History's Most Expensive Party

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed.

podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Heath, and I'll be hosting this party.

And I'm joined by four guys who look like the premise of a joke when they walk into a bar: Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Eli.

As long as it isn't in Edinburgh, I think it'll be a good joke.

We're more of a joke when we order at the bar, right?

It's like one beer, three waters, and a plate of tofurky jerky or something.

Jokes keep on coming.

Yeah.

Actually, the joke's on you, Heath, because I look like a joke no matter where I go.

It's fair.

Oh, there you go i'm the rabbi

thank you yeah

it's not it's vaguely anti-semitic joke until eli explain it's cool it's cool all right there he is

all right no hey podcast listeners no i'm gonna just go right into this

we're gonna go right into it

all right

Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today?

Today, Today, we're talking about history's most expensive party.

All right.

So what was history's most expensive party?

It was a multi-day affair that took place from October 12th to the 14th of 1971.

It was hosted by the Shah of Iran in a desert venue near the tomb of Cyrus the Great and marked the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, which, if you think about it, is a really fucking weird thing to throw history's most lavish party over.

Right?

It's like, it's it's not a birthday it wasn't a coronation it wasn't an anniversary of his reign it wasn't a wedding and it wasn't even a date that could be pinned down with any kind of historical certainty nobody knows for sure what year the persian empire began let alone what day and yet the party took the title for history's most expensive back in 1971 and it's held that title for 54 years and counting You barely even have to account for inflation.

Man, if the 25th anniversary is a silver one, the 2500 anniversary is like a nine-carat singularity or you're cheaping out.

You hear that, Anna?

If you're listening, I'll take our 25,000th anniversary off.

I'll sleep in, I promise.

Well, there you go.

Yeah.

So first we have to tackle the why of it all, because as extravagant as this thing was, I don't think it could fill a whole episode.

So we're going to open with a bit of that dreaded context.

Oh, I know this one.

It's because you've been reflecting lately on the intersection between the celebration of empire and colonialism and how the inevitable decline of empire mirrors and perhaps even portends the annihilation either way, not just your own personal soul, but the very soul of humankind itself, and that the party is really a metaphor for the desperate last gaspism of a sort of cultural midlife crisis.

It's like he's punching you with a poem.

No, it's okay.

Tom, it's good.

No, but it's good to know that you're ready to tag in.

I got you.

I got you.

I just need a speaking stick.

Word count, brothers.

Word count, brothers.

So, but for me, I feel like if you want to understand why the Shah would pour a huge percentage of the kingdom's wealth into a made-up anniversary, you have to understand how he came to power.

And for that, we have to rewind all the way back to World War II.

Feels like we've been doing that for a while.

Am I right?

Our nation has fallen to fascism.

It has, yeah.

Now, it's worth noting here that women be shopping

Iran was not allied with Germany during World War II.

But their leader, Reza Shah Pahlavi, did have strong ties with Germany, and it was generally perceived by the Allied powers to be sympathetic to the Nazis.

And that was enough to merit an invasion if you were Brown.

So in 1941, Russia and England invaded in a joint operation.

The Iranian military, for its part, absolutely melted before the war-hardened and entirely unprovoked invading force.

An unprovoked and unsupported attack on a Middle Eastern nation by a coalition of the willing on spurious pretenses?

What?

I'm sure glad we took the whole damned to repeat itself adage seriously.

That's all.

Oh, strap the fuck in.

So, okay, so

it was Santana the guitarist who said that, Prince?

So, upon seeing how poorly their army fared, the nation's top generals realized that they were going to have to surrender, but nobody had the guts to talk to the Shah about it.

So, instead, they summoned his son, the crown prince, and discussed how to go about waving the white flag.

But when dad heard about that shit, he flipped out and he attacked the general that he thought was behind all of it.

And I mean physically attacked, attacked the dude with a writing crop and not in a sexy way.

Good clarification.

Yeah, thank you.

He stripped the dude of his medals.

In a sexy way.

And not in a sexy way.

And very nearly personally executed him, also not in a sexy way, before relenting to pressure to have somebody else shoot him in the back of the head instead, like you know, sexually,

not sexy.

Following along, sex-wise, okay.

Getting beat with a riding crop by a Shah,

I feel like that's got to be kind of tricky.

Like, like a fine line of letting him win, but not too hard, because then

you got to be like medium getting beat up by a riding.

