Iran, Beyond the Headlines with Maziar Bahari

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Hello, everybody.

Welcome once again to the Weekly Show podcast.

My name is Jon Stewart, and we are currently not at war.

It's been hours, I think.

This means Wednesday.

It's Wednesday, June 25th.

This will probably come out.

Thursday, right now, we are not at war, and Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon.

By tomorrow, maybe the nuclear weapon.

And we're back at war.

And we either completely obliterated their nuclear program or set it it back 36 hours.

Boy, this has just been

everything that is so difficult about this administration just on display in the moment.

Just the even

actions that it might take that can be successful are fraught with his fragility at all times.

We obliterated their nuclear program.

Well, the early intelligence says, oh, that's, but that's scumbags reported that and people that hate the pilots.

And you just think, hey, man, if it's real

and that, and, and, and all the things that you said you had accomplished had been accomplished, then it shouldn't be that hard

to not be so defensive and angry

all the time.

And just

it's, it is such an amazing moment when you see a guy who's the commander-in-chief of the United States and the president of the United United States in a situation room with like Trump was right about everything.

Like, how many, how many of history's great leaders

had their own merch?

We're doing,

we're having in the moment of triumph, in the moment,

you know, it's Roosevelt at Yalta with Churchill and Stalin, you know, wearing a nice no fear, fear itself.

He had fear itself

on the t-shirt available on Roosevelt's website.

And just the shallowness sometimes of their, you know, J.D.

Vance, people are saying, you know, we're concerned about intervention in the Middle East and how these things

can have unforeseen consequences and instability throughout.

And J.D.

Vance says, yes, no, we understand that that's something the American people are afraid of.

But, you know, the American people have never had a smart person before.

Now we have a smart person.

A smart person.

And because we have a smart person, you will not have unforeseen consequences.

A smart person that thinks anybody that might possibly look into whether or not it was actually obliterated is a scumbag.

Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt comes out and

they ask her, was it obliterated?

And she says, everybody knows what happens when you drop bunk.

Everybody knows, is what she said.

Everybody knows what happens when you have a precision strike with these kinds of weapons.

These weapons have never been used before in the history of the planet.

But everybody knows what happens.

It's just beyond the silliness.

And if anybody pushes back, they demand

100% fealty.

And anything beyond that sets off anger and frustration because of the fragility.

And speaking of which, my favorite

comment from the news has been, has this attack, what is the future for Ali Khamenei, for the Ayatollah, what is the future?

Does this put his future in doubt?

And you're like,

he's 86

and

And he ain't Jack Lelaine.

Like, he's not the healthiest dude in the world.

Like, I don't know what's what's more dangerous right now to the Ayatollah,

the American and Israeli attacks or stares.

Like, this is

fuck, man.

But I am, you know, in these moments, I, years ago,

a friend of mine, Maziar Bahari, was a journalist and was imprisoned in Iran.

And he wrote a book about his time in solitary confinement.

He was imprisoned for reporting on

the Green Revolution in 2008, 2009 during that election, and

wrote a book about it called, and Then They Came for Me.

And

then he and I did a movie about it called Rosewater.

And now he does

still a journalist and does something called IranWire.com, which allows voices within Iran to have an outlet.

uh where information because it's a difficult country to get information out of can can come out and he is such an interesting and has such a

an encyclopedic and brilliant knowledge of all that has happened in that country and the things that are currently happening.

And

the first thing I thought as I saw this was, boy, I just want to talk to Maziar and just see how he's feeling, what he's thinking about this.

And so very luckily, we're going to get a chance to do that today.

ladies and gentlemen, oh,

what a treat today.

We're very excited.

Our guest today,

oh my goodness,

writer, journalist, filmmaker, bon vivant,

traveler of international renown,

author, Maziar Bahari, and also the publisher of Iranwire.com and my dear old friend, Maziar,

what are you doing, man?

Well, you know, you called me a bon vivon, but Vivon is not bona.

It's you're not bonning at all.

No.

Yes, no, I can see.

I recognize that.

Yeah, it's a no, it's a very, very

sad and tragic moment for many Iranians, including myself, all around the world.

But for me personally, because many of our colleagues in Iran and citizen journalists, and also

the families of our colleagues outside of Iran have been harassed and they've been interrogated by different

intelligence agents.

And this is something that the Iranian government does when it loses a war, a fight.

Iran has been defeated by Israel.

Iran has been embarrassed and

we are worried that what they're going to do.

They executed three people this morning because of espionage and because of an assassination that happened two years ago.

They've been forcing people to confess against themselves.

So Iranians really, really,

they're stuck between this thuggish, hostage-taking, corrupt government and Israelis who think that by bombing they can solve everything, that by bombing they can bring democracy to Iran.

And people are thinking that okay if with bombing you could bring democracy to a country gaza would be a scandinavian democracy by now gaza would be like norway absolutely but it is so iranians are just they have these mixed feelings and as people outside of iran who are in touch with iran all the time

we just feel helpless and this is just so uh depressing so it's just horrible i want to i want to step back for for the audience right now just to to give a sense of where Maziar is coming from.

So Maziar,

for many of you who don't remember, wrote a book called, And Then They Came for Me.

You were covering the Green Revolution.

This was the 2008 election.

I think it was 2009.

2009.

Ahmed Dinejad against, was it Moshavi?

Mousavi, yeah.

So Maziar was covering it, filming at the bassie stations where there was a lot of violence.

That's sort of their kind of secret police that would come out on these motorcycles and harass and hurt people.

A bassie arms depot.

Yes.

In the middle of a residential neighborhood for people.

Don't forget that.

And people were going up to that end and being shot and killed.

And Maziar was arrested,

interrogated, and then held in solitary confinement at Evan prison for months

until a campaign.

spearheaded by his wife Paula and many other international human rights groups got him released, got him out.

So, your experience in Iran is

of this moment that you're talking about.

The Iranian government cracking down on what they think are the dissidents and the people that are undermining whatever their security is.

Iranwire, which is the site you started, is an incredible outlet for these citizen journalists that are in Iran.

So, just to give kind of that,

you know, kind of a

basic run there of where it is that you're coming from there, you've experienced this cycle

personally,

and now you think that's going to play out on the streets.

Have your sources there

been able to still reach out?

Or is it kind of a a radio silence right now?

What are you saying?

It's been very difficult.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's been very difficult because sometimes they narrow the bandwidth of the internet, sometimes they shut down the internet.

So it's been very difficult to get in touch with us.

And, you know, both citizen journalists and officials as well.

Since last year, when former President Raisi died in a helicopter crash, many Iranian officials have been in touch with us and leaking information because they think that they are on a sinking ship and they don't know what's going to happen.

and because of that they are informing us about different things and one thing that they're talking about is corruption

so uh i i i always like to say that the islamic republic is not either an islamic or republic you remember that episode of seinfeld that you know remember that episode of seinfeld that george told jerry that you know it's my artistic integrity that i'm worried about and jerry goes what the you're talking talking about you're not artistic and you don't have any integrity

that is the islamic republic so maziar bihari by the way one of the only iran experts who will quote seinfeldt fluently exactly one of the only ones yeah yes and days of our lives yeah and days of our lives what so what are they

What are they saying now?

