EP18 Iranian Interconnections

it's hardcore history the guest we're going to have on today is talking about a subject that is near and dear to my heart i first fell in love with what i would have called persian civilization as a teenager by studying ancient history and the persians are in one of their you know perhaps their greatest period it depends on how you define greatest but perhaps the greatest period in their history but they've had many and of course the um long time antagonist in the ancient world of the greeks and and so you get caught up in the the romance and the and the fascinating involvement the persians had in the region then you start studying how often they have that involvement and you begin to understand that this is a traditional regional superpower and then right when i'm really getting heavily into my interest in persia the situation with the modern nation of iran takes a 180 degree turn when i was a kid iran was a nation friendly to the united states in fact one of our best friends the shift to a fundamentalist religion-backed revolution where the united states was the great satan was an unbelievable turn of events not just for the united states but for the entire world stage in terms of what it did to things and many people have been born since without any memory of a friendly iran at all john gasvinian uh is going to talk to us today well basically about anything i ask him about so the deficiencies in the conversation are yours truly not asking more questions about more things i remember looking at the clock and thinking wow i've i've kept this historian here a long time i don't want to keep him all day but boy i never even got to x y and z so that's my fault and i do ho oh uh john gazvinian and you all an apology for the way this sounds um you know we have several methods for doing interviews remote interviews they all sound great some of the time and then let you down other times so we'll try something different next time so my apologies to everyone involved any mistakes are purely my own or you know imaginary creatures who shall be unnamed i'll share the um the blame maybe in any case without ...