The poor guy was just confusedly yelling out his safe word the whole time, like pomegranate, damn it.

I said pomegranate.

So upon hearing about that, the Anglo-Russian force decided that the Shah would probably be a hard guy to work with.

So they forced him to abdicate.

He would be sent into exile in South Africa, where he would die only a few years later.

But the coalition believed his son Mohammed Rezapalavi, a kind of dithering, unassuming, Western-educated, weak-willed 22-year-old, would be a perfectly pliant puppet.

So they allowed him to assume the throne.

But of course, this was like a hurried and tainted way to rise to power.

So there was no lavish coronation ceremony, a fact that would bother him for decades to come.

Didn't even get one of those Jostin class rings, man.

It's straight.

Why did they have a monopoly on that shit?

I don't know.

Yeah.

You want to start a class ring company, or you want to kill ourselves?

One family has

the first class ring.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And everyone else has been like, pimp.

Now, ultimately, two obsessions would rise from the way he came to power.

One was a lasting desire to have some kind of over-the-top giant party celebrating him that's filled with foreign dignitaries and royalty and shit.

The other was making sure his military would be strong enough not to crumble in the face of an invading Western force next time.

And both of those obsessions would work together to cost him his throne.

The latter far more than the former, of course, because armies cost a lot of ongoing money.

Okay, okay, guys, hear me out here.

All right.

We're buying missiles, and you're going to love this one.

Gold-plated solo cups for the party.

It's going to be a fucking ranger.

It's the best.

Ranger.

Fancy for this cup.

So, so now, I should also point out that over the first few decades of his reign, the Shah's foreign puppet master kind of shifted from England to America.

So after the Second World War, the UK and the USSR were not in joint control of a goddamn thing.

The Middle East was more or less carved up between them with very little thought as to the independence or desires of anybody who actually lived there.

England ended up with Iran in the divorce, which meant that British oil companies ended up with Iran.

Everyone shifting back and forth uncomfortably, like every team that was forced to eventually pick me and kick all the time.

We can play with the odd man.

We play with that.

No.

He's coming.

Okay, you were an untapped untapped resource it turns out in well yeah as it happens a lot of oil so the british control of iranian oil fields came to an abrupt

so the the british control of iranian oil fields came to an abrupt but temporary halt in 1953 when the prime minister mohamed mossadegh decided to nationalize those oil fields and just keep the country's enormous mineral wealth for himselves now England, of course, said no,

but in 1953, England wasn't really in any place to enforce their no.

So instead, they turned to their good buddy America and said, wow, nationalizing oil fields, that sounds like a precursor to communism, doesn't it?

Now, that convinced the CIA to plan, finance, and execute a coup that would remove Mossadegh from office.

And it's worth noting that during this coup, the Shah went on vacation.

And he came back like after it was clear that everything worked out for his side.

So at this point, it was clear to everybody, including average Joe Iranian, that their national leader was serving at the pleasure of the U.S.

president.

I don't want to make you upset, United States, but a country on the other side of the world is considering a social safety net, so you might want to do something about that.

Yep.

And that's when the U.S.

stepped in, and the Middle East has been at peace ever since.

Checkmate, liberal historian.

Haven't even gotten a thank you.

Now, of course, even with the nationalization effort thwarted, the Western powers realized they were going to have to cut Iran in on a bigger slice of the petroleum pie.

state control of their own natural resources not on my watch bold eagles assemble yeah right the anti-captain planet steps in yeah grab some intel though let's grab like 10 of intel

yeah yeah

it's a golden shit

so credit where credit is due in the years following this coup the shy actually pulled off a few very clever moves to manipulate the price of oil to drive that up while shirking the blame onto all his arabic neighbors right so the end result was that the nation was suddenly rolling in newfound wealth.

And you're back to being a good government again.

Funny how that works, right?

We just found it.

Yeah.

Don't do an OPEC soon.

Don't do that.

Yeah, right.

Well, that's basically all

super mad.

But like all suddenly rich autocracies, the wealth was spectacularly top-heavy in Iran.

All the money was concentrated in the cities.

So people from the countryside flocked there looking for work.

But since they all kind of flocked at the same time, there was a glut of labor, which meant that even if you could find a job, it was likely to pay jack shit, which meant that even aside from the endemic corruption, money was concentrating ever more at the very top.

And that means that you increasingly had desperate poor masses butting right up against homes with fucking stairways cut from solid crystal and shit.