Is it that the corruption may be the thing that finally kind of undermines their authority?

So let me go through my shil uh so the islamic

right now islamic republic of iran is not

islamic republic of iran it's islamic republic of corruption it's islamic republic of persecution and islamic republic of masturbation we get to the masturbation in a few wait what i tell you all right so this is a government that's corrupt to the core why do you think that the israelis managed to know how many revolutionary guards commanders live in what places and they managed to kill 12 of them on the first night?

Because of the fact that Israel has so many spies around Iran.

And because of the fact that they know the

coming and going of these Revolutionary Guards commanders, they know exactly where the bases are, they know everything.

And how?

Because of the spies, because this economy is so bad that they can hire a spy spy for $5,000.

And, you know, according to our sources, some of these spies that people see even in prisons, they're not getting like $100,000 or $200,

you know, like Russian spies during the Cold War.

They're getting like $5,000 for a bit of information that which commander lives where.

And then the Israelis, they juxtapose all that information together and they have this hole, which has helped them to do that.

And that corruption exists in every aspect of this government and society.

It's an Islamic Republic of persecution.

All it knows, you know, in the absence of

any real governing of the country, in the absence of providing people with electricity, in the absence of providing people with employment, all they can do is that imprison people.

torture people,

you know, arresting people because of their hijab, etc.

So they're not really interested.

They have given up governing the country maybe since 2019, since the protests in 2019.

And persecution is what they're doing.

Those were after the death of Masa Amini.

Is that the ones in 2019?

Before the death of Masa Amini.

This is even before that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Before the death of Massa Amini, when we had three days of total internet shutdown and they killed almost 2,000 people.

And then, of course, during the time of Masa Amini, there were others.

And then it's the Islamic Republic of masturbation.

Why?

Because all they do is that they're just keeping themselves happy with propaganda.

All they do is that through these forced confessions, through this propaganda, like right now, they have these rallies in Tehran for the victory of Iran in this war.

You know, what victory you should be embarrassed about.

So it's really like, you know, when when uh you think about uh

the islamic republic's uh leaders i would be embarrassed if i were them because they're not even good at being evil

incompetent at being evil at incompetence at being evil

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And on the other hand, you have the Israelis who know exactly what they're doing, who have managed to destroy Hezbollah to a certain extent, Hamas to a certain extent, Iran's

flights and the airplanes

and they come and go as much as they want.

In 2012, let me tell you a story.

You would be interested in this story.

In 2012.

Five Iranian terrorists, they went to Bangkok, Thailand to kill Ehud Barak, who was the minister at the time and who was going to visit Thailand.

Minister of Israel.

He was not prime minister, he was minister, I think, foreign affairs at the time.

So he went to Bangkok.

Iranians, they sent five agents to kill Ehud Barak.

Three of them hang out with hookers the night before.

There is a picture of them in Pattaya, which is a beach just south of Bangkok.

On the day of bombing, The bomb that they were supposed to have for Ehud Barak, it blew up in the apartment building that

they were, which was a few blocks from Iran's cultural center in Bangkok.

The guys came out, people called the police, they hailed a taxi, the taxi didn't stop, they threw a hand grenade, and the hand grenade bounced back, and one of them lost his leg.

This is the type of inefficiency of evil you're talking about.

You know, like Hannah Arendt talked about, Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil.

This is like the inefficiency, ineptitude.

The inefficiency and incompetence.

But let me ask you, Mazgar.

So you talked about the difficulty of getting information now out of Iran and into these other things.

What about information getting into Iran?

And when the Supreme Leader and whoever else it is in the Ministry of Propaganda, who are putting out the idea that this is a great victory, I think they put out that they had completely destroyed the American base in Qatar.

The people obviously are quite skeptical of all that, but is there an ability for them?

Look, it's hard enough for us to get the information.

We don't know what happened to those nuclear sites.

We don't know what our bombs did.

It's hard enough for so-called open information societies to understand the realities on the ground.

Within Iran,

how much is their propaganda dismissed and with skepticism?

How effective is it?

I mean,

and when we talk about that too, we'll roll back.

You know, Iran is not a monolith by any stretch.

It's similar to many countries.

There's, you know, sort of look at it as red and blue.

There's this, you know, divide there.

But what is the information that they're getting?

So

Iranians, when the internet works normally, like when there is a connection between the Iranians and international World Wide Web, they can get their information.

There are many sites that are blocked, including Iranware.com, but people use VPNs and people use filter busters.

And funnily enough,

Iranian government uses Chinese firewalls in order to stop the internet.

And Iranians use Chinese filter busters developed by Chinese, some of them.

So they use VPNs.

They get the information.

There are satellite channels that are beamed into Iran that people look at.

And also,

because the the Iranian government cannot at the moment, because of that inefficiency that we talked about, they cannot shut down the internet totally.

There are times that people can get the information.

So we are using WhatsApp, for example.

We have a channel on WhatsApp, on Telegram.

So people can get the information as much as they want.

But yesterday, The Iranian government sent an SMS, a text to many Iranians, millions of Iranians around the country, saying that you should not like or post on any Zionist or Zionist-friendly sites or platforms.

And that's open to interaction.

That's going to be all of them.

I mean, we that's open to interpretation because, you know, anyone can be a Zionist.

And for most,

even most of the

Iranian government officials that I've met, they don't know what Zionism means.

They all think that Zion was a person, and these people, like Marxists, they support Zion.

Who is this Zion that they're talking about?

This is something that I heard from a senior government official that damn that Zion who started Zionism.

You know, this is a level of.

But at the same time, you have this society that is educated.

They are,

you know, they want, you know, they're secular mostly they hate this government but unfortunately there is no alternative so when i hear about regime change in iran like from different senators congress people different you know like even netanyahu who netanyahu talked about you know regime change it's gotta happen yeah regime change to what you know the iranian opposition has been its own worst enemy for the past few years.

When was it?

Almost three years ago after the Massa Amini's death and during the woman life freedom movement, a few of these opposition figures, they got together in Georgetown University.

And they had this manifesto and this and people were really looking forward to something happening.

I mean, there were actors and actresses and football players, you know, soccer players.

And, you know, people people thought that they might be able to do something.

They could not even hold that group together for more than a month or so.

It's there.

So the Iranian opposition really does not exist.

So imagine if the regime collapses tomorrow.

there is no you know mandela or vaslav havel who's going to take care of the country you know people compare iran to the situation in south africa that you know bring up the bring uh you know to the end of the apartheid but mandela was not himself.

You know, there are some interesting figures in the Iranian opposition, but they don't have a real political party behind them.

Mandela had people like Oliver Thambo, Chris Haney, Mbeke,

the current

president, Sir Rama Fossa, who managed to, you know, negotiations, the transition, and all that.

And also, on top of that, ANC, the African National Congress that came to power after apartheid was a political party with decades of history.

