pressure and intelligence.
Otherwise, it is just the same uniform environment, not so much.
You learn a set of skills and you apply them all the time.
Right.
So it has to do with the deferral of gratification.
And I'm not disagreeing with you and, you know, just sort of adding a little bit of my own special source.
So the general theory is that if you have summer to, you know, spring and summer and fall to grow and mature and harvest your crops, and then you have to prepare for cold weather where hunting is difficult and where food is not available on the farm, at least until sort of winter crops like turnips and so on get developed.
But that was much later on, only really six or seven hundred years ago.
So the general idea is that in order to prepare for winter, you have to defer gratification and you also need a significant degree of social cooperation because you need people to help you harvest, you need people to help you build your barn, and violence is less productive in highly seasonal weather.
So if you look at places like Siberian-derived populations, such as the East Asians, the Japanese and Koreans and so on, there tends to be a high degree of social cooperation and strong self-control and the deferral of gratification and also mathematical abilities, but that's developed in part because the amount of water that is required to grow rice is quite complicated and irrigation needs to be developed and so on.
So in places where there's cold and warmth, as you point out, different from the sort of Inuit or Eskimos, then you need high deferral of gratification and you need high social cooperation.
And it tends to breed out in-group violence.
There's still out-group violence, you know, obviously the East Asians and Caucasians can be quite violent towards out-group.
But there's in-group cooperation and deferral of gratification and a planning.
You can't just, if you're hungry, you can't just go down to the river and get some fish or grab some fruit from a tree or something like that.
And so in highly variable climates, social cooperation, non-violence, and the deferral of gratification are all selected for genetically or through Darwinian evolution.
And the best way to defer gratification and to ensure social cooperation and to reduce violence is to increase IQ.
And when you dial up IQ, social cooperation goes up, deferral of gratification goes up, and the capacity to deferral of gratification, control impulses.
And when you control impulses like, well, I'm going to eat all my food, even though it's only November, in which case you starve to death, when you control your impulses, you also control violence.
You know, the sort of immediate, some guy looked at me funny, I'm going to take him down with a club, that kind of violence.
Or to put it another way, those who were impulsive and didn't cooperate socially and were violent tended not to survive.
So if you look at more extreme social cooperation and non-violence internally and deferral of gratification, if you look at the Siberian peoples where the winters were more brutal in general than they were in Europe, you see higher IQs among East Asians.
And then the next round is the Caucasians, and then you sort of go from there.
And because the winters in Siberia were more brutal than the winters in Europe, there were more selection pressures, which had a lot to do with producing not just genetics, but also culture and so on.
And so, in general, where there's, as you point out, highly variable climate, then IQ tends to be selected for, not just for its own sake, but because it promotes the kind of behavior that leads to survival and thus, of course, reproduction and flourishing and so on.
And if there's anything that I've gotten wrong or missed, I mean, obviously it's a very sort of brief overview.
But if there's anything I've got wrong, obviously, please feel free to add or correct.
No, it all makes sense to me.
If you have the common enemy of the environment, then you kind of have to be pulled together.
And if you're the guy that nobody wants to help build shelter, you're going to freeze your ass to death.
Whereas if you're in the savannah chasing after hunt, all you need to do is be fast and grab the hunt.
And then you can be a violent psychopath all you want.
That may help.
And also, of course, the kings or the rulers or the lords or the sort of emperors or whatever you want to say, the leaders have to control or diminish the amount of spontaneous violence within their environment, within their lands, right?
So to sort of take the European context, the king has to suppress violence in his lands because if there's violence, in other words, if there's rampaging marauders who come around and steal everything from the farmers, then the entire kingdom runs out of food for the winter and everyone starves to death and the king is done.
He's got nothing left to rule over, or there's a rebellion and he's killed and so on.
And so the king has to suppress violence because so much planning goes into the production of food that if the farmers don't believe that they're going to get to keep the products of their farming, they just don't farm.
Free Speech and Survival00:03:08
They won't bother.
They'll move away.
They might turn to hunting, but they won't do all of that back-breaking labor.
Like anymore, like if you're a kid, you know, like if you've ever been in that situation as a kid, sorry to use such a silly analogy, but it's kind of vivid.
If you've been a kid and you've built some complicated sandcastle and then some debag older kid comes along and just stomps on it, I mean, what's your motivation to create another complicated sandcastle?
It's not very high.
So there tends to be a non-aggression principle tends to be enforced or reinforced or imposed in highly variable climate societies.
And the last thing that I would say is that there is an emphasis on free speech.
And the reason why there's an emphasis on free speech, this is particularly true of Western European countries, like why did free speech arise out of particularly England, but other places as well.
And that's because disagreement is really important for optimizing outcomes.
If you have a bunch of people around a table and they're all free to speak their minds, the likelihood of you coming up with the best solution is higher than if there's one guy who kills anyone who disagrees with him, which is where you don't have free speech.
So free speech is selected for because those societies that allow for more free speech, who allow for disagreement around a table of people trying to solve a problem, you generally come up with more optimum solutions.
And this is of course why philosophy and Socratic reasoning and so on has been developed in more variable climates.
It didn't stick particularly well in the East.
And again, these are generalities, but free speech generally comes out of European societies, not out of East Asian societies.
And part of that is because the solutions worked, and the level of conformity that was necessary for that society to flourish, as it did.
I mean, just to take China, for example, for like 6,000 years, they invented gunpowder, they invented IQ tests for the Mandarins or the bureaucracy, they invented currency and so on and complicated mathematics and like a really impressive society.
But the level of conformity that is required in those societies is so high that free speech was not really an issue or not really a value.
And one example of that is when the Europeans came over to China and engaged in battle, everybody was so terrified, as the Europeans were, well, the British in particular, in the opium wars and other wars, when the British were taking territory and torching winter palaces and sailing up the Yangtze and obviously taking Hong Kong and so on.
Everybody was so terrified to talk to the emperor and say that the big-nosed foreign people were succeeding that they lied.
Persians from Colder Northern Steppes00:09:35
And this, of course, allowed the British to take more and more territory.
So that's too much.
You're not allowed to disagree.
You're not allowed to argue with the king or the emperor.
You're not allowed to give him bad news.
And therefore, the news keeps getting worse.
So, in sort of general, I think those are the rough outlines.
Now, why am I talking about maybe you know the answer?
Why am I talking about cold climate selection for intelligence theory?
Well, I think we're trying to segue this to Iran's present politics.
Well, where did the Persians come from originally?
You mean, besides what the theory I mentioned is, I mean, I don't really know how true that is.
Well, the Persian Empire was established 2,500 years ago, and the people who made it up were the Medis and the Parthians.
And if I had to guess, their genetics were probably some sort of Georgian or maybe Macedonian mix blend.
I really don't know.
Robert Stepper is the person to talk to about this stuff.
And there's no reason why you would know.
Look, please, I'm not trying to be like quiz you or cross-examine you.
I don't want it to be a monologue.
So if you do know, that's great.
There's no particular reason why you would know.
But yeah, the ancestors of the Persians are, they migrated from colder and more northern climates.
So the Proto-Indo-Iranians, who are ancestors of both Iranians and Persians, and Indo-Aryans, so that they came from modern Ukraine, southern Russia, Kazakhstan, the Pontic, Caspian steppe.
And this is a region with a continental climate with cold winters, often below freezing, hot summers, vast grasslands, and much colder and more harsh than the Iranian plateaus, milder and more varied climate.
So around 2000 to 1500 BC, I mean, some models have it earlier and so on, they migrated southward.
And one branch moved into the Iranian plateau, and that's where, you know, the horse-use chariots and so on.
And Persian is an Indo-European language, of course.
And so the hapla groups, the sort of genetic groupings of Persians, are significantly different from the haplogroups of Iraqis.
Iraqis are Arabic, and Persians are substantially cold climate haplogroups.
And that would have some influence.
Again, nothing's determined.
And certainly, individuals would be judged by individual standards.
But the majority, sorry, the history of the Persians is that they came, and relatively recently, from cold climates with all of those selection pressures that went on for hundreds of thousands of years.
And the Iraqis did not.
They came from the warm Arabic haplogroups, and there does seem to be some difference along those lines.
That would be sort of my argument as to why there could be this difference as a whole between Iraqis and the Persian elements of Iran, if that makes sense.
It does.
I also would like to mention that the Persian language, I realize it looks the same as Arabic because we used to have our own orthography.
The Arabic alphabet wasn't really used in Iran before the Arab attack, the Islamic attack, which happened some 1200 years ago or so.
But that's just the way it looks.
As far as Persian grammar, the spirit of the Persian language and the way we structure our sentences, it is in fact very, well, it's Indo-European.
So you have the subject, verb, object, order, which makes Persians.
I have taught English to Iranians and I have taught English to non-Iranians also.
And I have to say, Iranians make very good students for English because they don't really have to reorganize and juxtapose every neighborhood of their brain in order to make sense of the English language or the German language.
Really, we don't really struggle with sounds either.
We have all of the sounds that we have in English or in French, even like the sounds that a lot of people struggle with.
We have all of those.
Arabic is Semitic.
The Arabic language is closest to Hebrew and their lost cousin, which was the Phoenician language, which no longer exists.
And it's a completely different animal.
If you started learning Arabic, you would soon realize that the way they think about language, the fact that they don't have the verb to be, this is a horse in Arabic is horse.
You don't say is a horse, you just say it, it just is.
The is is assumed, and so on and so forth.
So sometimes linguistic and genetics sort of blend, and people try and make sense of genetics and the divergence of populations by looking at language similarity.
And Persian does, in fact, have a lot of the primitive or basic words like the words you use to describe your family.
Daughter is the word we have in Persian.
We pronounce it very differently, of course.
And many of the concepts that early humans had, I don't know, like hell and heaven, like paradise is a Persian word.
And, you know, there's entire lists that people can look into.
So, yeah, I mean, what you're saying makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah, so I mean, Persians' linguistic and partial genetic or cultural ancestors come from these sort of colder northern steppes.
They migrate south to the Iranian plateau.
If you compare that to the Iraqis, it's just a very different kind of history.
So the modern Iraqi Arabs come from ancient Mesopotamian populations, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and so on.
And there's, of course, later Semitic and Arabian influxes.
And of course, unfortunately, the cousin marriage stuff, which is not ideal for the smartest aspects of society.
And they reach the area via outer Africa routes, right, through warmer, wetter Arabia, sort of humid periods 400,000 years ago, did actually develop these migration corridors.