Which in turn makes the crystal smudgy.

What Noah is saying is that it's bad for everybody when poor people are alive.

You know, Jesus

would have fucking I Brian kill me?

No.

Just describing capitalism.

You have to describe it sometimes.

Okay, but nowhere was the nation's profligacy more apparent than in its military.

Stung with the humiliation of the nation's almost uncontested invasion in 1941, the Shah was downright pathological about making sure that he had the biggest, baddest military in the region.

And since he was pretty adept at tricking the Americans into thinking a Russian invasion was perpetually right around the corner, which was a really easy thing to convince Americans of at the time, America made pretty much everything in its non-nuclear arsenal available for purchase.

This historical moment brought to you by Lockheed Martin.

Yeah.

Lockheed Martin.

When the world loses, we win.

Yeah.

So the end result is that Iran bought weapons and weapon systems like a kid buying candy.

They perpetually had like more fighter jets than they had qualified pilots, right?

They would buy whole systems that they had like immediately mothballed because they didn't have the personnel required to assemble them, let alone operate them.

All their jets have that grandma plastic couch covering on them.

No, they did.

They did.

J.D.

Vance condom.

Bunch of guys sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with like a hex key and fighter jet parts all over the living room.

Oh, I told you we should have called your dad.

It says Titan Flugin with star.

I don't know what any of that is.

We have a hacker.

I just know Titan.

Customer service.

Now, I should say that the Shah's shitty reputation within his country wasn't just due to his wasteful spending.

Sure, you don't endear a lot of people to you.

by pissing away millions on giant statues of yourself while the nation's vital infrastructure has fallen apart.

But

he also had an abysmal human rights record that included arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, barbaric interrogation practices, summary executions,

and other shit that America now freely does, making this really awkward to condemn.

But it needs to be said that he was a really shitty human being, in addition to being a very incompetent one.

So many glass houses.

I'm not sure which one to aim at, guys.

One of the not American ones, Cecil.

Yes, thank you.

Obviously.

Now, of course, even an incompetent leader can earn the love of his people when things are going well.

And for a decade or so, things actually were doing very well in Iran.

The average citizen could see marked improvements in roads and electricity and shit.

And they could see that the nation was modernizing, even if they weren't.

like actually benefiting from it themselves right there's just something about seeing more paved roads with more cars on them that makes everybody feel like things are looking up for the country we hear uh none of us were alive when that was a a thing, but like we hear.

No, I was like in the 80s.

Like I remember the 80s.

But

I'm kidding.

I would have lived in Detroit in the 80s.

I don't remember.

No, but over time.

But over time, the combination of gushers of money,

right?

Terrible fiscal policy and top-heavy corruption led to basically all the bad economic outcomes at once.

Just squirt coins.

Inflation.

You got like inflation, high unemployment, high crime, stagnant wages, plus an ever-increasing mass of young, unemployed men living in slums at the outskirts of the city and watching other motherfuckers have all the trappings of wealth.

Please take notes.

I just somebody should take notes.

I feel like there should be notes.

Repeats itself.

So this led to an inevitable dissatisfaction with the nation's leader.

And since Iran had one man rule, all the blame fell on the shoulders of the Shah.

But no worries.

He knew exactly how to win over the destitute and disaffected subjects by throwing himself a lavish party that cost about 2% of the country's entire GDP for that year.

Fuck.

All right.

Well, stagflation, wealth inequality, angry young men.

That sounds fucking bad.

Somebody should take notes.

I feel like that's a good thing.

Where the fuck is our lavish party?

Where's our lavish party?

Well, they're building a banquet hall onto the White House as we speak.

Google, Google, Google, Google.

All right.

Well, I guess we'll find out where our fucking lavish party is after a quick break for Smopavovna.

Hey, Shah, you in here?

Hey, Abdul.

How's it going?

I mean, it's okay.

Everyone was looking for you and

are you okay?

Like, are you not enjoying your party?

No, no, it's fine.

I just...

Can I be honest?

I feel like the vibe is off slightly.

I mean,

there was just that bloody revolution and coup.

A lot of people tied up in that.

Yeah, well, so was I.

Like, I'm the shot, but I put that aside to show up, you know, like emotionally for my party.

And I feel like nobody else did.

And I don't just.

A lot of people lost family members.

So did I.

I mean,

you executed some of your family members.

Which I would argue is as hard, if not harder.

Is it?