Many of these opposition figures outside of Iran, they have not managed to bring even a small group of people together in an organized way to be able to talk to different governments.

They don't talk about, they don't have any plans for transition.

People say that, yes, we will be in charge of the transition.

But they have no idea about transition, transitional justice.

And that means that for the majority of Iranians who are secular, who hate this government, and they want change, to look at the

neighborhood around them, Iraq, Libya, Syria.

And those are not great role models to emulate.

So because of that, we are in a situation where we are, that we have this millions of Iranians who are sophisticated, educated, open-minded.

They are taken hostage by this group of thugs who are organized, who have power, who have money, etc.

So when I heard the president yesterday saying, you know, these are the two countries that don't know what the fuck they're doing, that was, I think, that was the exact emotion that millions of Iranians and most probably millions of Israelis

could express as well.

Right.

I want to tell you, there's quite a few Americans who feel that way right now.

Americans as well.

So there's, it's kind of a universal statement.

I think it's why it's become such a meme.

But I think also for people to understand, you know, Iran is really split.

The power base for

this current, you know,

the Ayatollah is more the rural areas, more religious,

more extreme.

There is that dichotomy of the more educated people in the cities, and they have a more liberal.

But, you know, relate this to when you and I were in Jordan, it was in the middle of sort of that arab spring that feeling of there was a real sense of hope and possibility of what a more democratic ideal might be generally one that we were kind of projecting onto them and i think egypt presents a really interesting example because that was a ground up revolution.

First, there was Mubarak, who was sort of the authoritarian dictator who had been there for,

you know, for all those many years.

The people on the street during the Arab Spring rose up and overthrew Mubarak, and they were going to institute a democratic election.

And what everybody began to realize is, oh, the only people that are organized enough,

because civic institutions had degraded for so long over that time, was Muslim Brotherhood.

They were the only ones that had any.

So Morsi, through Muslim Brotherhood, becomes the leader of Egypt.

They become dissatisfied with Morsi's rule.

The streets rise up again.

This is, it takes a year.

And who takes over?

Sisi, another autocrat, basically Mubarak again.

And now he's very popular.

I think the point that you made is really interesting.

Without,

if you have an authoritarian regime over a period of time, it degrades your civic institutions.

So when you talk about who's next,

it's maybe another Ayatollah, maybe it's somebody from Quds force, maybe it's somebody from Revolutionary Guard, but it is not probably going to be

some

democratically minded leader who's going to empower the people.

Would that be fair to say?

Well, let's go back to the premise that, you know, that the country is divided between rural and urban area and educated and whatnot.

I think that was maybe the old paradigm.

At the moment, we can say that Iran

right now is very similar to Soviet Union in

the 1980s.

So you have many people who support the regime as they did in Soviet Union.

You have millions of people who are getting paid by the intelligence services like you had in Soviet Union.

And

they are supporting an ideology, but at the same time, they are getting paid by the system.

So they have material interest in the existence of the system.

Right.

So

the government is supporting a lot of them.

A lot of them.

So

in like 1985, if you ask a KGB agent, do you support the Soviet Union because of the communist ideals and Marxist ideals, or just because you're getting paid?

You know, he was probably would say yes, because of the ideals, but he he was supporting because he was getting paid and because he had seen 70 years of corruption and dictatorship in his country.

And you know that, you know, communism did not work.

So at the moment, many people who support the government,

I would say most people who support the government, they have some material interest.

It can be because they are getting paid by Imam Khomeini's charity foundation that is supporting up to 10 million people, maybe because they are paid by different

foundations, because of the Revolutionary Guards.

And also,

as you know, Revolutionary Guards is not only an army.

The Revolutionary Guards is one of the biggest industrial

bodies in Iran.

It has universities, it has hospitals.

So many people are getting paid by the Revolutionary Guards and supported.

Going back to the other question that you have in terms of the organized opposition.

Yes.

So there is no organized opposition outside of the government.

At the moment, I would say that the government is fractured into different parts.

Some of them are hardcore supporters of Ayatollah Khamenei because they either believe in him as this

island of purity in this sea of

corruption and dirt and someone who, as they say, is

basically the backbone of the revolution.

I would say there are

many of them.

There would be maybe four or five million of them who vote for the most hardline candidates during the presidential elections usually.

But there are many other people who do not believe in the government.

They believe in,

but they still work for the government.

And many of them are good bureaucrats, who would be good bureaucrats for a good

government?

Yes, for a good government, like you know, Iran's deep state, some diplomats, exactly.

Some diplomats that we have, some accountants, bookkeepers, etc.

So, they don't have any kind of ideological

belonging to the system.

So, the best case scenario would be to have a leader who would realize that Iran needs stability, and most people really

don't care about

many of the dictatorial aspects of the regime.

They want stabilities in life.

And when Trump says, you know, they don't know what the fuck they're doing, I can understand his frustration because as a businessman, he looks at Iran and he says, you guys have gas, you have oil, you have an amazing country.

I hang out with these Iranian property owners in New York and I know how brilliant they are.

Why do you keep on

chanting these ideological slogans and just don't make money?

Just be quiet and make money like the rest of the Middle East, like

people in UAE, people in Saudi Arabia, people in many other countries.

And because of that, I think the best case scenario would be to have a leader who is nationalist,

who can bring different groups together, who can give people social freedom, who can tolerate some level of democracy and elections in Iran, and then Iranians would rally around him and someone who has a plan.

Because Iranians, they're smart enough to know that if someone doesn't have a plan, they're not going to support that person.

Right.

Someone like Mohamed Mossadiq that we overthrew in 1953.

Well, maybe so, maybe somebody like that.

Yeah, Mohamed Mossadegh.

Right.

Someone like him.

Yeah, because he basically came through the system as well and you know here let's make it open a parenthesis because well we we couldn't allow it because we thought he was a communist so that no exactly but the thing about uh mossade as well is that uh people say here that you know not here like in the us i've seen that a lot of my leftist friends and liberals say that he was democratically elected mossadh was not democratically elected mossader was became prime minister like many other prime ministers before him and after him the shah introduced him to the parliament and he and the parliament voted for him as the prime minister.

Mossadegh's main mistake,

and I think that many other

Iranian politicians and many politicians in different places' main mistake was to make the Americans afraid of

the Soviets so much.

That you know they couldn't trust him anymore.

And they said that you know, okay, we have to bring our own strongman because Mossad was saying that, was saying, was telling Truman and then, you know, Churchill and Attlee at the time said, you know, if you don't support me, the Soviets are going to take over, the communists are going to take over.

And then, you know, the CIA was a young organization at that time.

And, you know, when Eisenhower came to power with Alan Dulles, and, you know, they said that, well, if you're so weak that you cannot withstand the Soviets, then we can have our own people.

We can have the strong military.

So that's why, you know, know, the coup happened.

And he also did, you know, British petroleum and the fact that they couldn't trust

that Mosadegh would do what they wanted him to do for British petroleum.