Neolithic farmers 10,000 BC were local to the Fertile Crescent and so on.
And so Iraqi Arabic roots are tied or come from the warm Mesopotamian, Arabian Levant region.
Whereas, and it's really just a couple of thousand years ago, the Persians migrated from brutal winter selection pressures.
So that would be one way to look at it.
And again, these are just theories, but that's one reason that I would say that it's possible that there are overall IQ differences between the two groups.
And are the numbers accurate?
No.
Of course, no general numbers can be accurate.
But if the Persians come out of the brutal winter steppes in Russia and so on, then they would have greater intelligence selection pressures than Western Europeans.
And of course, as you know, the IQ normalizes around the white population at 100.
So to me, I would imagine that the Persians would have IQs more close to East Asians.
And therefore, that since East Asians tend to have higher IQs than Caucasians, and the Persians came from similar brutal selection pressures, I would expect, whether it's 104 or 102, the sort of East Asian IQs tend to clock in at 104, 105, 106.
It depends, of course, because spatial reasoning, they're off the charts, right?
This is sort of the Asian engineer stereotype sort of comes from a sort of very real place.
Whereas for whites, language and creativity tends to be higher, which is why you have white Shakespeare's and Dickens and so on and not so much from East Asia and why whites tend to compose, whereas East Asians tend to be fantastic at playing the instruments and reproducing the sounds.
So if the Persians came from more brutal selection pressures than the whites or the Europeans, then I would expect, as a whole, for Persian IQs to be slightly higher than white IQs, similar to East Asian IQs being slightly higher than white IQs.
And so that to me is where I would sort of reason things through.
And that's why I tweeted that, if that makes sense.
Right.
Fair enough.
And I mean, even let's just be pessimistic and go with the lower end of that spectrum.
Let's say mid-90s, maybe high 90s, if we're being generous or optimistic.
I think that's workable.
The main difference between just talking in the context of foreign interventions and external attacks, Afghanistan and Iraq were a disaster.
And people could have told you, and people were telling us.
Iraqis and Afghans00:04:46
I think we had just about the largest rally in Europe's history on the streets of London, right on the eve of the Iraqi attack.
Correct me if I'm mistaken about that, but I think some 2 million people showed up.
Now, I get it.
A lot of them were leftists and they weren't really protesting it with the best of intentions or on principles that you and I might share.
But I was a teenager back when the Iraqi war was starting, and I could have told you at that age that this is never going to work out because Iraq is a new country.
I would say it's a fake country.
And the reason I'm attacking them by calling them fake is that Iraqi borders were lined up by the British after they beat the Ottoman Empire.
Iraqi borders do not reflect any genetic or ethnic reality.
It's just a mashup of Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites, all of whom hate each other.
And they don't really have any meaningful voluntary association with one another.
They've always had to tolerate each other under some sort of a dictatorship, whether it was the Ottomans or the Arabs before that, and so on.
But ethnically, religiously, and linguistically, it's disparate populations that just hate each other.
And they've had conflict with neighboring Iran.
They've constantly have had conflict with neighboring Turkey.
So then the Americans come, they deploy forces, their IQ is not great.
Their education was non-existent under Saddam Hussein.
And of course, it was going to go south.
The reason I disagree with the comparison between Iraq and Afghanistan, and I'm trying to have as much empathy as I can, looking at this from the point of view of Americans, maybe right-wing Americans or nationalist Americans are sick and tired of this garbage.
Why should our kids die for us to fail in delivering democracy or freedom, like abstract, vague terms that don't really translate well in the context of Afghan society, for example?
I get it and I sympathize.
And I would never be selfish enough to say even one American kid needs to die for my country to maybe become better.
The cell in the current attack has been, at least up until present, a massive sea and air campaign in order to give Iranians the opportunity to finally topple this regime.
Now, as far as cost, I can't speak for the next Iranian government, of course, but I would suspect the Americans are going to force them anyway.
And I'm fine with that.
You guys take 10%, 20% of our oil money for as long as you need in order to pay for the attack and the military investment, and then some.
That would be the economic aspect.
As far as loss of life, I think it hopefully will be limited or non-existent even if there is no ground deployment.
Here's the thing: I can't recall if Iraqis or the Afghans showed up in the millions on the streets of Kabul or Baghdad to protest the Taliban or Saddam Hussein.
Iranians did.
Nobody can say with a straight face that, oh, well, if you wanted your government changed, you needed to do more.
Why didn't you do it yourself?
They did.
And they surprised me even.
I've been living in North America for 20 years.
And I must confess to periods in my life when I just completely lost hope in Iran and just kind of severed myself and said, you know what?
You guys do you.
I can't worry about you all the time because you guys are not doing anything.
And boy, was I wrong.
Because on the 8th and 9th of January, millions did show up on the streets.
It was massive.
And there's videos that I have watched of people basically thinking it's all over.
How can they possibly push us back?
There's millions of us.
We have control of the entire city.
And they're dancing and cheering and they're pulling statues of Qasem Soleimani, the Islamic Republic general that Trump killed.
They're pulling his statue down and burning Islamic Republic flags.
And then all of a sudden, they start shooting at people and they don't stop.
And even when they start running away, they chase them down and they give them coup de grace.
And then they chase them to hospitals and they finish people off on hospital beds.
I've seen gruesome pictures that would never make it to mainstream media.
So if people have the stomach for this stuff, do wander on to Telegram, Persian channels.
Massacre In The Basements00:06:04
You will be horrified.
The extent of massacre that happened.
People have been shot with hospital heart monitors and IVs still attached to them.
And then they tell their families, here's a pile of bodies.
Go dig your kid out of that pile, if you can find him or her, and then pay us for the privilege of dragging that corpse back to your house.
And we will tell you where you can bury it.
Because you can't take it to a public cemetery and make a spectacle of the funeral.
We don't want that to be a nucleation point for even more protests.
So, no, we will tell you, we will order you to take your child four hours away and bury it in some hole that we have prepared for you.
So, tell me if my analogy here is maybe naive or childish, but I fully understand the concept of right to self-determination.
However, what do you do in a set of circumstances where somebody comes over and throws you in a basement, locks you up, and begins to assault you daily?
Can we is it logical for us to kind of scale that up to the level of society and say I'm sorry, I'm getting very lost in your questions.
If you could try and boil it down, that was a long speech with a lot of information, and I want to make sure it's a conversation.
So, if you could help me understand the question in a slightly more succinct way, I would appreciate that.
Yeah, I apologize.
I'll try and make it concise here.
If I'm being assaulted by somebody locked up in a basement, is it reasonable for me to say people outside not necessarily owe me help, but I would really, really love for them to help me.
And if they did, I would try my best to repay them for that generosity.
What I'm asking is: is it naive to compare that personal example I gave to and scale it up to the level of society and say the Islamic Republic has made it impossible for Iranians to do anything meaningful to change or modify their government?
Is it reasonable for Iranians to have the same expectation about external help and to pay for it later on and minimizing casualties as much as possible?
Well, but you can't take individual situations and scale up to state actors.
So, for instance, if you are being held prisoner in a basement and so on, then anyone and everyone has the perfect right, and in fact, I would say it's a good thing, to use whatever force necessary to free you from your enslavement.
However, let's say that I'm interested in freeing you and I go in through the window and help you out and so on.
And maybe the guy chases us and we have to, I don't know, hit him with a stick or something to get him to stop, or then we can find him or whatever it's going to be.
So, if I decide to do that, I think that's a good thing.
I mean, insofar as if I was trapped in the basement, I would want you to come and free me.
And if you're trapped in the basement, it's a good thing for me to come.
I'm sure we would be lifelong friends if we helped each other out in that manner.
So, that's my sort of perspective on the individual, if that makes sense.
And Adobe roughly in agreement that people have the right, in fact, it's a good thing for them to work to free people who are imprisoned or enslaved.
Yes.
Although, I don't think it's an obligation, though.
I cannot meaningfully sit in that basement and think that anybody owe me anything.
Well, I think just sort of common humanity you owe people, but you can't be shot for not doing it, right?
So, it's not a positive, coercively enforced obligation.
Like, I have an obligation to not kill people, and people can use violence to enforce that obligation if I fail it, right?
If I want to go kill someone or try to.
So, it is not a coercively imposable positive obligation, but it's a plus.
You know, it's kind of like telling the truth.
Telling the truth is nice, but you can't shoot people for telling lies.
So it is a positive obligation, but not enforceable.
Does that sort of accord with your way of thinking?
Okay.
Now, the question is, if you start to scale it up to state actors, we end up in a different moral situation.
So, can I force someone else to save you?
I think we said no.
Like, it's not a positive obligation in that way, in that I can't put a gun to someone's head and say, you have to go and save this guy who's locked up in the basement.
And if you don't, I'm going to shoot you, right?
Like, that would not be moral.
So we sort of agree on that.
Well, but governments are the initiators of the use of force.
And so if it's an individual using his own resource, his own choice, and he can hire someone, right?
If he's got some savings and he wants to hire someone to go and free you from the basement, he can do that, right?
But what he can't do is use force to compel the salvation of another.
Do we agree on that?
Yes.
Can I play devil's advocate a real quick question?
What if I was, let's say, a neocon and told you, well, we don't have forced conscription in the United States.
So therefore, the fact that people sign up to join the military and get paid for it makes it voluntary.
So they have agreed to this, and they agree to be sent over to Iraq and risk their lives.
Okay, how's it paid for?
Well, right.
Course of taxation.
Right.
Right.
So if I go and hold someone hostage and say, give me a million dollars, and then I go and pay someone to come and free you, I go and pay $100,000 while keeping $900,000 of that for myself, that would not be moral.
I say, well, but the person is being paid.
Totally Worth The Lie00:05:52
It's a free market transaction.
It's like, yes, but the source of it is still compulsion.
So that does not quite fly, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think I was stuck as a neocon.
I folded right away.
Well, and yeah, no, of course, I understand that.
And it's hard for us to process that because so much propaganda goes into covering up the fact that governments initiate force as their essence.
The other thing, of course, in the neocon argument is, of course, that whatever, I guess in this case, Iran, formerly Iraq, and so on, that they say, this country is about to attack us, and therefore it is self-defense in the face of immediate danger.
And that is the case that they make, and that's the case that they made.
Of course, the leader of Iraq had, I think it was 2003, he issued a fatwa, as strong a legal ban as you can get in Islam, as far as I understand it.
I just asked Salman Rushdie.
But if, so he put a fatwa against nuclear weapons.
