When I lived in Iran for 11 years, I was born in 78.

The Shah was leading Iran, you know, Mohammed Darsar Shah, Palavi.

And when you look at the stats, from 1941 when he took office to 1979,

that 38 years that he was in, not a lot of wars, it was fairly peaceful.

You have some numbers on the low end of 17,000 people that died due to war

in Iran during that 38 years. High numbers, 50,000. In the Middle East, not as chaotic. Of course,

there was issues, but not as much as they have now. Then from 1979, Khomeini comes in IRGC,

which I had the former founder of IRGC here. We had a conversation with him. Khomeini comes in in 79, from 79 till today, if you look at the numbers, low-end, 600,000 people died in Iran, 2 million people. In the Middle East, 4.5 to 5.5 million people have died. Of course, some of the words are different places, but still, when you go back to Iran, you have Houthis, you have all these other things that they control. How much do you think of what the Middle East

was like pre the Islamic Revolutionary Guard took over, how everybody was able to find a way to get

along versus what happened after 79? I know you're a big history person. What is the difference between those two eras? Well, the, the big difference is the Islamist revolution

that basically took this very gifted people. The Iranian people are enormously gifted.

First of all, they have a tremendous historic culture, and you won't be surprised, but

maybe your listeners would be surprised that in antiquity, in the time of the great Persian

king Cyrus, there was a honeymoon between the Jews and the Persian people.

And that relationship actually continued in modest ways, but in significant ways under the Shah.

When the Shah went down and these theological thugs took over Iran, they basically said,

our goal, that's in their constitution, is to export the Islamic Revolution worldwide. And that's what they proceeded to do.

So all the mineral resources, all the economic resources were now tuned to war.

In the time that I said when I was finance minister, until today,

Iran at that time and Israel had roughly the same GDP per capita.

Ours went up from $17,000 to $60,000 per capita.

And there stayed flat.

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