Yeah, so I think it's very important to understand, you know, understand the other people's narrative.

I think Mosadih's main problem was that he did not understand the American Cold War narrative at the time.

He did not understand the level of fear in the U.S.

That that was viewed as an existential threat in the United States, right?

Exactly.

And the Americans at that time, they didn't care about the narrative in Iran.

And they thought, you know, with the coup, they can bring, you know, stability and they could, you know, break the ally.

The Shah will be our guy.

Exactly.

And 25 years later, it backfired.

Then there was a revolution in Iran.

At the moment, I think that's happening as well.

That, you know, people don't understand each other's narrative.

And there's a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunications.

So let's talk about narrative because that you bring up an excellent point because so much of this is about narrative.

So, and I do have a couple of questions on that.

One is and I'm sorry for drinking so much water.

It's so hot here that you know I have to hydrate myself.

Maziar, I can tell you, first of all, it's very upsetting to me how good you look.

I'm already upset about that because.

And you too, man.

You too.

Over the years, the eroded.

Hey, my God.

No, you look like a

young George Clooney.

You know, Maziar, thank you.

That's great.

That's very kind of you, sir.

No, uh, uh, that by the way, when we were making Rosewater, which is a film about Maziar's experiences in captivity in Iran, we had to get Gael Garcia Bernal to do it because there was no one else handsome enough to play a young Maziar Bahari.

It just wasn't.

And unfortunately, Peter Sellers was dead.

So, in the absence of Peter Sellers, we had to get

someone handsome enough or witty enough, and we went with Gael, who did a very good job.

Who did a very good job, bridge the gap.

Talking about narrative, so

and it's the two narratives.

One, in Iran, so the revolution, and people know that there's a distinction between Khomeini, who was the leader in absentia, and then when the Islamic Revolution came to power, he took over.

And then when he passed, Khamenei.

Why do they,

if this nuclear program is the sole reason that is preventing them from the kind of progress that you're seeing in some of these other nations,

why do they,

do they feel like that's the key to holding on to their power?

Is it still the idea of creating a kind of a more Shia-dominated power source from Syria through

Iran?

Is it, I can't wrap my mind around

why they do allow themselves to be so at a remove when they do have so much to offer, as you say, in terms of brain power, in terms of everything,

that they've kind of, you know, it seems like cut off their own nose to spite their face in some regard.

No, it's a very good question.

And I think it goes back to the one of the main problems with this government that it has not managed to define itself.

The fact that

40 years after the revolution, 46 years after the revolution, they're still calling themselves a revolutionary government.

So in 1979, the revolution happened because of mainly two reasons.

Iranians, they wanted freedom.

They wanted to defeat tyranny.

The Shah was a brutal force in Iran.

People might forget that.

The Shah was a brutal force.

And also the Iranians, they started their movement for freedom in 1906, one year after the original Russian revolution, and they had the constitutional revolution.

And Iran had the first parliament in Asia.

So people started to fight for freedom in 1906.

Then, you know, that

movement was was defeated.

The Shah's father came to power, and there were many movements in the 1940s.

And as you said, the coup happened in the early 1950s.

So many Iranians thought that they could use Khomeini in order to defeat the Shah, and then he would just go home and then they could come to power.

And at the same time, the Shia clerics, they had a lot of power in 1962.

The Shah had the white revolution and you know uh that undermined the power of the clergy in iran so the clergy they really developed the uh what was the white revolution go back to that because that i'm i'm not familiar so yeah so that the white revolution had two main tenets one was that the big lands had to be taken away from landowners and divided into farmers because the Shah thought that the that feudal system that existed in Iran at the time was a main obstacle to the progress of Iran.

And he was inspired by Kennedy, actually.

He had,

he was, you know, at that time, Kennedy was in power.

So there was a lot of conversation between the Kennedy administration and Iran.

And the second tenet was

giving women the right to vote.

So when Khomeini started his movement in 1962, he wrote a letter to the Shah saying that, you know, your Royal Majesty, he used the word royal majesty, giving women the vote is going to drive them to prostitution.

You know, like, you know, okay, women get a vote and then they go to a Brazil immediately, you know, just like that.

It's going to

this letter is available online, you know.

And then.

So the white revolution.

So after the white revolution, Khomeini, of course, had his original uprising.

He was sent into exile.

Many of his supporters were killed and put in jail, including

the current Supreme Leader, Ayto Lo Khamenei, who was, I think, around 23, 24 at the time.

He was born in 1939.

So

the clergy, they wanted to take power.

And so in 1979, these two forces, the nationalist forces and Islamic forces, they managed to topple the Shah.

But again, as you said about Egypt, the nationalist, the Islamic forces, they were more organized.

Khomeini had a network of

people in mosques around the country.

He was a very good communicator.

He knew how to use the cassette tapes.

He was sending his messages to Iran

in cassette tapes.

He was using photocopies of his messages.

So that was distributed all around Iran.

So when the revolution happened in February 1979,

Khomeini managed to get rid of all the other groups one by one, put people in jail, execute them, and then be the absolute ruler of Iran.

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Now, do you think Iran now, if that's the origin story of sort of this new version, do they define themselves

through

the Islamic premise?

Do they define themselves through opposition to the great Satan, which would be America and I'm assuming Israel?

Do they define themselves, you know, through this idea that they are a counterweight to the majority Sunni population in the region?

Like, what is

what's kind of the defining foundation then that holds the nation together?

Yeah.

So, I remember that I didn't answer your question about the nuclear, but so I'm going to answer

both of them at the same time.

No, I got that.

Yeah, I know.

I answered both of them at the same time.

Okay.

So, again, like what we are talking about, the opposition right now, when Khomeini came to power, he had an ideal of creating

Islamic utopia, exporting the revolution, and he inspired millions of people around the world.

You know, there's a guy who lives in Iran right now who came from Washington, and you know, he killed someone on behalf of the Iranian government, and he has been living in Iran for the past 46 years.

He inspired millions of people around the world.

And as you remember, in the 1970s and the 60s, revolutions were invoked.

So Khomeini was really a good revolutionary leader.

But that utopia

was, you know, was a mirage

idea.

It was a mirage.

Islamic Republic, as we said, that you know, it's like, you know, George with artistic integrity, that, you know, that does not exist.

So, in the absence of

being able

to create this Islamic utopia, what Khomeini did and what his successor Ali Khamenei did, since he's been in power since 1988, since 1989, sorry.

He's been, they've been,

they've been insisting on that revolutionary aspect of the Iranian government,

of the Islamic Republic.

And what do you need for a revolution?

You need an enemy.

So you have to have enemies.

And Khomeini said it himself that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran in 1980 was a gift to the Islamic Republic because when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and it started the Iran-Iraq war for eight years, that brought everyone together and they supported Khomeini.

And as a result, people, you know, he managed to mobilize people.

Then Khomeini died in 1989.

Ali Khomeini came to power and he's been, his catchphrase is

Doshman,

the enemy.