I think it was 2003.
Just as of last summer, the White House, and you can still see the press release up on the White House website, claimed that they had completely eliminated Iran's ability to make nuclear weapons.
So the head of the entire theocracy had issued the strongest prohibition on the development of nuclear weapons.
And the U.S., of course, claims that they have eliminated his ability to create nuclear weapons.
And so the argument that they're about to get nuclear weapons and they're extremely dangerous is not particularly credible.
And that this is not to defend the dictatorship or theocracy in Iran in any way, shape, or form, but just in terms of like a skeptical real politic view.
It's not particularly credible.
And of course, all of the former lies to get people into war.
I mean, the Gulf of Tonkin incident that started off the Vietnam War was falsified.
Korea, of course, and Iraq and Afghanistan, like Afghanistan offered to turn over bin Laden, and they said nope.
And anyway, so I do have a couple of points to offer about that.
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
I do realize that the WMDs in Iraq was the nothing burger.
So this is the United States basically turning into the.
Okay, bro, bro.
Hang on, hang on.
I'm sorry to be annoying and interrupt.
I really am.
Don't call it a nothing burger.
Half a million people got fucking slaughtered.
No, it was a lie.
It was a blatant lie.
It was a murderous falsehood.
Like a mass murderous, you couldn't invent a thousand serial killers, give them all the time in the universe to kill as many people and genetically harm them through these depleted uranium weapons.
I'm sorry, like nothing burger is just a very dismissive and shallow way of describing one of the most appalling falsehoods in modern history.
No, I didn't mean to dismiss it.
And I watched the footage of Iraqi kids.
I mean, Iraq is not a nation exactly near and dear to my heart, but nobody wants to see kids suffer.
And I remember Madeleine Albright, was it?
The father and secretary.
Yeah, she said it's totally fine, but it was totally worth it.
Yeah, totally worth it.
Yeah, she said, was it worth it?
And she said, yes, it was.
Iran.
I do want to say something about the Islamic fatwa of the Ayatollah and whether or not Iran is actually pursuing nukes or was before they got taken out.
Shiite Islam is there is a term called teqiya.
You have heard of it, I think.
Oh, sure, yeah, yeah.
It's the idea that if it and this is true for Marxists, this is true for leftists, this is true for most revolutionary groups, that to speak falsehood in pursuit of the advancement of your belief system is a virtue, not a sin.
Yeah, and the most famous example in the Iranian context is Ayatollah Khomeini, the first one, the first supreme leader, was asked very clearly when he was still in France.
He was asked what will be the state of freedom in Iran, political freedoms, women's rights, and so on.
And he said, and we have him on recording.
He said women will be free to choose.
All political parties will be allowed to operate.
He named them by name.
He said the Communist Party will be allowed to freely operate.
It will be democratic.
I am but a clergyman.
I will go to Combe, the city of Combe, and I will...
Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
So, yes, I understand that people lie, but this is not particular to Islam.
This is not particular to communism.
I mean, you just talked about this lie of the weapons of mass destruction, where they said it's a slam dunk.
We know for certain we know what they are, we know where they are, and this was all a complete lie.
So, lying to advance your ideology is common to all ideologies, which is why I prefer philosophy, where you can't lie to advance your cause.
True, but I was saying this in order to make sense of the fatwa, because the fatwa can easily be nullified, and the Ayatollah can change his mind about it three years down the road and say, well, that fatwa was teqiya.
I was basically telling a lie in order to advance the cause of Islam.
So, the fact that Khamenei said Khamenei is the second one, the one who just got blown up, the fact that he said it by decree of Islam, it's illegal to have nukes, that really means nothing at all.
So, he could have been lying about it, and I suspect he was.
Weapons Grade Deception00:12:41
Listen, of course.
I mean, sorry, he issued a fatwa does not mean that it was enforced or that it could have been Takiya and so on.
But of course, the Americans recently said we want to gather everyone together for negotiations and then just blew everyone, the American Israelis, and blew everyone up, which was a falsehood.
Now, again, all's fair in love and war, I suppose you could say, but falsehood and deception is foundational to politics and certainly to war.
So, I wouldn't singular it out.
I wouldn't make it singular to that particular regime.
And of course, I mean, when was the last time that Iran invaded a sovereign nation?
1860?
Some people say goes back even further, like without provocation, without sort of fighting back.
And it has not been a particularly expansionist or violent nation throughout most of its history, as opposed to America, which is 250-plus years old and has been at war for all but 14 of those years.
I do want to comment on Iran's threats towards the United States and what have they done to you, line of questions.
But can I just quickly rewind here about nukes?
Just for the listeners to have some context, the Iranian nuclear program started under the Shah, the late king of Iran.
Under the Islamic Republic, they very quickly got bogged down with the war in Iraq, which lasted eight years.
Iraq started that war.
Iran provoked it, and we can talk about that too.
The Ayatollah, the first one, as soon as he took power in Iran, he was calling onto Iraqi people to revolt against Saddam Hussein, this devil's child, and to institute an Islamic Republic over there too.
So he was provoking the Iraqis, and Saddam always wanted oils and so on and so forth.
So during this eight-year war, nukes sort of fell by the wayside.
Most people think that the Islamic Republic didn't have the funds or the concentration on nukes during that period.
But as soon as the war ended, which would have been 1970, 1987-ish is when the war ended, they began redeveloping the nukes.
I don't know what the Shah wanted them for, but he was doing it openly during the French engineers were working on it, I believe.
The Islamic Republic was secretive about it, and it was only discovered in the early 2000s that they were having these underground facilities.
It was revealed by a dissident group.
So, spies, basically, inside Iran, revealed it.
It's very spread out.
The Islamic Republic has had nuclear reactors in Isfahan, in the south of Bushehr, and they have it all spread out.
And they're all in mountainous, underground, very deep tunnels.
I don't think people do that stuff unless they mean to have nukes.
I'm sorry, so of course, my apologies, but we were just talked about people who lie to advance the cause.
Of course, the people who fled Iran would be very keen, I assume, to have the theocracy overturned.
And the best way to do that is to say that there are all of these nuclear facilities or nuclear developments, which is going to give the U.S. in particular an excuse to topple the regime.
So I'm not saying that they're lying, I don't know.
But if we are going to include people lying to advance the cause, then they would have a huge incentive to lie about the development of these nuclear weapons.
And just telling you the incentives, of course, I don't know the truth.
Yes.
However, I think the aggregate of these statements with satellite imagery and the fact that the Islamic Republic has boasted about it.
The Islamic Republic has some incredibly dumb people.
So they invite people on TV who actually let it slip.
And we've had this over the years.
People who just kind of say something and then they backtrack it.
Say, oh, I didn't mean that.
And they're talking about the destruction of Israel and very clearly making reference.
So I wish I had some clips lined up for you.
I don't.
But no, I mean, and some of the facilities are overground, like the one they have in Boucher.
There is satellite imagery and there's photographs on the ground available.
So the idea, and look, Khamenei's the second one, supreme leader, dead now, his only foreign trip, as far as I know, was to North Korea.
And this is when he was the president.
He hadn't become the supreme leader yet.
He went to North Korea for a period of a week or two, I think, with Kim Jong-il.
He visited their facilities.
And when he came back, he was full of praise for the North Korean system.
And then later he became supreme leader.
My guess is that countries have praise for the North Korean system.
And I get like both communism and theocracy tend towards totalitarianism.
But why do you think Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and so on, why do you think they're all toppled and overthrown and invaded, whereas North Korea is not?
Because nukes.
Right.
Right.
So you have created the great incentive.
I did this look up, and again, I don't know the truth, but according to Grok, Iranian leadership has not openly boasted about actively developing or possessing nuclear weapons.
Official policy repeatedly stated by Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini until his reported death.
And other top figures maintains that Iranists use only peaceful nuclear energy and that nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islamic law via Khomeini's long-standing fatwa.
Iran denies any intent to build bombs, framing its progress as civilian.
However, and this is to your point, several senior officials and advisors have made statements that come close to boasting about capability or ease of weaponization if pursued.
In December 2025, Atomic Energy Organization spokesman Beiruz Kamalvandi said developing an atomic bomb is the simplest task, requiring no ongoing fuel control and much easier than building a nuclear power plant.
In July 2022, and echoed in later years, advisor to Khomeini Kamal Khazari stated Iran has the technical capabilities or means to produce a nuclear bomb, but has chosen not to.
Former nuclear chief so on boasted Iran has all the necessary components for a bomb and so on.
So they've talked about technical readiness and breakout potential, but they have not, at least according to Grok, and I mean, this is not omniscience, but just to maybe push back a little or round out the comments, that they have not boasted that they are developing, but that they could.
They've never done it in a very formal or official manner.
But the Iranian military leaders, again, I wish I had, I could maybe take some time to look this up for you.
But they let it slip.
They have these speeches that they give, and they say things about, well, we have things that they don't know about.
And very clearly, they're making delusions to nuclear weaponry.
And sorry, sorry.
So just to why, if they don't have those things, why would they be saying that, do you think?
Because I think they were trying to copy the North Koreans by trying to by displaying their fangs, so to speak.
They wanted the Americans to stay away by giving them the doubt of, well, maybe they do.
Yeah, I mean, if you're in some sort of, I don't know, mafia shootout or something, and you don't have a gun, what do you do?
You put your forefinger in your pocket and pretend to have a gun.
Maybe that's like a desperate move or whatever, but that I assume would be some strategy that would be pursued.
Yes.
But the nuclear program in Iran has always been about nukes.
They have not injected a single watt of power into the civilian grid after spending billions and billions on, let's say, just the Boucher nuclear power plant where the Russians were.
I think that they're just mining Bitcoin with all that energy.
But anyway, that's a topic for another time.
Could be.
So, and look, again, I'm no expert, but from what I've heard, for civilian purposes, you don't need anywhere beyond a few percentage enrichment of uranium.
These guys were at 60%.
And this one, this part...
Well, but you say these...
Hang on.
But you say these things like they're just true.
This part is not disputed.
The Iranians themselves have said, or the Islamic Republic dates, that we want 60% enrichment for this and that.
So that part is not disputed.
Sorry, I thought you said they have it or they want it.
No, so for weapons-grade enrichment, I think you need over 90%.
I'm getting into a topic that I'm not an expert in, so I want to be very cautious here.
Purely hearsay.
60% is what they were at, and they have agreed to it.
90% is what the Israelis and the Americans were.
All right, so sorry, just because you say you're not an expert, I just looked this up.
