Lively, respectful discussions even when, especially when, there's disagreement. No shouting, no talking over each other, no straw man or ad hoc arguments. Reason baby, it's what's for dinner! To learn more about New Atenism please visit our website (https://newatenism.org/),
What Comes After Iran's Regime? Zolal Habibi on the NCRI, Pahlavi & a Democratic Future for Iran
What happens if Iran's current regime falls — and who gets to decide what comes next?
Iranian human rights activist Zolal Habibi joins me to discuss her remarkable personal story, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), Reza Pahlavi — son and grandson of Iran's last two shahs and a would-be shah himself — and competing visions for Iran's political future.
We explore a question that's easy to ask but much harder to answer: How can Iranians — and outsiders like me — determine which path offers the best chance of producing a genuine liberal democracy?
We also discuss the difficulty of knowing what Iranians actually want, competing polling and evidence, the NCRI's proposed transition to democratic elections, the role of the United States, and a crucial democratic test: If free elections produced an outcome the NCRI strongly opposed, would it accept the result?
For more information on the Iranian resistance:
https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/ (https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/)
https://oiac.org/ (https://oiac.org/)
https://www.maryam-rajavi.com/ (https://www.maryam-rajavi.com/)
Outside the US: https://iranfreedom.org/en/ (https://iranfreedom.org/en/)
#Iran #NCRI #RezaPahlavi #IranianResistance #Democracy #HumanRights #ZolalHabibi #FeastsOfReason
29 Sept 2026
Money, Power & Freedom with Author James Keena
How do we find truth without simply trading one ideology for another?
Author and former business executive James Keena joins me for a wide-ranging conversation about capitalism, socialism, free markets, institutional power, and the systems humans have built to cooperate on an enormous scale.
James argues that political and economic “isms” can become self-reinforcing dogmas, and that increasingly powerful institutions have weakened individual freedom and concentrated control in the hands of what he calls “the elites.” We explore what he means by socialism, why he sees free markets as one of humanity's most powerful systems of cooperation, and whether science, democracy, and markets succeed because they contain mechanisms for finding and correcting their own mistakes.
Things get particularly lively when we turn to banking and the Federal Reserve. James argues that private banks have been given extraordinary power to create money and questions whether we need the Federal Reserve, or even banking in its current form, at all. I push back, and we find an interesting fork between his preference for replacing the existing system and my inclination to reform it.
We finish where Feasts of Reason so often ends up: How do we recognize when our own beliefs might be wrong—and what does it take to change our minds?
For more information about Jim, his blog and his books go to: https://jameskeena.com/ (https://jameskeena.com/)
22 Sept 2026
The Fixer: Finding Truth in the Middle East | Amjad Tadros
For more than three decades, Amjad Tadros had a front-row seat to history as a Middle East field producer—known in the business as a “fixer”—for CBS News and 60 Minutes.
He helped arrange Dan Rather's interview with Saddam Hussein, reported from wars and revolutions across the Middle East, interviewed Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard, and helped investigate one of the most consequential intelligence failures of the Iraq War: the Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball.”
Curveball's claims about mobile biological-weapons laboratories became an important part of the WMD case presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations. Years later, Amjad finally sat across the table from Curveball himself.
But this conversation is about much more than Iraq.
Amjad and I talk about how journalists decide whom to believe when everyone has an agenda; how 60 Minutes tried to verify stories before putting them on the air; whether journalists should ever stop being observers and intervene; how atrocities can be used to manipulate public opinion; why important stories like Yemen are so often ignored; and what more than 30 years behind the scenes taught him about which news sources to trust.
We also talk about Amjad's remarkable book, The Fixer: A Journalist's Accidental Journey Through the Middle East—part memoir, part history, and part behind-the-scenes look at how journalism actually works.
Feasts of Reason is about a simple question: Why do we believe what we believe? Few stories demonstrate the consequences of that question more dramatically than Curveball.
For more information on Amjad and "The Fixer" go to https://www.amjadtadros.com/ (https://www.amjadtadros.com/)
Chapters
00:00 Becoming the Fixer
02:23 The Role of a Fixer
04:11 Investigative Journalism and Collaboration
07:24 Ethical Challenges in Reporting
10:50 The Story of Curveball
23:21 Journalistic Integrity and Neutrality
25:46 The Power of Storytelling
26:42 The Significance of Overlooked Global Issues
28:36 Reporting from Conflict Zones
37:11 Determining the Credibility of a Story
43:47 Impact of Historical Context on Current Events
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