And, you know, he's been talking about Doshman, and you know, talking about Doshman is like really for him, is uh, it's give him these uh,

you know, it's

his character, it's like you know, Barry Gibb finding his or Seto, you know, it's just like that, you know.

It's like when you think about Barry Gibb before,

you know,

see, this is the fun of hanging out with Maziar.

No, no, but seriously, like, you know, uh, Saturday Night Fever before and after, sure, it's like, you know, it's like when Khamini talks about once they found that signature sound man, Doshman.

Exactly.

Doshman was the staying alive.

You know, because apparently Khamini smokes opium.

And, you know, people who've known him, they say that every now and then he likes to smoke a little bit of opium.

He doesn't say Doshman.

He says Dojman, which is a very much, you know, like an opium-affected sound.

Anyway, so yeah, so he has to define a new Doshman, a new enemy for himself every time.

So it was Saddam Hussein, which was a blessing.

And then, of course, America, the great Satan, Israel, the little Satan.

And then, you know, the

then,

I think around 1993, 94, he talked about the cultural invasion because of the Western cultural invasion, because of all the velvet revolutions that were happening in

Eastern Europe.

He talked about that.

So he keeps on talking about that.

And how can you defeat a Doshman, an enemy,

you know, through military power?

And what is the most potent military device that you can have to defeat and,

you know,

defeat the enemies?

That's the nuclear program.

They've been trying to do that since,

as far as we know, since the late 1980s, when the

former Revolutionary Guards Commander and the letter is available, asked Khomeini after many defeats during the Iran-Iraq war that we have to start developing a nuclear program.

Wasn't even the Shah pursuing that, I think, towards the end?

Well, Shah was not pursuing.

The Shah was not pursuing a nuclear

weapon.

He wasn't pursuing.

We don't know yet.

We don't know.

The funny thing about the Shah is that the Americans, they helped the Shah during the time of Eisenhower, around the 1956, 55, 56, to develop the program Atoms for Peace.

And many countries, they had that.

And the Shah had a very smart idea, actually.

The Shah was saying that oil is a finite resource.

So we cannot uh use oil only for heat.

And you know, we have to have

alternative sources of power and keep oil for other

usage.

So the Shah was developing nuclear energy and in early

around

late 1970s

there are some documents that some Israelis, they were saying that the Shah should develop nuclear weapon in order to be able to defeat the Arab enemies the same way or at least frighten the Arab enemies.

And at that time, the Americans did not want to

have that and prevented that.

And when this government came to power, it basically got rid of all the nuclear program in the beginning, and then they started again in the late 1980s.

So when you go to the Israeli archives, that part of the archives is still not available to the public.

But when you talk to the

people in the Israeli army in the old old times,

the military attaché, the Mossad people in Iran at the time, they're telling you that that's what happened, that we wanted to have Iran

nuclear program.

And the other thing is that, you know, between Iran and Israel is that there is no real beef between Iran and Israel.

Iran needs Israel.

By the way, I think more Jews in Iran.

Yeah.

Than any other country around there after Israel and the United States.

Maybe after Turkey, I'm not 100% sure, but right, maybe Turkey.

Right.

There's a sizable Jewish community in Iran, and it's one of the oldest

Jewish communities in the world.

And you know, then they're not Ashkenazi and they're not Sephardic.

There are, you know, Iranian Jews, Persian Jews.

Persian Jews.

You know, and there are many of them is they are very close to where you live.

You know, they're in Long Island.

Wait, what?

Yeah, yeah.

I thought it was Los Angeles.

No, no, no, no.

Great neck, Great Neck in Long Island

has the biggest Persian Jewish community.

They know, you know, they know where to choose.

Like, these are like beautiful areas.

They have very, very different.

You got to go by waterfront, you know, the Jews.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, so there's no beef between Iran and Israel.

But it is,

Iran's been very clear they would like to destroy Israel, and Israel's been very clear they would like to destroy at least this regime.

Yeah.

Well, Iran has to say that again again, because Khamene and the regime as a whole, they need an enemy, but

they need a dochman, yeah, or doshman, if you want to

emulate

right.

So yeah, there's no, in the shah's time, there was no de facto relationship between Iran and Israel, but Israelis had up to 10,000 people

working in Iran in different industries, advisors.

There was a direct flight between between tehran and tel aviv really so yeah to ordinary iranians

there are no uh animosity between iran and israel you know yes of course when people do they not is the palestinian question not as important to the iranians no the thing is that the palestinian the palestinian question for is as important to iranians as the situation of rohingya is important to the israelis You know, they are sad about it.

Yes, of course, when they see destroyed houses, their children, etc., they are sad about it, but it's not their issue.

The same thing for the Israelis.

The Israelis, when they look at the Rohingya in Burma, they're sad about it, but this is not something that has to do with them.

So many Iranians, they just don't understand why they are stuck between a corrupt, violent government, a regime, and

a government in Israel that thinks that they can just bomb everything.

And the solution to everything is bombing, including bringing democracy.

And the icing on the cake was a few days ago when the Israelis, they bombed Evin prison in a symbolic gesture that, you know, we want to bring our freedom to Iran.

And what happened?

Many buildings were destroyed, many windows were shattered, and many prisoners were hurt seriously, were injured seriously.

And those are the people who hate the Iranian government.

And those are the people who are the future of Iran.

And the Israelis are hurting them because they want to bring democracy to Iran.

Right.

This is such,

it's such a repeat of so many of the ill-founded efforts that we have had in that region for these past 100 years of that idea of, oh, we're going to bring democracy.

How does the Saudi bloc and Qatar UAE,

how do they play into this?

Because I'm always surprised,

given the brutality of this campaign in Gaza, given this, you know,

there's a lot of rhetoric from Turkey, the Saudis, Qatar.

Nobody seems to do anything.

Nobody seems to want to get involved on behalf of the Palestinians.

Like to create,

every now and again, they'll put out a kind of statement about a peace plan that they were going to do, but nobody will put

skin in the game and i'm wondering now you know as they're bombing iran

the passivity of all the other countries is that tacit approval of these actions

i wouldn't say that it's tacit yeah i wouldn't say that it's a tacit approval Some of them, you know,

because Iran has been trying to have its proxies in different countries, including Saudi Arabia, and it has cells in Bahrain and UAE and Kuwait.

Well, certainly Hezbollah and Hamas are the most well-known.

Yes, but also

smaller groups, yeah.

Smaller groups they have in Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, and other places.

And, you know, Iran and Saudi Arabia, they haven't had a very, you know, brotherly relationship since 1979, even before that.

but so on one hand many people in among the Arab countries around the Persian Gulf they

they're kind of happy that you know Iran and Israel are fighting and the fact that Iran is being weakened by Israel and the United States but at the same time

because the security and stability of the region, especially the Strait of Hormuz, where

20% of the oil produced in the world, it goes through Strait of Hormuz every day.

They are worried about the stability of that region.

uh maybe they're heart in their heart they're happy that iran is being weakened but when they think about it this the instability and insecurity of the region is not something that can be helping even the uh

persian Gulf Arab countries.