And you're right, so the highest grade of uranium Iran has developed is enriched to 60% purity.
This is classified as highly enriched uranium, close to but below weapons-grade levels, which are typically 90% or more.
Iran has repeatedly enriched uranium to this level at facilities like Natans and Ford Dow.
So no public evidence shows Iran achieving or stockpiling 90% plus weapons-grade uranium.
The 60% level remains the highest confirmed and sustained grade.
Iran insists that its program is peaceful, denies weapons pursuit, cites a fatwa against nuclear arms.
Western assessments view 60% as a short technical step from weapons grade with breakout time potentially weeks if pursued covertly.
So it is, at least, it does seem to be something that can be used for energy production.
It is below weapons grade.
So, you know, I just want to point that out.
And we don't know.
We don't know.
We're not there.
We don't have Geiger counters or isotope detectors or anything.
We can't take samples from wherever we want.
And so this is all hearsay.
And I'm not saying it's false.
I don't know.
But I go with the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt for war.
And I would say it's really the highest standard of proof.
So of course, in civil cases involving money, not jail time usually, it's a preponderance of evidence, like 51%.
Whereas, of course, in criminal cases where people lose their freedoms and go to jail, then we're talking proof beyond a reasonable doubt, like 95% certainty, that kind of thing.
War has to be very high.
War has to be very high.
And I am skeptical of all claims involving violence.
And so for me, this is why I'm sort of pushing back, in that you don't know.
You know what you've been told.
I know what I've been told.
Could they have 90 plus percent?
Sure.
Absolutely.
It's certainly within the realm of possibility.
Could they have hid it?
Yes.
Do we know?
No.
And so when people say to me, well, you know, there's this and that evidence, I'm like, okay, but where's the proof?
And yes, okay, they have enriched to 60%.
That seems to be, that seems to have peaceful applications.
It's not weapons grade.
Could it become weapons grade?
Sure.
I mean, according to this report, it's a couple of weeks, perhaps.
But I'm very skeptical of all claims.
And this is just, you know, like I'm 60 this year, so I've just been down this road a whole bunch of times where people make these claims of imminent danger that don't turn out to be the case.
So when you say these things, I've just be honest, I'm going to push back, and you don't know, and I don't know.
It's just what we've been told, and what we're told is by bad actors who've repeatedly lied in the past, who are power mongers, who for some reason love war and love the profits of war.
So I'm skeptical.
That's my basic point.
But sorry, go ahead.
I think given the nature of the Islamic Republic, they have known full well that they are not wanted in Iran.
Again, numbers are impossible to gather because obvious reasons.
Why They Stay00:03:52
Iran has 90 million people.
My guess is a few million people are still loyal to this regime due to their ideological and religious beliefs.
The rest of the people are just over it.
These people, the Islamic Republic has failed in just about every single aspect.
Like you name it, they have failed.
They have drained entire lakes.
They have collapsed the economy to the point where a single American dollar now equates 1,650,000 reals.
There's too many zeros to even be able to fit in a calculator anymore for common daily transactions.
Iran has lost access to clean water.
Electricity is now a luxury in many parts of Iran, and so on and so forth.
Like they have removed a single incentive for people to want them.
In my brain, it makes sense when you are cornered like that as a dictator to look east and say, well, the North Koreans are safe, and there seems to be only one reason for it.
We must do exactly the same.
So I don't think you talked about the messianic.
I can't pronounce that.
It's a tricky one.
Yeah, go ahead.
The messianic nature and the color.
I wish that conversation had continued.
The color bailed on you early.
Yeah, for sure.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I wish he had persisted.
But yes, they are messianic.
When Qasem Kolemani was blown up to smithereens, his daughter was on Iranian state TV celebrating and congratulating people and saying, this is what my father wanted.
And this was a very high up.
This was a high-ranking official.
He used to sit right next to Khamenei constantly.
He was like the number one celebrity military guy in Iran.
They do want to die, a lot of these people.
They're insane.
And they don't, no, no.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Ideologies, however foreign they may be to our way of thinking, are not insane.
Explain.
I mean, there are premises, there are arguments, there are conclusions, and so on.
And so I'm not saying that I obviously don't agree with the ideology, but communism is not insane.
I mean, I think it's immoral.
But I mean, I've been around genuinely insane people.
And again, I'm sorry to be a nitpicker, but I've been around really insane people.
My mother was institutionalized.
I spent a lot of time around institutions.
That's not ideologues.
Because I think it diminishes the moral aspect of the ideology to call it insane.
But sorry, go ahead.
Well, let's leave aside the word insane.
Communism, I look at as a failed, repeated attempt to govern the affairs of man on this planet.
Shiite Islam is a failed attempt to govern the affairs of man.
It's an earthly ideology, is what I'm trying to say.
And they failed miserably at organizing society.
And every time they've done it, it's resulted in genocide and poverty and so on.
Shiite Islam also wants to run the affairs of man, but they also are very concerned about what happens after death.
And for them to say that martyrdom getting blown up by the Americans was the best thing that could have happened, which is what they're saying right now as we're talking to each other.
That's what I use the word insane to describe.
They really have this belief.
They think it's a fantastic thing for you to go straight to heaven because the Americans came and bombed you.
So they are messianic in that respect.
That being said, I don't think they wanted nukes for an aggression.
British Discovery Controversy00:06:11
I think they just wanted it in order to be able to rule Iran forever.
I think they wanted nukes just as, well, just like the North Koreans is all I can say.
Yeah, so that they can't be overthrown because there's a dead man's switch.
Yes.
And at the same time, again, it is my personal belief that if you push them right to the brink of extinction, they would in fact use it at that point.
I mean, certainly they would have to give that impression, right?
Because if they didn't give that impression, there would be little point having the dead man's switch, so to speak.
All right.
Okay.
So, sorry, I have a more of a historical view of how Iran got here in the first place, but I'm certainly happy to hear anything else that you wanted to mention about the current situation.
Well, I do also want to comment on whether Iran has ever aggressed against foreign.
You said that the last instance was back several hundred years ago.
More recently, one of the first things the Islamic Republic did was to take over the embassy of the United States.
Everybody knows that.
Go watch the movie Argo.
It is garbage to some extent.
The first two-thirds of Argo are great.
The last third is pure nonsense and it's very Hollywood.
But, you know, we all know about that.
A little earlier than that, Iran nationalized oil.
This is the Iranian British.
1951, yeah.
Yes.
Now, I don't know if you want to term that an act of aggression.
The British had discovered absolute theft.
They stole $12 billion from British companies.
$12 billion.
I think it was about a billion back in the day.
But yeah, they openly seized through force $12 billion of British assets.
Absolute act of rapacious theft.
Now, they said, according to the laws of the time, you have to offer sort of, you know, fair compensation and so on, but it was never really more than a pittance.
So, yeah, out and out theft of $12 billion worth of property.
Yes, and the guy who was behind that was the prime minister at the time who was trying to stage a coup d'état against the Shah.
The British had contracts with the Iranian imperial government of the time.
The British discovered oil.
The first oil ever discovered in the Middle East was discovered in Masjid Suleiman in the west of Iran.
So if you have an issue with your contract, you can renegotiate it.
You don't just take it over.
And it wasn't just the oil that they were trying to take over.
The leftists, backed by the Islamists at the time in the 50s, they were also trying to take over and institute their Marxist-Utopian dream government back in the 50s.
That one failed.
Unfortunately, in 1979, they tried again, and that time they didn't fail.
And largely because of the support of, well, significantly because of the support of women.
But anyway, go on.
Yes, and some foreign states were also happy to see that happen.
A lot of Arabs were certainly very happy to see it happen.
And I don't know what the American thinking was at the time, but we did have a very long border at the time with the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan and Armenia and Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
These countries didn't exist back then.
So they were directly our neighbors to the north.
And maybe in their thinking, having a green Islamic shield in Iran was the way to sort of push back against the influence of communism.
But the revolution that happened in 1979 was just as much Marxist, if not even more so, as it was Islamic.
It was a coalition of Marxists who had been fighting the Shah and attacking American tourists and killing British and American engineers in Iran under the Shah.
We're talking pre-1979.
They had this coalition with the Muslims and the Muslims, of course, eradicated them as soon as they came on top.
But these are acts of aggression.
I mean, they did the Iranians.
They've been talking about death to America, death to this, death to that.
Iran in the 1980s, while they were fighting the Iraqis, the Islamic Republic.
Sorry, every time I say Iran to mean Islamic Republic, I apologize to everybody who's going to be pissed off by this.
I recognize that, but it's hard to sort of say that.
In the 80s, towards the end of Islamic Republic's war with Iraq, Iranians attacked an American frigate, and that whole thing snowballed.
And that terrible mistake happened by the Americans where they brought down a passenger civilian Airbus.
And there's documentaries about that if people want.
That was directly the default of the Islamic Republic by provoking the American frigates in the Persian Gulf who were providing escort to Iraqi tankers as well as other Arab state tankers through the Persian Gulf, out the Strait of Hormos and into the open ocean.
The Iranians started that.
They went and picked a fight with the Americans.
They couldn't win.
They got obliterated in the sea.
And then they were flying military aircraft around the frigate, which unfortunately led to the Americans mistaking the Airbus as one of those aircraft.
But there was a whole operation going on.
But at the same time, I realized, Stefan, you know, this type of military conflict and who started what, if you go back in time, it becomes a never-ending cycle of, well, you did this, but you did that, and then so on and so forth, like the Israeli and Palestine.
Sorry, I understand all of that.
I'm just pointing out that it's fairly precious for America to accuse Iran of aggression against other countries.
When America has obviously had significant amounts of aggression and, as I said, been at war for all of its history, except for 14 years, where I'm sure they just were planning for the next one.
So my particular, this is a very big sprint through a lot of details, but I'll try and keep it very high level.
And again, I'm happy.
I appreciate the call.
I really appreciate the conversation.
And I sort of invite anybody else who wants to join in.
Why Free Stuff Backfired00:11:49
So my sort of very brief sprint through all of this is that the prime minister, Mossadegh, Mossadegh?
Is Dek?
Deutsch Dek?
You're not going to get it right, so don't worry about it.
Okay, I appreciate that.
Okay.
Barry.
I'll just call him Barry now.
So Mossadegh came in.
He was a socialist in his youth and was a nationalist and a socialist.
Came in with his big spending, right?
He wanted to expand the welfare state.
And obviously, that involves basically taking money from men and giving it to women.
And he received a lot of support from women, as socialist politicians tend to.