Yeah.

Okay.

Tell you what.

Why don't you come out?

We're going to do cake and we're going to sing.

You'll feel way better.

Are you guys going to do that thing where you turn out the lights and then at first everybody's like, whoa, what's happening?

Let's go out.

And then my favorite person slowly walks in with the candles.

I mean, I thought we could just go ahead and and do it.

Yeah, no, it was the play with the candle thing.

Nice.

No way, do it again.

No.

Amazing.

Hey guys, are you ready to restart the show?

Okay, in a second, Heath is showing us this amazing trick.

Yeah, so when I don't want to do something, I just say no to it.

Just like that, he just says no to it.

But what if someone doesn't like you after?

Well, turns out that's both unknowable and kind of none of my business.

Wow.

Where did you learn this?

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All right, Heath.

Thanks.

All right.

You guys ready to record?

No.

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Oh, okay.

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And we're back.

When we left off, the Nepo baby despot was about to throw himself a party.

That's cool.

What's next?

Yeah, right.

So the whole point of this exercise is to soothe the Shah's ego at not having had a coronation fit for the very important king that he so clearly was.

So he wanted a party that would serve to highlight his grandiosity.

He also wanted to bolster the legitimacy of his rule by tying himself to Cyrus the Great and presenting his reign as just like, you know, the latest in a 2,500 year of unbroken kingship, which it fucking wasn't.

At the same time, he wanted to recast Iran in the Western eye as a fully modern nation that could compete with any European country when it came to throw in a classy shindig.

Yeah, what a huge waste.

Nowadays, we just let you host the World Cup.

It's all about

the same price.

FIFA really needs to make some like demands, some like funny demands on Trump.

Like, I don't know, like Trump in a claw machine and then I guess pull out of the U.S.

either way for the World Cup.

Right for a human rights thing.

Maybe get him in a claw machine.

So now the first thing he needed was an occasion to celebrate.

So he manufactures this 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, which, like, I mean, it's about right.

Maybe now.

The reign of Cyrus kicked off the Achaemenid Persian Empire on or about 550 BCE, but it could have been exactly 529 BCE.

And the empire may have started on or about October 12th through the 14th.

So there you you go.

So with those as his working assumptions, the Shah declared that the country would celebrate its 2,500th centennial or whatever in 1971.

And quick before anybody had time to plan anything, he sent out invitation to world leaders across the globe.

Hey, we got this gigantic stone tablet in this envelope from Iran today.

Were you accepting something?

Oh, shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, the Shah mentioned something.

Let's just go ahead and send him a fighter jet or something.

We'll pretend we're sick the night before.

It's fine.

Just RSVP.

No, I don't want to.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

You just have to.

Yeah.

So the invitation, which was apparently made without consulting literally anybody who would eventually be involved in the planning, contained only two pieces of information, both of which would prove nightmares to the planners.

The first was the date, which would give them less than a year to pull off the most extravagant party ever thrown.

The other was the location.

The party was to take place in Persepolis, which is a ruin said to hold the remains of Cyrus the Great.

But like, there's no city there.

It's just a fucking ruin in the desert.

There's no infrastructure.

There's no running water.

There's not even like a paved road that leads to it.

The only thing there, other than the dubiously attributed ruins, were a shockingly dense population of venomous everythings, including spiders, scorpions, and snakes.

So once the date and location are locked in, the Shah sets about getting this thing organized.

First things first, they have to kill everything that lives there.

So they have this massive campaign of poisoning and removing everything within a dozen miles of the ruins.

This happens at the same time that they're building a 450-mile road from Tehran to this fucking random spot in the middle of nowhere.

Okay, guys, I know we're out here in the desert building this road, but do not drink any of the Gatorades you see lying around in the bazaar.

Unfortunately and ironically, scorpion poison.

So,

why is the poison frost blue, though?

That is in case any of us are cops.

What if it's more than 12?

What if a spider runs like outside of the 12 miles?

We just let it go.

Gotta let it go.

Gotta drop that one.

So, but once they've got a road and a reasonable expectation to walk in 20 yards without being bitten by a fucking cobra or something, they set about building an airstrip, which they're then going to use to fly in all the prefabricated tents that are going to make up the tent city that they're going to host the party in and much to the consternation of iranian craftsmen who would have loved the concession on this shed the shah instead turned to french architects and interior decorators to design and build the 50 fucking tent suites and the main building a tent to banquet hall measuring 68 by 24 meters or about 220 by 80 feet and all the other ancillary dwellings that they built uh as well right that they needed for the staff those were also going to be constructed in france and then put together in iran In all, the Tent City took a year to build and it used 37 kilometers of silk.