And for all that time,

you know, again,

people always talk about the off-ramps.

I think what's so helpful about this, Maziar, is you giving us the kind of context and background about how Iran developed and how they got here gives us sort of an idea into the

psychology of it.

You know,

you and I still live live in the 1979 world to some extent.

I would imagine that the majority of people now in Iran and in that region do not in any way remember 1979, don't have any real

ties to that, you know, the enemies and foes and friends of that time.

It does present an opportunity to redefine what that region can be.

It seems insane to me

that this region has been so fraught.

What are the real dangers?

Well, you know, in Iran, the situation is not like as you described, because in Iran, they celebrate the 1979 revolution every day.

People see pictures of the people.

They still live in that moment.

Oh, yeah.

People see pictures of Khomeini, Aitolla, Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the revolution, every day.

And people collectively remember the collective fuck-up that they had in 1979, who came to the streets and chanted, when the devil goes out, the angel comes in.

Meaning that when the Shah goes out, the angel Ruhollah Khomeini would come in.

And I think, yeah, I mean,

the whole nation.

even the young people who don't remember 1979 and the majority of Iranians, maybe 85% have been born out after 1979,

they still regret that historical mistake that they made in 1979 to have a revolution without knowing, without having a plan for the future.

And that includes many people in the government now.

People who were revolutionaries at the time, when you talk to them privately and sometimes even publicly, when you talk to them, they said, we made a mistake.

We should have given the Shah the opportunity to reform the country.

The Shah was afraid of the Soviets, of the communists, and then maybe after the collapse of Soviet Union, there would be more opening.

In any case, the situation would not be as bad as it is now.

And that is according to many people within the Iranian government.

Are there resentments more internal or are there resentments that look, we've imposed really devastating sanctions on that country.

You know, I would imagine it's very easy for them to point to as they did with you yeah that you are an agent of the west sent to weaken them that's been their game plan you've been the doshman the west has been the doshman for so long yeah that

how reflective are they and even within iran for those who resent you know

what would you say is the is the regime's actual sort of support level, you know, given everything that's happened.

Yeah, I would say based on the last election that we had, and the majority of people voted for the person who

was not Khamenei's first choice for president, and people, you know, about five to six million people, or maybe a little bit more, seven million people, maybe, they voted for Jaliri, who was Khamenei's chosen candidate during the presidential election last year.

I would say that is the highest level of support that you would have in the country.

And that includes people who are getting funding by the government, the intelligence agents, etc.

But

this

question of sanctions is very important

because I think it's multi-layered.

The problem is multi-layered.

In order to impose

targeted sanctions against the nuclear program, against the human rights violators

in terms of

certain sectors within the Iranian economy, you need the bureaucracy to back it up.

You need the

people in the treasury, in the State Department, other places in order to be able to liaise with the banks saying that, okay, this pharmaceutical company that wants to bring,

you know, to wants to import

medicine from the U.S.

or medical equipment from the US, they can be exempted.

They can have this OFAC license that you know treasury

issues for the exceptions.

But that bureaucracy has not existed in the U.S.

government since the beginning,

since 1979, when Carter's administration imposed the sanction.

And neither Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama, Bush Sr., Bush Jr., none of them had that.

And it doesn't exist at the moment.

And at the same time,

the Revolutionary Guards is not only a military force in Iran.

It is the biggest industrialist in Iran and it has many companies.

It has shares in some private companies.

So when

the Revolutionary Guards Corps, IRGC,

is prescribed, is subjected to sanctions, that means that the pharmaceutical companies that are owned by the Revolutionary Guards, the pharmaceutical companies that bring medical equipment to Iran, they are subjected to sanctions as well.

That somehow resembles hiding amongst civilians for the Revolutionary Guards, because it is like an octopus.

It has its tentacles everywhere in every aspect of Iranian society.

And sometimes, you know, you are a bookkeeper or you're an accountant working for a company, for a pharmaceutical company, and then the revolutionary guards take over.

You're immediately become subjected to sanctions by the American government and many other governments.

So I think this is this

question about sanctions is very, very complicated.

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But I think the main reason for the sanctions is the behavior of the Iranian government.

In 1979, when the sanctions started, they started because a group of students inspired and supported by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over the American embassy in Tehran, meaning the

part of the American land.

And I think that resentment

still exists among many American diplomats and

actually among many older Americans who are voting for different elections.

Absolutely.

That's what I meant by it.

Like, for the younger Americans, I don't think they have any foreknowledge of that.

But for older people who still remember

the pain of that time, that's why I'm saying this seems like a moment where we can finally break free

from this kind of historic, self-defeating pattern that has a lot of people who are.

That requires requires

an education, don't we?

Well, it's funny.

You always think 20 people, yeah.

The one thing Maziart was always really clear with me.

So we always talked about this when we were sort of working on the film was

the difference between incompetence and evil.

And, you know, you were always really clear that so much of, and we tried to sort of insinuate that with the interrogator that used to, that Kim Bodnia who played your interrogator that would come in, this idea that they they weren't evil as much as ignorant and incompetent.

And

that chasm seems like it's only grown.

And is the Revolutionary Guard the only organization within Iran now that kind of functions as holding that whole thing together?

No, I think the civil society in Iran is still very strong.

Iranians are educated.

And since the woman life freedom movement, Iranian society has changed a lot.

You see stronger civil society groups and these civil society groups, they are not maybe politically active and they want to topple the government.

They are environmentalists.

They are

you know, they are involved in providing employment to different people.

They are

targeting poverty in different parts of the group.

So society as a whole is really progressing and it's really advancing advancing

regardless of what the government is doing.

Right.

Almost nature finds a way.

Exactly.

And, you know, some many Iranians, in the absence of any viable opposition to this government, they are implicitly and explicitly asking the government, just leave us alone.

Just leave us the fuck alone.

We want to do, you know, we want to provide jobs.

We want to clean the environment.

This is the air that we all are breathing.

you know let us clean the air what's wrong with that but the revolutionary guards on the other hand they are very organized and but again the revolutionary guards is not a monolith there are different factions within the within the revolutionary guards who are fighting against each other uh

A

voice file

came out about five, six years ago.

It was about the clash between Ghassim Ghassim Soleimani,

the former head of the courts force, and the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, and because of the fact that Soleimani was involved in some

money laundering, etc.

So that guy was criticizing him.

So Revolutionary Guards is not a monolith as well.

And also you have to remember that.

And I hope that the American administration remembers that as well, that many people, they are drafted into Revolutionary Guards.

So when a young person

is graduating from high school or maybe not drafting, but and joins the Army, they have a few choices.

They can go to the

the Army, the Navy, or they can be drafted into

Revolutionary Guards.

And they have no ideological

belonging to the Revolutionary Guard.

They don't ideologically support, but they're just drafted to the Revolutionary Guards.

So the Revolutionary Guards is really not a monolith as well.

And yeah, so in the absence of any

viable opposition, in the absence of any viable alternative, the majority of Iranians, they want security, they want peace,

they want to be able to provide the basics for the family, whether under this government or not.