He got a lot of support from women.
And in 1951, they stole British petroleum.
It was the Arab, sorry, it was the Anglo-Iranian company.
We'll just call it BP for now.
So they stole $12 billion, a massive theft.
I mean, if you think of a bank robber, he's lucky to get away with a couple of million.
This is $12 billion, a staggering amount.
And of course, all of the capital and so on.
And when this happens, of course, the British withdrew all of their engineers.
And I'm sure that there was some sabotage, as people tend to do.
If your car's getting repossessed, you usually don't take unjustly, right?
You don't generally tend to take good care of it.
And so the Iranian people, and in particular, the Iranian women, were cheering this on.
This massive theft.
And of course, the Iranian government was saying, oh, but the BP company is not paying us enough.
Do you know that they pay more in taxes in England than they pay in fees here?
And they're ripping us off and exploiting us.
It's like, no, that's just a, I mean, from an ANCAP standpoint, that's just a mafia-style shakedown.
If you want to do business here, you're going to have to pay a certain percentage of your profits, so bad things will happen to you.
So people were like, hey, I want free stuff.
And the socialists came in and said, hey, I know how to get free stuff.
We'll take over this BP refineries and oil fields and $12 billion worth of stuff just sitting there waiting to be plucked.
And they plucked it.
And what happened?
Well, the inevitable thing happened when it was nationalized as the oil production collapsed.
And then they had made all of these promises and expanded all these programs and hoping to pillage the British assets didn't work out.
So they just started printing money.
And of course, there were embargoes and boycotts and so on, which was harmful to the economy.
Of course, I mean, if you go and steal $12 billion from people, they tend to get quite upset about it.
And so this is where, of course, the coup with the Shah came in, the CIA, and we don't have to get into all the details about that.
But then the Shah came in, who was an absolute monarch, and everyone said, oh, my gosh, the Shah is so oppressive.
He's such a tyrant.
Well, from 53 to 79, maybe 100 people were killed under the Shah who were killed for, I mean, he would of course say that they were radical theocrats and dangerous terrorists and communists who were using violence and that sort of argument.
Again, what do I know?
They all say they're freedom fighters.
He all says that they're bad guys.
But I did look up the numbers.
It's about 100.
About 100 people killed.
Now, of course, if you compare this to what's gone on under the new Iranian regime from 79 to present day, I mean, it's wildly different in terms of numbers.
Tens of thousands, probably, I mean, probably the numbers will never be known as far as all of that goes, but it is just wild.
So, yeah.
Post-79, so post-79 revolution, hang on, let me just finish the numbers.
1980 to 1985, 25 to 40,000 people were arrested, as opposed to a couple thousand, 2,200 or so on as a whole under the Shah.
When the Islamic Republic came in, it was massive.
Execution of political prisoners, fewer than 100 from 1971 to 1979, no mass killings.
And of course, you know, there was torture and so on.
But compared to what went on under the Islamic Republic, it was crazy.
Why did they imprison people under the Shah?
Anti-communism, opposition to the monarchy, armed insurgency.
And they focused on secular and leftist threats.
And religious conservatives were often spared.
Khomeini was spared twice.
Under the Islamic Republic, dissent against theocracy was punished.
Emmity against gods, any kind of protests, unveiling.
You could even get the death penalty for unveiling any activism for women's rights.
And of course, purges of Shah loyalists, reformers, protesters, the Green Movement in 2009, 2022, there was a movement, Women, Life, and Freedom, that was smashed.
And so it reminds me of Pinochet in Chile that everyone says it was the worst thing ever.
Or, you know, if you read Dostoevsky's reports or reports as a whole of political prisoners under the Tsar prior to communism, I think in the whole century it was a couple of dozen of people executed.
And then you compare that to millions slaughtered under communism.
And so, yeah, so my basic argument is that, and it's very unfortunate to the current generation who didn't have anything to do with it directly, of course, but the socialists came along, as he does.
He was a little Pied Piper.
Hey, I can give you free stuff.
And people get tempted by this.
And they don't say, well, no, hang on, hang on.
The British have invested here, and we are actually quite wealthy, and they're employing a lot of people and paying a lot of money to the government.
And the British invested here on the basis of being able to keep their property, because nobody invests $12 billion if they expect it to be stolen from them.
So the Pied Piper, Mossadegh, came along and offered people free stuff.
And in particular, the women swelled with throbbing joy over the prospect of free stuff.
And everybody forgot their morals.
Thou shalt not steal.
And it turned out the theft didn't work.
There was lots of blowback.
And then you get the Shah.
And then you get the mullahs.
So going back to, I mean, the resolution was, I think, first passed in the 30s to give government control to some degree over the foreign property.
I mean, just in terms of having to pay the government off just to be able to do business.
But when you get a socialist-leaning guy coming along and saying, oh, the foreigners are bad, you're being exploited.
I'm going to give you free stuff.
It's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
It's better to have a local dictator than a foreign non-dictator.
And he appealed to people's greed.
He appeals to people's primitive nationalism.
And he got people to forget their morals.
As socialists, they're very good at this kind of stuff, right?
It's the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
That you just have one rule, right?
Don't eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
And the serpent and the socialists, and this also happens on the right with the fascists and so on, but they're very good at talking people out of basic virtues.
And when the socialists came along to the Iranian population in the 50s and said, hey, man, you can get all this free stuff.
All we have to do is push back against those imperialistic British bastards and reclaim what is ours and stop them from exploiting us.
And as I talked about in my documentary in Hong Kong, the communists, the socialists, they come in and they rouse up a lot of resentment.
And through that resentment, they get people to forget their basic virtues, to forget their basic morals.
And everybody, and again, the women more so.
It was very popular among the women.
The women were cheering all the free stuff.
And they don't understand the means of production.
They don't understand how delicate it is as a whole to have an economy.
An economy runs on trust.
An economy runs on contracts.
An economy rests upon the expectation of future profits, which means it's back to what we talked about at the beginning.
The farmer doesn't plant if he has good reason to believe everything's going to get stolen from him.
And so they came along, these serpent-tongued leftists, Mossadegh and others, and they said, hey, you know, we get all this free stuff.
Get rid of those nasty British, take their stuff.
It turns out they took their stuff.
They didn't really pay for it.
They couldn't run it.
They couldn't produce anything with it.
I mean, it's just like a chapter out of Atlas Schroed, right?
Free stuff.
And then, you know, it's like what happened in Argentina, what happens in Cuba, what happens in a whole bunch of places.
People come along offering you free stuff, and then you lose your soul.
It's a demonic offer.
It's like, I will give you all of this free stuff, whether fame, money, sexiness, talent, or whatever.
I'll give you all this free stuff.
You just have to give me your soul.
And these people keep waltzing down the aisles of society, offering all this free stuff.
And again, it's a little bit more women as a whole for various reasons of evolution, but it's a little bit more women who were hungry for the free stuff.
And they talked to the Iranian people back in the day, right?
We're talking 70 years ago and change, right?
But they talked the Iranian people back in the day to cheer on the mass theft of other people's property.
And that creates a giant scar in the conscience of a nation.
And people feel bad.
They feel guilty deep down, right?
And then when people come along who want to punish them, they're more susceptible to that kind of stuff because they know that they've acted in an extremely dishonorable and predatory manner themselves.
And this, of course, is not to say that everything the British were doing was great.
I'm just talking about the corporation as a whole, honorably set up its business in Iran on the assurances of a protection of property.
And then when the Iranian population as a whole greedily wanted to steal all of their stuff, it sets the...
A big crime changes the path of a nation.
You know, like a big crime changes the path of a person.
If you go and kill someone, that changes your entire path.
And the rest of your life is conditioned by that terrible crime.
And a terrible crime changes the path of a nation until the lesson is learned.
Until they say, you know what?
We should have been working to ensure and expand property rights, not stealing from others for the sake of being bribed to avoid the responsibilities of life, which is to produce in order to consume.
And I don't see the Iranians as a whole saying, going back and saying, oh, you know, we were offered this free stuff.
We stole from the British.
We cheered it on.
And that set our country on a very bad path, on a very bad path, until we admit, not the wrongs we did, but the wrongs that were done, right?
Until we can admit the wrongs that were done, the country really can't be improved.
And I don't know where that goes, but until that massive crime, which set a lot of things in motion, and until that massive crime gets acknowledged, I don't know that there's much of a moral future for the land.
All right.
End of speech.
I'm happy to hear your thoughts.
No, absolutely.
What you're saying is true, as far as I know.
The Iranians have paid a heavy price listening to the false song of Marxism and Islamism.
Socialism's Cognitive Dissonance00:08:47
A very common Marxist lie.
No, but before that, it's the socialism.
That's my point.
And I'm sorry.
I get that.
And it's the same thing in the West.
The reason I'm so passionate about this is the same damn thing that's happening in the West.
So before that, it's the soft socialism, the democratic socialism, that opens the wounds.
But anyway, go on.
Yeah, I mean, the Islamic Republic and the revolution that brought it to power started with promises of free electricity and free water.
Now, look now, half a century later, they can't even provide it, let alone what they charge for it.
And they do charge quite a bit too.
But a disgusting lie that the Marxists and the socialists have fabricated, George Floyd-style lie, or Devon Stack would call it a satanic inversion of the truth.
The coup d'etat that happened in the 50s, the état in that coup d'état was the state, whispers the Shah.
The Shah was ousted by the coup people, which was Mossadik and his socialist Marxist ilk.
They have rewritten history to teach people that it was the Shah who staged a coup, which doesn't make sense because he was already in office.
So you can't stage a coup against yourself, can you?
But let me read you a few names about who used to be in prison under the Shah.
I'm sure you're going to recognize some of these names.
These people used to be in jail by the SAVAC, which was the intelligence agency of the Shah.
Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Khamenei.
These other names may be less familiar to you.
Shariati Bazargan, Masood Rajavi is the head of a terrorist Marxist organization currently still active in Europe.
These are, oh, and many members of the Tudah party.
Tudeh means proletariat in Persian.
My own grandfather is one of these members of the Tude party.
My grandfather was a traitor to his country and he was in cahoots with the Soviets and he was caught red-handed in a failed coup d'état to overthrow the monarchy and he was thrown in jail for six years.
I have no idea why six years only.
I wanted to be in jail a little longer than that.
But anyway, these people were in jail under the Shah.
And it's exactly these same people who now have the blood of who knows 50,000 people on their hands.