Although the source I saw didn't say 37 kilometers by anything.

So

I have no idea how much silk we're talking about.

This is like a really long strand, one thread.

Exactly, right, right.

It doesn't seem excessive, though, to have silk walls, regardless of how much or little you use of it.

You know, that was still a really hard day for the Iranian owner of domes, domes, domes, though.

Right.

Yeah, when that came down.

That one burned.

Now, you might be thinking, wow, I bet it would be really hot in a fucking tent in the middle of the Iranian desert.

And you would be right.

It was over 100 degrees every day, even in mid-October.

And it was also cold as fuck because it would dip down to like 30 degrees overnight, which meant that in a country where only about one in four homes had a refrigerator.

Jesus Christ.

The government was spending millions of dollars to air condition and heat tents in the middle of the desert that would only ever ever be used for three fucking days.

Back then, we used to do that for people.

Now we just do that for cryptocurrency.

You'll see, Cecil, I bought my apes on the bounce.

Yeah, this is the first time in history when you could tie up your entire retirement portfolio buying commodified irony, but it's going to turn out awesome.

It'll probably turn out awesome.

Oh, yeah, it'd be great.

It's a derivative

of irony.

Now, of course, just air conditioning the tents wouldn't be enough, right?

The Shah didn't want his guests to have to stay inside for three full days.

He also wanted them to add a forest next to the tent city.

Sure.

Yeah, right.

Now, you can't exactly grow a forest in a fucking desert in any length of time, let alone the one year that they had to work with.

So what they did is they just flew in a fuck ton of trees and propped them up in the sand.

Come on.

Nice.

Yeah, nice.

Yeah.

Well, and to make sure that the forests seem good.

They're all leaning against each other like very,

right.

Don't touch any of them.

Don't touch any of them.

Do not sneeze.

Do not sneeze.

They all fell like dominoes a bunch of times.

And they're sitting there.

Right too as they're setting them up, right?

Well, it gets so much fucking worse because to make sure that their forests sounded good and foresty, they also flew in about 50,000 European songbirds.

Wow.

Yeah.

To live in the desert.

Both the trees and birds would be dead within a few days of the party wrapping up.

Okay, the weird part is they actually executed the birds for treason.

Okay, some airport in Europe somewhere watched a team of the Iranian Shah's royal party planners load up an airplane with like 5,000 songbirds in a bag or a cage, and then

they like strapped a few loose trees on top of the airplane and were like, that'll hold off to Persepolis.

We're good to go.

What the fuck is happening?

Okay, so, and of course, much like the architecture,

Griswold plants.

Yes, right.

Yes.

Down to the tree.

We're down to the tree, Forest, Clark.

Thanks for coming to my party.

Everybody gets a jelly of the month club.

Bend over and I'll go.

Well, okay, so much like the architecture, The Shah also turned to France for the catering.

At that time, Maxim St.

Paris was generally considered to be the world's best restaurant.

So the Shah had them take care of his party.

It was such a big deal that they literally,

they closed the entire restaurant for two weeks in advance of it.

And they flew their whole kitchen staff and much of their wait staff to Iran to live in air-conditioned desert tents.

They also flew in a kitchen that, according to later accounts from the chefs, rivaled any kitchen in the world.

Yeah, still the only kitchen that was actually hotter to work in than the actual hell's kitchen.

Yes, right.

They probably had the most scorpion poison.

That's for sure.

Now, they also flew all the food in from France, virtually all the food, and to a point where it was ridiculous, right?

Like, I feel like they could have used Iranian parsley and chives without compromising on taste at all, but they didn't.

Other than the caviar, every bit of the food was flown in.

And we're talking about enough food for like 500 guests to feast like kings for three days.

So that included 6,000 pounds of beef, pork, and lamb, and nearly 3,000 pounds of fowl and game, which, of course, had to be kept frozen in the desert.

They also had to build a special wine cellar for the 2,500 bottles of wine that they shipped in.

Make sure you ship in a ton of desserts or these let-them-eat cake shirts are just not going to make any sense at all.

It seems stupid.

The wine number feels low.

It does feel low.

I'm with you.

It feels low.

