joining me now is Reza Aslan. He's a writer, a producer, and a global theology scholar.

He's the host of the executive producer of the podcast, Rough Grap, with Reza Aslan. He's written

many, many important books on religion, including an American martyr in Persia.

Reza, thank you for staying with us through this conversation. You heard the

conversation I just had with Dr. Bagai, the spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry. There's

a lot in there to dissect. I guess the first part I want to ask you about is sort of what

you heard in there that surprised you. I imagine, given your knowledge, nothing really surprises you that the Iranian authorities will say.

No, not really, to be honest with you, Ali. I mean, look, you know, he's got a job to do,

and that job is to tow the party line for his government. And so that's why, as you very rightly noted, you know, so much of what he

was saying was either just false information or just information for propaganda purposes.

I will say, however, that some of the rhetoric that he used, and I hate to bring this up, started sounding

very familiar to me when he was talking about innocent civilians, innocent protesters

in his country being killed by government agents because they were in actuality violent domestic terrorists who

deserve to die. I think some of your viewers, that sounded fairly familiar to a lot of them.

Yeah. Yeah, it was, let's talk about, was there anything in there that he said that's worth our examination?

Because my one takeaway from this whole thing is that last summer's bombing of Iran came while there were indirect negotiations being facilitated by the Omanis.

This one did the same thing.

And the Omani foreign minister, who had no particular

reason to not be truthful with us, said that we were getting somewhere with a deal.

Most people would say, whether you like Iran or you don't like Iran, you like a deal or you

don't like a deal, deals generally are better than wars. What do you make of that?

Do you get some sense that maybe something was

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