And have a sense of a future.

I mean, it's...

And they want to have a sense of future.

And I think, yeah, I think that's very important.

You know, when the Israelis, they are targeting

Tehran and they're targeting civilian areas or they're targeting oil refineries.

And when people remember what the Israelis have done in Gaza.

That doesn't give them the confidence that the Israelis, they want to

have their own future.

Exactly.

That they want to work with them in the future.

But see, this is what's so heartbreaking about this region.

And this is something that I think I learned from working with you and from being over there.

I don't know of a region of the world where there is a larger gap between the nature of the people and the nature of their leadership.

The extremities of people's leadership in these areas versus, I mean, I can remember when we sent Jason Jones when we originally interviewed you during that time of the Ahmadinejad election.

a warmer group of people, better educated, a more artistic.

You will not find when you go into often these regions that are being torn apart by extremist violence.

You know, the people in Palestine, a more hospitable, like lovely with nothing.

I remember we would go into those refugee camps

in Jordan, people with nothing who wanted only to invite us in

and feed us.

And I was so struck by the gap

between the beauty of the hearts of those people and the hardness of the hearts of the leadership.

And I feel like that is where we're caught right now.

Yeah.

And, you know, when you travel to countries like Malaysia or Thailand or any other South Asian countries, but I'm giving Malaysia Malaysia as an example because it's a Muslim country and they don't have any relations with Israel.

The majority of people don't like Israel because of what it's doing to the Palestinians.

But the Malaysian government does not build a weapon and write in Hebrew on it, death to Israel.

You know, they don't.

invest so much money into denying the Holocaust, into anti-Semitic propaganda.

No, they don't have relations with Israel, but you know, they are doing their job, they have good relations with the US.

But it's not their reason for existing is to destroy them.

Exactly.

It's not the reasons for this.

And they don't do anything about Israel.

They just don't like it.

They don't deal with them.

That's all.

Maybe they deal with them with God, but it's not something that the Malaysians wake up in the morning and see death to Israel all the time.

And, you know, if you think about it, like when you're an Israeli, and I've been to Israel a few times in the past 10 years or so,

when you are an Israeli and you have this government that chants death to Israel all the time, as I said, and the example I gave is a real example that they built bombs and they wrote on in Hebrew on it death to Israel.

And at the same time, you see that they are funding groups that are acting against you.

That doesn't give you the confidence as an Israeli that, you know, you can deal with this government.

And you think about doing something.

But then you also, though, have politicians in the Knesset saying we should nuke Gaza.

I mean, that's exactly.

I can't imagine that's giving much confidence on the other side.

Of course, I mean, there are some rabbis in Israel who are saying that we have to emulate Iran and

have a Jewish, Jewish kingdom in Israel.

But I mean, we are not talking about like the extremes.

We are talking about normal people for normal Israelis.

That's what I mean.

I think it would, yeah, I think it would be interesting.

But the problem is that there is the narrative exactly that the ordinary Israelis, they do not understand the narrative of ordinary Iranians and vice versa.

Yeah.

If I want to blow our own horn, is that what we are doing in Iran where we're trying to somehow translate these narratives for the Iranian audiences about what the rest of the world are saying and for the rest of the world about what the Iranians are saying.

And it kind of takes us around sort of full circle to what we were talking about earlier.

And, you know, we're talking to Maziar Bahari, who had been imprisoned in Evan and has certainly,

you know,

his family had been arrested by the Shah.

I mean, that's the other thing I want to make clear is, you know, Maziar's experience, his experience was with Khamenei and being in solitary confinement.

His father's experience was with similar repression, but under the Shah.

Yes.

And so you've seen

the U.S.

aligned government and the non-U.S.

aligned government acting in the same fashion,

you know, as they say, meet the...

Oh, within the same, but similar fashion?

Similar fashion.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Is there some way?

And this is probably a

question beyond all of it, where

a country born in revolution, and and let's say the birthday is 79, or in Israel born in

Zionism or whatever it was that created it through,

that they mature past

this existential tightrope that they seem to always feel like they're walking

and

get past whatever they believe is the fear or humiliation of actions

and take this chance of

maturing past that moment

and giving their good people an opportunity to rejoin the family of other nations and

still obviously have issues and and act fucking normal like that's your that's it act fucking normal act normal like you know the government of malaysia for example it's not the best government in the world, but it doesn't wake up and say death to America.

Right.

You know, it took you about

two or three minutes to ask that question.

I think that process, it was a long question.

No, but it's, you know, but...

I'm just trying to work my way through.

No, no, no, but it's no, but it's important.

For the right question to be asked, you need to take your time, you need to think about it, and you need to articulate it.

For this change that you're asking about, people have to think about it, people have to introspect, and people have to come up with solutions.

The Iranian society, the majority of Iranians are doing that.

What you're asking about is not going to happen as a result of a bombing.

It's not going to happen as a result of sudden change.

As I said, after the woman, life, freedom, Iranian society was changing.

It has been changing.

This set of

bombing, this 12-day war, I'm not sure whether it's going to be an obstacle to that or

it may have weakened the regime to a certain extent that they may listen to people.

If they're wise enough, they would be listening to people and don't worry about hijab and things like that.

And they would just

try to have people on their side and survive, but survive in a more normal way.

But there's also the fear, the danger that they go Ayatullah Khomeini's way, that after 1988, after defeat from Iraq, the military defeat, they can close the society.

But one way or another, I am very hopeful about the long-term future of Iran, because the people I talk to, the young women, and men I talk to, especially young women, I think the Iranian women, they're just, it's just, it's really,

their future is theirs.

And when you think about the sacrifices that they've made, the amount of shit they've had to go through since 1979 and even before that, and their resilience and their brilliance, you can see that the future of Iran can be in the hands of these women.

And I'm very hopeful about the long-term future of Iran.

In the short term, especially in the next few months, after such a humiliating defeat uh by israelis and americans i'm not sure there might be some tragedies happening in the next uh few days weeks months and i can remember you and i would talk about you know these movements and the green movement and

and when they would sort of dissipate the people would come out in the street uh the basij or the revolutionary guard or

you know would would put it down violently and you said something to me once that really struck with me, which was

the people of Iran decided they like

life

more than they like freedom.

Exactly.

And that they were tired of

for their freedom having to put themselves in such harm's way.

And boy, that was such a good thing.

They want to celebrate life.

They just want to have a normal life.

And you know, the

most famous song that came out of the woman life freedom, it's called Baraya 4.

And the main line in that song is for a normal life.

And that is something that people have been fighting for, just a normal life.

I want to go out.

I want to buy a piece of bread.

I want to just, you know, hang out with my friends.

I want to drink coffee.

And that is not

allowed in a normal.

And that is not against God.

And that is not something that

guys on motorcycles with fucking sticks should drive through us and start beating us as as we're doing it and the sad thing is that they are shooting themselves in the foot and they are undermining their own authority by alienating people by alienating people who may have rallied around them at the time of war at the time that a foreign uh

country has invaded the land but i'm

unfortunately i'm sure that they're not going to learn from this and they're going to continue with this morality police and things like that.