Five doesn't include the champagne.

It's like five bottles of per oh, okay, man.

Yep, still doesn't include the champagne.

So it's

a three-day party.

So, okay.

It's also worth emphasizing here that the Shah, who had fuck offer experience planning large events or small ones, really, was hands-on with everything in this shit.

So much that several of his planners had quit or been fired along the way.

Eventually, he got this one over-taxed subordinate that handled all of his shit handling this party too.

And this is a guy who knows even less about event planning than he does.

And at some point along the way, he also brings his wife in on it.

You're always saying how I spend too much time at work.

I thought you'd be happy.

Honey, if we do a good job at this, they're going to let us plan Woodstock 99 and Fire Festival.

We're going to be legends.

No, okay.

So his wife has at least a somewhat better grip on the mood of the nation than the Shah.

And she recognizes that this whole thing is a fucking PR disaster waiting to happen.

Got to get so much more wine.

So much more.

The real problem was the coffee, man.

They only had the ability to make two cups of coffee at a time.

I'm furious.

You're the Shah.

What the fuck is happening?

Yeah, no, that was skipping out on all the important shit at this party.

Yeah.

So, okay, but the, but the Shah's wife is sure that the Iranian people are going to be furious with all the money that's being pissed away on a vanity project for their ruler.

And the fact that the people profiting from it are mostly foreign companies is going to add insult to injury.

So she does everything that she can late in the game to add in some shit that might offset that.

Right.

Like, so she lobbies her husband to open 2,500 new schools across the country in conjunction with the 2,500th anniversary celebration.

She also organized a concurrent academic symposium that was meant to highlight Persian contributions to the arts and sciences, but all of that shit was too little, too late.

By the time she got involved, it was pretty much guaranteed that all the headlines about this shit the world over were going to be: look how much fucking money they spent on their tent party.

But who gave you the zero to add to the end of that bill?

That's right,

the Islamic world.

That's who not Persian specific, but you know,

you don't know the difference.

But, okay, but the Shah remained unconcerned about the optics.

Or, sorry, about the relevant optics.

He was obsessed with which world leaders would and wouldn't attend for like the whole year.

And he spent an absurd amount of time arguing with people about like fucking seating charts and shit.

He was also like perpetually pissy for like six months over the fact that the three world leaders he most wanted at his party had turned him down.

U.S.

President Richard Nixon sent his vice president in his stead, which is a fact that would have been insulting even if that Veep wasn't Spiro Agnu.

The Queen of England snubbed him.

Just J.D.

Vance trying to fuck a jet.

He's just like, yeah, right.

So the Queen of England snubbed him even harder and sent her fucking husband, what's his name?

And the worst snub of all.

I have no fucking idea.

The worst snub of all, though, came from the lowest name on the list.

That was the president of France.

But his snub hurt all the worse, since at first he agreed to come, but then he found out that he wouldn't be sitting at the spot closest to the Shah.

That spot was reserved for Ethiopian Emperor Haley Selassie.

So he changed his mind and canceled last minute.

But they did manage to fill up their guest lists.

And upon arrival, those guests would be whisked from the new airport to the tent city in one of 250 red Mercedes limousines.

where they would be shown to their luxury apartments with silk walls.

Each of the apartments had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, and a lavishly furnished living space that could accommodate about a dozen people.

There was also, for each world leader, there was a tapestry with a picture of them woven into it hanging on the wall as like a take-home gift.

Just a bunch of world leaders throwing this tapestry into their tapestry pile in their closet when they get home.

Whatever.

Okay, question.

Was it a take-home gift?

Like it was free, or did they charge you for them at the end, like with the robes at the hotel?

No, exactly.

No word on that.

Did they charge you for that?

Yeah.

Just a quick note: on an apartment made entirely with silk walls, everyone can hear everyone else shitting.

Thank you.

They keep talking about that.

That's terrible.

It's a terrible idea.

You can smell, taste, and kind of see everyone shitting.

Yeah, so it's so dumb.

I'm underselling how stupid this is.

They're actually like wooden structures.

They're like full buildings, but then they just put silk all over the walls to make it look like a tent.

Okay, that's so much.

It's better.

It's better.

It's so much more wasteful than I'm making it sound.

So, okay.

Well, they had plenty of wood from the nearby forest.

I think you're forgetting that.

I bet they did the shitting shadow puppets for like an afternoon and they were like, okay,

drywall underneath.