I would argue that if Tyler Robinson or George Floyd were in an asylum or in a hospital or in a jail, I don't really care before they did what they did, I think that would have benefited the people.
I think the Shah and his Savak oppression industry, as they call it, I think they had identified exactly the right people to put in jail.
And under the monarchist, in the monarchy, the rule was, or the stated rule was, socialists and Marxists, because of their ties to the Soviet Union, are outlawed.
You cannot have a political party that openly espouses Marxism.
And there is history to that.
The Tudor Party, backed by the Soviet Union, attempted and failed multiple times to carve out entire provinces of Iran and annex them to the Soviet Union.
The Marxists assassinated the prime minister of Iran.
The Marxists were attacking oil facilities.
They were killing Americans and British engineers and tourists because they were anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
And an American is just about the worst thing you can be in the eyes of these terrorists, the mujahideen, whose head was in jail again on the Shah.
They're still out there.
So, no, I think when people talk about how brutal the monarchy used to be, first of all, it's a drop versus the ocean of criminality in the Islamic Republic.
And even that drop, I object to, because if these are the type of people, if these animals were in jail, I think we can argue successfully that he had his hand, he had his finger on the right button, perhaps.
But yeah, nobody's going to argue successfully that we had full freedom of speech in Iran.
No, freedom of speech is somewhat unique to the Anglo-would it be fair for me to say Anglo?
I think it is.
Yeah, Anglo-Sign, yeah.
Yeah, because even some Eastern Europeans, as far as I know, they don't have this culture of celebrating free speech.
And this is the assignment I have given myself.
If I have a voice to use for the next 30, 40 years of my life, I will be yelling on the top of my lungs: First Amendment, Second Amendment.
Take it, copy it, paste it, put it in Iran.
I think Iranians need to be armed and they need to have freedom of expression.
Well, but they're never going to get freedom until the foundational sins of more than a century ago.
I'm talking long before the British petroleum theft.
They turned over the education of their children to the government in the early 20th century, a little bit later than most European countries and American countries, 1906 to 1910.
They turned over the education of their children to the government.
And then, lo and behold, within a generation, you've got socialism.
And then you have totalitarianism.
And until parents, private institutions, free market capitalist institutions are there to educate children, the moment you hand your children over to the state, you set your country on a very bad path.
And this is why I say, like, this is more than 100 years ago, so nobody's around who made those decisions and so on.
We're just living in the dark shadow cast by people's terrible decisions in distant history.
And so, you know, the raw material is there for a free society as a whole in general, as we sort of talked about at the beginning of this conversation.
But as long as people are still dabbling and turning their children, dabbling in socialism, collectivism, coercion, as long as people say, well, the government is good enough to educate our children, then who's going to say that the government can be bad as a whole?
And that just leaves the door open to more and more totalitarianism.
All right.
I have another caller.
Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
I really do appreciate the conversation.
It's always a great pleasure to me to speak with you, Stefan.
Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
And if there's ever any research help or any other help, if you think you might need an insider scoop about Iranian matters, you have my email.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate that.
The only thing I desire from Persian research is to learn how to sing like Freddie Mercury.
All right.
Thank you very much.
And we're going to move on to El Capitan.
If you wanted to unmute, I'm certainly happy to hear your thoughts.
Thank you for your patience.
Going once, going twice.
Sometimes it takes a little while for people to catch up.
All right.
I'll give you another moment.
I'll give you another moment.
If there's anybody else, and this doesn't have to be the topic of the day, I'm certainly happy to hear what topics people have as a whole.
Could be anything that's on your mind.
This is an open forum for philosophy as a whole.
All right.
Is he back?
If you want to unmute, make sure you unmute.
I'm happy to hear what's on your mind.
Can you hear me now?
Yep, gotcha, man.
Yeah, I was just going to say, I've been reading a lot of these posts from the Iranian diaspora, especially people in Canada.
And they're very happy with this attack and all these kinds of things.
And I'm asking myself, you know, if they support, if they support regime change in Iran, because they say that the regime was oppressing, you know, the opposition, they're engaged in violence, transnational repression, extrajudicial killings, all this kind of stuff.
Then why is it that I see so many people in the Iranian diaspora supporting the regime in India, which also uses violence to oppress opposition inside their country and outside?
So I'm curious to know how they can have this kind of cognitive dissonance, where on the one hand, they will support freedom for who they consider their people, but they don't support freedom for others who are experiencing what they would consider the same kind of violence.
Would Choose Stranger's Child?00:11:47
Sorry, I don't know much about this.
And if the other, if our previous fellow wants to come back and explain it, I'd be happy.
So are you saying that the hang on, hang on?
Are you saying that the diaspora of Iranians or Persians in the West are fans of the Indian government?
Yes.
Okay, I don't know anything about that, but I'm going to take you at face value.
Is there any theory that you have about why that is the case?
I think it's just that they have a hatred for the Islamic regime and anyone that they think hates on Islam or Muslims, they're willing to align with.
So I think it's just for them, it's a matter of convenience.
I don't think they have a principled stand.
Oh, so the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Yeah, so they don't have a principled stand in terms of human rights or values.
It's just whatever is convenient at the moment.
So I don't think that the Iranian opposition or the Iranian diaspora is particularly moral, in my opinion.
Okay, let me ask you this.
And I'm just playing devil's advocate here, so I'm just encountering this argument for the first time.
So let's just play that out.
So if you were in a car crash and you were trapped in your car and you smelled gasoline and there was some fire and a guy that you knew was a criminal came along and offered to pull you out, what would you say?
Well, I would take the help at that moment.
Right.
So you would not be principled in that, in general, you would say, I don't want to be in debt to or associated with criminals.
But in that case, you would take his help in an emergency, right?
So if we want to complete, if we want to have a complete the analogy, I think it would be more appropriate to say that if I'm in a burning car and someone else is in a burning car beside me and there is a criminal keeping me in my car,
I should call the criminal that's lighting that other car on fire to come over and fight the criminal that is keeping me in the car so that that other person, while that other person continues to burn in that other car.
So that's what I see it as.
Okay, so let's say that you're trapped in a car with someone and there's a criminal that you can get to come and free you.
Would you do that?
Is that criminal, is someone else going to suffer with my with because of that because of that request or because of me supporting that criminal in their criminal activity?
I mean, I think it comes back to like the moment, not for in the moment.
In the moment, you have that criminal and his criminal partners are keeping someone else pinned in a car.
And I'm going to, I'm pinned in a car and I have some criminal keeping me pinned in the car.
And I'm going to call on those criminals or on a couple of those criminals to come and fight these other criminals.
Meanwhile, those guys are still suffering in the car, right?
So I don't see how it benefits.
Hang on.
So let me make it a bit more personal because it is, I think.
So let's say that your child is trapped in a car.
And let's say that the criminals have some other child trapped somewhere and you call upon their help to trap, to free your child, even though that means that someone else's child might remain not free for the time that the criminals are helping you free your child.
Would you not do that for the sake of preferring your own child to the child of a stranger?
Yeah, I think that that's a moral dilemma.
And no, no, hang on.
I'm just asking, no, no, I'm asking what you would do.
Would you choose to save your own child, even if it meant somebody else's child might not be free for some time?
Am I guaranteeing that those other that other child is there's no guarantees, you just like all things in life, you have to make a decision without guarantees, right?
You can't guarantee that I'm not about to break into mime, but yet I guarantee that it's entirely possible.
My question is, yeah, I think hang on, let me just make sure I'm clear about this.
Yeah, okay, sure.
Would you collude with unsavory people to save your own child, even if that was at the expense of a stranger's child?
Yeah, that's a that's a difficult choice to have to make.
I don't, I don't know what I would do with anyone.
That's really not a difficult choice.
Well, you know, if if if I was if I was going to, um, if I'm con if if like I believe, I don't know about you, but I, well, I'm not going to speak for anyone else.
I believe in judgment, and I don't know that, I don't know that me condemning someone else's child to death and while doing everything I can hang on, hang on, hang on.
I can't let you just override the language like that.
Right.
So I didn't say to death, did I?
No, you didn't.
You said that's a hole.
Hang on, hang on.
So, so that's cheating.
Like you, with all due respect, and I'm enjoying the conversation.
Yeah, I'm changing.
Yeah, I'm changing the tangent.
You got to let me finish my sentences.
We can't really have a conversation.
Can we try to do that?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Okay, don't speak over me when I'm trying to talk.
I'll try to do the same.
So if you bring in, I condemn another child to death, that is not the framework that I set up.
Now, you can change the framework, but you can't cheat by just changing the terms.
Right?
So it's not good faith negotiation.
And I'm sorry to be an egg.
I really am.
And I'm enjoying the conversation, but it's not good faith negotiation.
If I say, would you ask for the help from a criminal, even if it meant some other child would suffer for the time being, and then you say, I would call, like, I, by asking, will cause the directly cause the death of another child.
That's changing the entire debate in a dishonest way because you're not saying, well, I'm going to escalate it to death and I'm going to say I'm the cause of it and so on.
So whether the Iranian diaspora wants the help of India or not will not change whether the Indian government remains oppressive in some way, right?
In other words, if the Iranian diaspora doesn't want the help of India, does that mean that India turns into a limited government Jeffersonian capitalist paradise?
No, they wouldn't, but I think it would cause them to hesitate knowing that there's greater opposition to their activities.
So what I'm saying is that there's so going back to your example, yes, I agree.
I did change the terms, right?
I escalated it to something outside of the terms that you had said.
No, no, the terms.
Hang on.
This was your analogy.
You had no, I know.
I'm saying, I'm saying, yeah, I'm saying I changed the terms that, you know, I'm agreeing with you.
You just did it again.
Hang on.
But you just did it again, bro.
You said I changed the terms, Steph, that you, Steph, had said.
That's not.
This was an analogy that you had adapted from my original analogy.
So when you say it's the terms that I, Steph, had set, that's also not true.
You changed the terms again because it was your analogy.
Okay, so there was no death in that analogy of yours.
It was just, can you save your own child, even if that means at the expense of another child being not free for some period of time or whatever, or being oppressed or suppressed for some period of time?
In other words, would you choose to save your own child, even if it meant colluding with distasteful or immoral people?
Would you choose to save your own child or not?
Even if it meant that there would be some expense to a stranger's child.
That was sort of the analogy, as far as I understood it.
And that's the analogy that I would like to deal with.
And I think that you're changing the terms because you don't want to answer that question.
I hear what you're saying.
I think the analogy that started out with if I'm in a burning car and another person's in a burning car, I think you had added the child to it to bring it to make it more personal.