Well, Maziar,

this has been, for me, just wonderful to see you, wonderful to catch up with you.

Lovely to see you too.

It's so nice to see you still just passionately doing the work, you know.

And I hope the listeners can tell for Maziar, you know, I've always said like, you're a Renaissance man.

Like the amount of knowledge that Maziar has, and you heard it on display, but man, get him going on film and music and it gets even deeper and more specific.

So, you know, you can always find good analogies with BGs and Seinfeld.

So, you know, if you know a few BGs and Seinfeld analogies, I think you're set for life.

He can pull them in.

Very few people of

custodians of history have that same knowledge of the disco era.

Well, thank you very much.

Nice to see you too.

Yeah, wonderful.

And Iran Wire

is just this incredible platform that allows uh people in iran to still have a voice outside of iran and get their stories out and maziar has been doing uh that work for now it's got to be what 10 10 12 years 12 years now yeah 12 years also available in english so people can go to iranwire.com and yep read the articles in english or we are also on substack i read oh look at you look at look at modern maziar very nice exactly

all right well it's it's just lovely to see see it.

Maziar Bahari.

Yeah, yeah, everybody.

Thank you.

How much you love Maziar Bahari?

So funny.

He's so great.

And he is a dead ringer for Peter Sellers.

When he said that,

it clicked for me.

And Peter Sellers, he never let race get in the way of a good part.

No.

No.

And by the way, then that's why we had Gael,

a Mexican national playing in Irani national.

And I remember saying

to Maziar when we were first

going to do the movie, I said, Maziar, I have this idea,

all Iranian cast and maybe even we do it in Farsi.

And this is going to be the most

naturalistic portrayal.

And he was like, don't you want people to see the movie?

He's like, my first rule is he has to be handsome.

That actually was his first rule.

He thought Gaal was close to handsome.

So

he was good there.

But it's so great to hear him.

And very few people have, again, his knowledge of history, but also culture, and are so agile.

He's so agile in the way that he weaves it all together.

But you can tell he's worried.

And I think he has so many friends.

and family members and people that I think he's really concerned about.

And I think he, you know, the uncertainty of the moment I could see is weighing on him.

Absolutely.

It was so good, though, to get those first person accounts through him of what young people are saying on the ground.

And it's just because that's so often lost in this conversation, is what the Iranian people want for the future of their country.

Just the breadth of what I don't know about Iran, what I assume most Americans don't know about Iran, what I feel confident saying our leaders don't know about Iran.

At least Ted Cruz.

Staggering.

Right.

Well, i can even remember when we did rosewater you know

i you know we we talked a lot about it and the id the idea was like if you're an american this was the most nuanced view of you know inside iran you'd ever seen but if you were iranian it probably felt like an utter farce two-dimensional sledgehammer you know what i mean like that's that's the gap between our understandings

of the separate countries and you can see how those gaps lead to such devastating outcomes.

And I think Maziar said it best.

He said, it's not a monolith.

There are those that really support and are really locked into that revolutionary mindset.

And there are those that are just like, we just want to fucking live our lives.

Yeah.

And who can't relate to that?

Totally.

I was thinking about something you all were saying, which is, you know, the generosity of the people on the ground not matching what the leadership has to say.

And it is also by design keeping information from people and framing things a certain way.

And we saw that with the attack on the base in Qatar, where the internet is cut off from Iran and they just declared victory.

And so I think it

destroyed the base.

Yeah, we need to like take a moment and think about what information is actually reaching people before we just assume that we disagree with them and this will be you know, a protracted battle forever.

And he, I think he very smartly said, you know, and there are a lot of people people there that are grabbing VPNs or, you know, it's, it's

ways of bypassing, but that is always going to be a narrower swath of the people.

And so we don't know the story that they're being told.

And by the way, before we get to kind of high on ourselves, we're not sure the story we're being told.

Oh, of course.

And, and, you know, it's been obliterate.

They're done.

It's over.

We had to do it.

They were within days.

They were, who the fuck knows anymore.

Now we are, we're off next week, right?

Yes, we are.

Little celebration of America's birthday there.

Or big beautiful Bill, if that happens.

Oh, Christ.

That's another one where watching them all have to say that reminds me of like whenever you call Disney and they have to end every conversation with and have a beautiful Disney day or whatever the fuck they have.

Have a magical day.

Have a magical day.

And it, when they say big, beautiful, Bill, it feels like a hostage video at almost every turn.

Just ridiculous.

But Brittany,

let's answer the listeners before we get going and then we'll head off into the sunset.

Sure thing.

First up, we've got John.

Do you think Donald Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize?

Sure.

Kissinger got it.

Why not?

Whoever's got the bombs, give him the prize.

What the fuck does it even matter?

The idea that winning that is somehow

means anything at this point there's a big cash prize i think that's why he's into oh

why doesn't he just make his own he does his own meme coin make his own do the trump peace prize award it to yourself and then have it for the rest of the time you'd rather have it that anyway That's such a solid prediction.

He's going to.

Right.

The Trump Prize will be given to whoever it was that did the most towards world peace.

And it turns out it's me.

Oh, my God.

I win, guys.

And they'll and they'll hold the reception at the Kennedy Center where he runs it.

It'll be perfect.

And remember, he said he was going to be a world-class, I don't remember what he said, violinist, flautist, whatever it was that he said.

He was talking to somebody saying he could have been world-class in an instrument, and he can play the music.

He's a one-man band.

What do we need anything else for?

He plays the flute.

Oh, I he said something in an interview, like, I could have been.

Oh, I, my brain just broke.

Sorry.

New trump lore just dropped.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He said, he was in an interview and he was saying to somebody he could have been a world-class musician.

Could have been.

Whatever else.

Yeah, he just decided.

Same.

Oh, how the world could have been different.

What else we got?

Next up, we've got, if you were stranded on an island, Colbert or Corral?

Oh.

That's easy.

A boat.

I would have a boat.

Why would I have one of those two knuckleheads who neither of us, by the way, that's, that's not even a choice on an island.

Like there's no, there's not a survival skill amongst the three of us.

It wouldn't matter who you had on there.

We'd all be gone within three days.

So

none of us, a boat.

I'd want a boat.

There we go.

For God's sakes.

But this is great.

I hope you guys have

a great week off.

Boy, you guys have been fantastic.

And

give yourselves a good time to decompress.

Brittany, how do they keep in touch with us?

Twitter, we are Weekly Show Pod.

Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Blue Sky, we are a Weekly Show Podcast.

And you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.

Boom.

Roasted.

Lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany Mimetovic, video editor and engineer, Rob Vitoll, audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer, Jillian Spear, and our executive producers, Chris McShane, Katie Gray.

Guys, have a wonderful week off.

We will see you all

the week after.

The week after, early July.

Thanks so much, and see you next time.

Bye-bye.

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a comedy central podcast.

It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.

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