Drywall underneath.

Iranian Heath, you were right.

Okay.

You were right.

Thank you.

So the Shah, who had humbly bestowed upon himself the titles of Shahanshah, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of the Almighty, opened up the festivities with a speech at the tomb of Cyrus.

And his opening would be lambasted forever in Iran.

So I might as well just quote it here: quote, Cyrus, great king, king of kings, you immortal hero of history, father of the world's most ancient empire, great liberator of all time, worthy son of man.

Oh my God, did I write this?

Right?

This is terrible.

After 2,500 years, the Persian flag waves as proudly as in your era of glory.

Today, as in your day, Persia bears the message of liberty and love of mankind in a troubled world.

Cyrus, great king of kings, you may rest in peace, for we are awake and will remain so forever.

End quote.

Still not as cringy as what Cash Patel said about Charlie Kirk.

I know it was bad, but it's not like that.

So now it's that last line about how Cyrus can sleep easy, knowing that the Shah is on the job that would be so mercilessly lampooned as his rule spiraled into disaster over the coming decade.

But before any of that could happen, they had to set a Guinness-recognized world record for the longest and most lavish official banquet in modern history.

I have no idea what unit one measures lavishness in, but apparently the folks at Guinness puzzled it out.

After that, they had a huge parade that highlighted Iranian history, though the Shah managed to further piss off the masses by skipping over the parts where the country adopted the Islamic faith.

Okay, but to be fair, they had planned to march a bunch of Mohammed lookalikes in the parade, but

that idea got shut down very quickly.

Yeah, no, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Now, the actual cost of the whole party is actually impossible to pin down.

The official price tag was $17 million, which is just ridiculously low.

According to the wiki, quote, the actual figure is difficult to calculate exactly as the government is embarrassed when asked to estimate the overall cost, end quote.

When a BBC documentary tried to suss it out, the number they came up with was $120 million or the equivalent of about $1 billion in today's money.

But even that cost is low, especially when you consider that he paid for the optics when he was chased out of the country by his impoverished subjects less than a decade later.

All right.

If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

If you pronounce Iran correctly, you fuck up a lot of potential Iran jokes.

And are you ready for the quiz?

Iran here to be here on time.

No, yeah, I am.

I am.

Okay, Noel, what was the most expensive thing they served for dinner?

A

lavishy soa.

B

lavishy so

pad tycoon.

C

fat catfish or D

loaded baked potato.

La Vichy sois is so.

Yeah, La Vichy Soa is fantastic.

I'm going to go with A just because of the tone that you sort of have to admitted to that one in.

I think that was the right one.

I'll call that one in, yeah.

That's fair.

Yeah, that's the one.

All right, Noah.

Throwing a huge, expensive birthday party for your nation with parades and shit that doubles as an excuse for your dear leader to chest thump and celebrate himself is A,

obviously the prerogative of insecure tyrants.

Damn it.

B,

oh, this is awkward.

They quit the country.

C,

that's okay.

Empires never collapse under the weight of autocratic mismanagement.

D,

still awkward.

This feels still awkward.

Secret answer, C and a half.

At least when they crumble, they never turn into theocratic hellscapes that people can't escape from for half a century after.

You got it.

Crushing it.

No notes.

All right.

Noah.

Obviously, air-conditioned tents and scorpion poison drove the price up, but what really cost the most from this party?

A

the chocolate fountain,

b

seriously, I couldn't believe how expensive a chocolate fountain was when I had one at my wedding.

See, it was like two layers, and all the stuff it came with was super basic.

Still, even

though it was so mediocre, yeah, no, yeah, secret answer D, what the fuck?

Yeah, yeah, put the money into water.

We all got fucking wasted.

There was no water.

There wasn't water.

All right.

Well, Noah, you aced the quiz.

You are the winner.

Oh, awesome.

Well, I would like a Tom essay next week.

All right.

Well, for Tom, Cecil, Noah, and Eli, I'm Heath, thank you for hanging out with us.

We'll be back next week, and Tom will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, the No Rogan Experience, Dear Old Dads, God Awful Movies, Scathing Atheist, Skeptocrat, and D ⁇ D Minus.

And if you'd like to join join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash citationpod.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.

Abdul Hakim, you are sentenced to death for the great and treacherous crime of insult to our amazing Shah

for

doing that fake version of the birthday song they do at TGI Fridays.

Feels like an overreaction.

I don't think so.

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