Yeah.
And then I brought in the part about, you know, would it result in the death of the other child?
Right.
So I asked, so, so I, so I think that's the flow of this.
If I'm mistaken, you can correct me.
Well, you brought in other people, right?
And then we were talking about other people.
And the reason I changed it to your child is that the Iranian people view their people as they are generally as, you know, in a haplogroup or genetic way as kind of their extended family, right?
That's what tribes do, right?
So that's why I made it.
Would you rather, and we could just make it simple.
Would you rather your child be in danger or a stranger's child be in danger?
Yeah, so I think that brings it down to the crux of the matter.
Yeah, you're right.
I think most people would say, I don't want my child to be in danger.
And if that means a stranger's child is in danger, they would rather their child, their own child, not be the one in danger.
I think that's hang on, but what about you?
Yeah, in that situation, you know, I'm not going to say no.
I wouldn't.
But I don't think that it's a perfect analogy.
I'm not trying to catch you out here or anything.
I just want to make sure I understand.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
I just want to make sure I understand we're on the same page.
So you would choose to save your own child, even if that meant risking another child or extending the suffering of a stranger's child.
Yes, to go with that analogy, yes.
I'm not going to, you know, say no to or sort of I'm not going to obfuscate or try to dodge that, you know?
So, and then listen, by the way, I completely agree with you, and I would never believe anyone who said otherwise, just so you know.
Like, we're literally literally hard.
Hang on, we're literally hardwired to prefer our own offspring to the offspring of strangers.
And so, anyone who said, no, no, I would, I would never, I would allow my own child to be in danger if that would reduce the sufferings of the child.
That would be somebody who would just be lying at a little very foundational level.
And I'm not accusing you of that, of course, right?
So, so you're saying that you would choose, you, you're saying that you would choose your own genetic proximity over the suffering of strangers, which is perfectly valid and fair and right and evolutionary and so on.
And in a larger sense, I think that's what the Iranian diaspora is doing.
And again, whether we agree with it or not, there's certainly, because we talked about some genetics earlier, there's certainly some precedent for it.
Yeah, if this was the case, if this was the decision, I would say, yes, I can understand that.
I think that opposing oppressive regimes enhances your credibility, one, right?
And I think oppressive regimes are subject to popular opinion when people who aren't immediately invested in that particular cause or issue also rally around the cause.
So we've seen that when in South Africa, for example, which you may be more familiar with, when the apartheid was brought down, it wasn't brought down by, you know, just people who were diaspora black South Africans wanting to, you know, or, you know, South Africa, diaspora South Africans protesting against apartheid.
It was a coordinated effort on the part of many people who had no link to South Africa saying that, hey, we don't agree with this particular system.
We believe that these people are being oppressed or treated unfairly.
And we unite to support that particular group.
I think that's the case that I'm making is that when you rally around oppressed people, wherever they may be, even if that oppressed group is not, you don't have any immediate genetic link to them or any kind of ethnic or tribal link to them.
I think it enhances the pressure on the people that are doing the oppressing to stop.
You know, I think that I appreciate, I appreciate that argument.
Sorry to interrupt.
So let me ask you this.
And don't tell me where you live in the world.
Do you believe or have you experienced that your government, wherever you live, has done things that are oppressive or negative in your country?
Yes, 100%.
And I would, I'll give you the example.
You look at the truckers protest in Canada and you look at how people were forced, coerced excessively into getting vaccinated.
People that didn't want to.
People weren't allowed to go outside.
And I felt that that's oppression.
They weren't allowed to go to public parks or anything else.
And I believe that was people experiencing oppression.
And then the people that actually protested in Ottawa were vilified and they were attacked and they were charged.
And there are people still being charged.
And the charges are the government.
The government attacked.
The government attacked.
You said they.
You weren't there?
I didn't go.
I wasn't able to go to the actual protests in Ottawa themselves, but I joined people who went outside where I was.
I wasn't able to go to the actual to go to Ottawa for logistical reasons, but I didn't get the injections.
So I defied the authorities in terms of what they were trying to coerce me into doing.
Well, no, hang on.
So it was legal to not get the injections.
Oh, but they made it very difficult.
Well, I mean, when you're trying to feed your family and you're being told that you're going to lose your means of survival with the job, you know, sorry, sorry.
Hang on, hang on.
I'm trying to, I'm just trying to understand abstract stuff.
I understand.
I'm just trying to understand your perspective.
So did you have to take the jab in order to keep your job?
Well, I faced the prospect, but I was able to find somewhere that I didn't have to take the job.
I was able to quit your job and moved somewhere else.
I resigned and went somewhere else.
Drawing Red Lines00:16:06
Okay.
I didn't know that.
There was a place for you to land, which I'm very happy.
I was able to find something, you know, but I don't necessarily, I didn't, did I necessarily want to have to do any of that?
No.
So I was, I was forced in a way to, you know, change what I wanted to do.
And then you're, then you weren't allowed to, at one point, leave the country without having the vaccination.
So they sorry, just interrupt for those of you who don't know, not just leave the country, but you couldn't take bus, trains, flights in the country.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
So I wasn't able to see my mom for years.
Right.
Right.
So, so, yeah, I do.
So you asked, like, did I go through some kind of in my country?
Yes.
So I would say that.
So my point being, my point in engaging you in the conversation was that I think that there is greater ability to lift more people out of oppressive circumstances if people of unrelated backgrounds get together to support each other in their quest for, you know, liberation from, you know, their oppressive circumstances.
I think that there is greater ability to lift more people out of oppressive circumstances.
Have you put together groups?
Have you gone out to protest the things that you consider unjust within your own society?
I post on X, you know, so I join spaces and I let my, and I use X to get the word out.
I mean, I, you know, I haven't gone and set up a protest.
You know, I have protested personally in the past about different issues, but I haven't gone out at this moment for personal reasons or for circumstances.
You know, I'm just not in a position to do it at the moment.
But yeah, I mean, I sympathize.
Sorry to interrupt.
I do sympathize with all of that.
And we all have to make our compromises, right?
I mean, you can't reasonably be a purist when it comes to protesting things that you disagree with.
Like we all have to make our compromises.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I think people have to decide where to allocate their time.
But I think that there is not where to allocate our time.
There are things in every country in the world, there are things that governments do that are bad or immoral to a certain segment of the population.
And obviously, there are things that your government has done that you consider bad.
And I would be in the same situation.
But we all have to make our compromises, usually, right?
I mean, maybe there are some extremists who don't, but we all have to make our compromises and we have to find a way to produce as much good as we can and also comply with things that we disagree with.
Yes, I agree with you that there is, and I think the point you're correct me if I'm wrong, but I think people need to draw a line up to what point they're willing to suffer or to entertain the authorities and what they're doing.
And at some point, it becomes unbearable.
And then you decide, well, this is where my red line is.
And so it dropped.
And sorry to interrupt, but so you haven't hit your red line yet, which is fine.
And I'm not disagreeing with you with anything like that.
And, you know, governments around the world over COVID did some pretty egregious stuff and it didn't hit your red line.
I suppose, you know, my concern as a whole, and listen, I appreciate your moral sensitivity and I appreciate you bringing this up.
My concern as a whole is that it's easy to lecture other communities about the right thing to do, but we all have to recognize that we all make compromises in the pursuit of the good.
We have to.
I mean, I don't agree that the government should run the road system, but I drive on the roads, right?
I can't teleport, right?
So there's lots of things that I disagree with.
I don't agree that the government should run the healthcare system, but I have a doctor, right?
So we all have to make our compromises in a very complex world.
And it's a whole lot easier to lecture other people what their compromises should or shouldn't be.
Yes, I agree.
We're all in this challenging situation where we all have to try and pursue maximum virtues, maximum promotion of virtues in a challenging and complex system where compromises are inevitable.
And I suppose my concern would be that it seems like if I was in the Iranian community and so on, and I know a little bit about the Iranian community, actually quite a bit about the Iranian community for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here.
And if they say, look, we don't particularly agree with everything that the Indian government does, but if we can work with them to free 90 million people that we care about, because they're our extended haplogroup family, something like that, right?
Then for me, it's pretty hard to say, well, you just shouldn't do that.
Because they're saying, look, whether we approve of or whether we work with the Indian government or not is not going to change the life of the average Indian person.
However, if we work with the Indian government, perhaps we can free 90 million people from decades of oppression.
I mean, you can understand how that would be tempting, right?
Yeah, that's where I would, so two points.
One, you said that my red line wasn't crossed.
No, my red line was crossed, and that's why I left, right?
That's why I left where I, where I, when my situation was, and I went somewhere else, right?
Oh, like you left the country.
Yeah, I left the country to find a new situation.
So, and I wasn't able to go back.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
So, but, but, but you didn't stay and fight.
And listen, I'm not disagreeing with you about that at all, but you didn't stay and fight.
I wasn't in a position to be able to do that.
You know, it would the cost to the cost to survive.
I'm not disagreeing.
No, I'm not saying you are.
I'm not saying you are.
I'm just saying that for me, it wasn't tenable.
Like, I didn't have a situation where I'd be able to survive.
Listen, listen, listen, hang on, hang on.
It would have been very tough, and you made a choice, and I'm not disagreeing with that choice at all.
But you made a compromise.
You didn't stay and fight for what you thought was right.
You decided to leave, which again, I'm not disagreeing with you about that at all.
But you had to make a compromise in that you didn't stay and fight, but you went someplace that was better.
And we all have to make these kinds of decisions when it comes to fighting public or private immorality.
If we have a friend who's doing things that we disagree with, how long do we stay and try and help that friend get to a better situation in life?
Or are we concerned they're going to drag us down?
Like, there's lots of complex moral choices in the world.
And let me ask, but let me ask you this, just sort of close off the stuff about the expat community, the Iranians.
Now, if they work, and again, I have no idea what's going on, but I assume it's something to do with borders.
Let's say that they show that they work to some degree with the Indian government.
And let's say that frees Iran to some degree and ends the theocracy and it returns to more of a free market, secular, democratic, you know, a better place, a place that you and I would feel much more comfortable living and where, you know, people don't get lashes for not covering up like women.
So if they work with the Indian government and free 90 million people, I'm not saying would you agree with that, but could you see that that could be a net positive?
I see that it could be a net positive, but my point, my point was with regards to this community, is that I think there's an opportunity to lift more than the 90 million people out of this kind of oppression.
And it's able, and you're able to lift multiple communities out of their oppression or the amount of oppression they face by joining together to oppose these kinds of oppressive regimes.
