Why We’re Interviewing President of Iran Mosoud Pezeshkian

Our interview with the president of Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Tucker Carlson?

  We just finished up an interview with Mosoud Pezeshkian, who is the president of Iran, the 70-year-old heart surgeon who leads the country we were just at war with about a week and a half ago. We know we'll be criticized for doing this interview. Why did we do it anyway? Well, we did it because we were just at war with Iran 10 days ago and maybe again. And so our view, which has remained consistent over time, is that American citizens have the constitutional right and the God-given right to all the information they can gather about matters that affect them. If their country is doing something with their money in their name, they have a right, an absolute right, to know as much about it as they can. And that would include hearing from the people they're fighting. Now, can you believe

• 1:14Tucker Carlson?

  everything you hear from the president of Iran? Probably not. But that's not the point. The point is, you should be able to decide for yourself whether you believe it or not. And keep in mind that anyone who seeks to deny you that right is not your ally, but your enemy. By the way, we have also put in, for the third time in the last several months, an interview request with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and we hope he accepts that. The interview is limited by a couple of factors. One, it was done by remote through a translator. That's always awkward. For another, I don't speak Persian. And there are all kinds of questions that I didn't ask the president of Iran, particularly questions to which I knew I could not get an honest answer, such as, was your nuclear program totally disabled by the bombing campaign by the US government

• 1:59Tucker Carlson?

  a week and a half ago? There's no chance he's going to answer that question honestly. I didn't bother to ask it. The answer, in fact, from an American perspective, even from the CIA's perspective, is unknowable. So we dispensed with those, and I asked him very simple questions, such as, what is your goal? Do you seek war with the United States? Do you seek war with Israel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Again, the purpose of this was not to get to the absolute truth. That's impossible in an interview like this. The purpose of the interview was to add to the corpus of knowledge from which Americans can derive their own opinion. Learn everything you can, and then you decide. That's the promise of America. And we hope that this interview does a small part to making that promise real.

• 2:40Tucker Carlson?

  This interview will be up as soon as we have done editing it, as noted, and that should be in a day or two.