I think there's more to be gained by you.
You didn't oppose your oppressive regime.
You left.
No, I did.
I did oppose.
You're talking about other people opposing oppressive regions.
No, I did oppose the oppressive regime when I had the opportunity.
When I was there, I did oppose the oppressive regime.
You know, but I wasn't, but I wasn't.
No, you left, bro.
No, I did leave.
Don't gaslight me here.
Don't do it.
And listen, I'm not disagreeing with you leaving.
I'm just saying it's a whole lot easier to lecture other people about taking these firm moral stands.
No, I think that is taking.
No, you're somebody who lectures other people.
No, I think it is what they should be doing to maximize the freedoms of the world.
And I have every right to ask you what you have done.
If you're saying, well, they got to fight these oppressive regimes.
And it's like, but you left.
Yeah, and I think you didn't stay and fight.
I think that is also that no that I think that is a form of opposition.
You know, leaving, removing a tax base, this kind of thing, not funding that, you know, political.
Yes, but you took an easier path.
That's the path that was available to me.
You know, that ensures.
No, that's not.
That ensures.
No, hold on a second.
Let me finish my point.
Let me finish my point though.
No, because if no, because if you're saying something that isn't true, I'm going to interrupt you.
Like if you say, Steph, I want to start a mathematical theorem.
No, I'm still going to talk.
If you say to me, Steph, I'm going to start a mathematical theorem.
Assume that two and two make five.
I'm not going to listen beyond that.
I'm going to have to interrupt you and say, but you can't base a mathematical theorem on two and two make five.
You had choices.
Some of those choices were very tough.
Some of those choices were very, were easier, right?
I mean, Tamara Lich made a choice that has been very tough.
And people who got debanked and so on, they made choices that were very tough.
And you said, that's too tough a choice for me.
And I'm not disagreeing with you.
I'm not trying to shame you or anything like that.
I'm not trying to say you did anything wrong or anything bad.
But if you're going to say people should fight injustice and you took the easier route of leaving rather than staying and fighting, I would just say it's probably important to have some humility about that and have some sympathy for people who are trying to free 90 million people from a theocratic dictatorship and say, well, I think that their methods are just not quite up to my moral standards.
And it's like, you know, I would have a little sympathy for, you know, they love their country.
They love their people.
They love their culture.
They probably want to go back, especially in March in Canada.
They probably want to go back to the slightly better climate.
And, you know, it's their ancestral home and so on.
And so I think just as a whole, I don't know whether the diaspora is doing the right or wrong thing.
Because I said, as I said, I don't know what it is that you're talking about.
But my concern is that it's just, it's a lot easier to lecture other people about moral purity, but it's very tough to advance the cause of virtue in this world.
And I think we should have sympathy for people and try to understand where they're coming from rather than just say they shouldn't be doing this.
It's wrong.
And 100%.
And it's like, it's complicated, right?
Yes.
Now, can I make one last point?
Sure, please do.
So I started out by saying I think it's a bit hypocritical.
That's one.
So I didn't say that they're bad people for what they're doing or whatever, you know, being self-interested to that extent.
I didn't say they're bad people.
I said basically my point was I think there's a better way.
One, I'm not judging them on saying that they're evil or anything of that nature.
I just think that there's a better way to go about it.
Okay.
And the other thing, but the other thing, I never said any of that.
I don't think you were saying any of that.
Yeah, so I'm not saying you did, but I'm saying like you're saying that there's a moral purity.
Yeah, but you're saying I put them to a purity test.
I didn't put them to that test that morally they're wrong.
I'm not putting them to that test that everything they're doing is wrong.
Do you think bringing up South Africa puts them in a moral category?
I'm saying that there's a better way.
I'm saying I'm making a case for unity in the face of oppression by, as I mentioned, non, like they're not the same ethnic or same tribal groups, but there's like a diversity of groups putting pressure on a particular regime to affect change.
That's what I'm saying.
So I'm saying that's an example.
I'm not saying that they're bad people because they didn't do it that way.
But the other thing that I was going to say is that you're saying that I chose not to fight because I left, but then the Iranian diaspora did the same thing.
They didn't choose to fight.
They left too, right?
They're not in Iran.
Well, yes, but now you're complaining about them perhaps align with another government in order to free their homeland, which is something you're not doing.
Yeah, so this would be this.
So if we're talking about, like, let's say I left because I didn't agree with the vaccine mandates, but then, you know, I align myself with some government that imposed vaccine mandates that's hectoring or haranguing the government that I left or the government, you know, the country that I left for its policies, right?
So I think that it would be hypocritical for me to say that, oh, this, this government over here that has, like, if I went to a country that imposed, you know, mandates, you know, it's just, I just didn't happen to have those mandates on me because for whatever reason, like, I think that would be hypocritical on my part.
Okay, so you're calling the Iranian diaspora moral hypocrites.
I think they're, I think there's some hypocrisy there.
I don't think, I don't think it's.
Okay, so that's bad, right?
That's negative.
Being a moral hypocrite is bad.
It's not good.
You know, so yeah.
So I'm going to come to the, I think we sort of come to the end of this is just round around.
I would just say in general to people, and I appreciate the conversation.
It's an interesting conversation.
Just in general as a whole, it's very easy to point fingers and it's very hard to do good yourself.
And listen, I sympathize with this fellow, and I was not obviously a fan of the vaccine mandates and spoke about them from the very beginning as unjust incursions on even regular old civil liberties and freedom of movement in particular.
So I just always find it kind of odd as a whole.
And I'm just telling you my personal experience.
I'm not trying to be some big lecture guy, but I do always find it kind of odd when people start pointing fingers and saying, well, I know better how to do X, Y, and Z morally, because, you know, these are things that are challenging and complicated.
You know, people could look at me and say, well, Steph, you know, the internet was developed by the military-industrial complex and you're against war.
And it's just, it's very easy to point fingers and it's very tough to do good in your own life.
Why I'm Not an Expert on Iran00:06:46
So, all right, so let's take one last caller, Sean.
If you wanted to, and again, I appreciate all the callers today.
It's been very enjoyable and a good workout.
So if you wanted to tell me what's on your mind, don't forget to unmute and let's talk.
All right, you may or may not be.
Oh, there we go.
I'm sorry, I can't speak so well English as you.
I'm so many years in Germany with my German accent or Persian.
I can continue it.
But I have a question.
Do you know where which groups controls in Iran?
Sorry, do I know which groups control in Iran?
Yes, yes.
I mean, I assume that the theocratic Islamists are the ones in control.
Do you mean in terms of ideology or do you mean in terms of culture or ethnicity or something like that?
Which agent, for example, what's CIA rules or what's MI6 or what's Russia, with which figure they take their plan to control Iran?
But you know, as you check now, what's Khamenei that was anything in Iran that he was not in strong when, for example, Macron sent a text message to President Trump that, hey, come deal speak or we deal about Iran, that means Macron has more stronger power in Iran than Khamenei, you know?
It's fine that I mean, I think you check just, you follow just the mainstream news and you don't know anything about Iran.
So you're saying that I only follow mainstream news sources and I don't know anything about Iran.
Yes, sir.
Check your comments.
I take here some comments.
That's one is that for 26 or 28 November 2017.
Okay, sorry, sorry.
So sorry, sorry to interrupt.
So look, the last thing I want to do is put out misinformation.
So if you've been listening to the show, can you correct the things that I got wrong about Iran that I've been talking about?
Yo, bro, I'm in connection with Iran every second more than you.
I was born there.
Okay, that's not what I asked.
What did I just ask for?
What's clear?
What's simply your question?
I'm sorry.
I just asked the question.
You're not listening?
Okay, Iran.
Okay, so I don't bother having conversations with people who don't listen.
I mean, it's a real shame because, of course, if I have put out anything that is incorrect, and listen, if I have put out things that are incorrect, please, please, please email me at hostho at freedomain.com, F-R-E-E-D-O-M-A-I-N.
Host at freedomain.com.
But, you know, if somebody's going to call up and you know nothing and you only follow mainstream sources, it's like, well, the one thing that I can't really be accused of is only following mainstream sources.
Am I an expert in Iran?
I certainly am not.
I certainly am not.
I am a moral philosopher.
I am not a geopolitical strategist or a formal historian of Iran.
So I'm far from an expert in Iran.
I'm far from an expert in war and all these kinds of things.
I'm trying to bring moral principles to bear on these sorts of questions.
So, you know, if people call up and they're sort of, you know nothing.
And it's like, it's okay.
That's fair.
I mean, of course, relative to all there is to know about Iran, I know next to nothing.
Fully and completely.
I do speak Persian.
I don't read Farsi.
So absolutely, I understand.
I know a little bit about the Iranian community for a variety of reasons.
I spent years in and around the Iranian community.
But again, that does not make me any kind of expert.
I think I'm pretty good at moral philosophy and principles as a whole.
But when people come, oh, you know nothing and so on.
And Macron controls more.
So if things that I've said on the show are not accurate or not correct, please correct me and I will certainly put out any corrections that are needed.
If there's things that I haven't covered, right, so I didn't go into details on who controls Iran at the moment, right?
Other than, you know, it's a theocracy.
So if you want to add, right, this is just sort of basic politeness in conversation and, you know, basic productivity in conversation.
So if there's things that I've got wrong, please, please, please always call in to correct me.
I don't want to put out anything that's incorrect.
So please correct me.
That's what I asked.
If there's things that I haven't talked about, then don't insult me for being wrong or not knowing anything.
If you want to, like, let's say that I've been talking about Iran, but I haven't talked about famous soccer teams from Iran, right?
And you say, oh, you know nothing.
You haven't even talked about the famous soccer teams from Iran.
I'd be like, no, I haven't.
I mean, if I did get that wrong, then you would correct me.
But if I haven't talked about a particular topic, I certainly welcome people as a whole to call in and to tell me about that topic, right?
If you want to talk about who controls Iran, I think that's interesting and I would be happy to hear about that.
But it's just kind of odd to me that people call up and they're just kind of insulting and then don't even listen when I say, what did I get wrong that you've heard?
And he says, goes off and doesn't even remember the question.
Like 10 seconds later, that's just somebody who's not worth having a conversation with.
And so, all right, well, I'll stop here.
I appreciate everyone today.
Thank you for a great and interesting set of topics.
Again, I look forward to corrections.
And, you know, the first caller wanted to give his perspective on IQ, which was very interesting and worthwhile.
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Thank you so much.
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