Warning: Why Iran Will Never Stop Chanting 'Death to America

0:00Iran's Theocratic leadership has been remarkably almost generously clear about what it wants and believes when people tell you who they are, show you who they are consistently across decades, the responsible thing clinically and strategically. You know, as I sit down talking to you guys, it occurs to me that it was 50 years ago this summer that I officially entered the field of psychology because it was 50 years ago this summer that I got my master's degree in psychology and it was a few years thereafter that I got my PhD. That's a long time to be in a profession. I really am glad that I took the path that I did because I decided to go a little deeper than normal and get training in clinical psychology, which is, you know, the typical course that you think about when you think about the psychologist or therapist, which deals

1:02with challenges of daily living, neurosis, psychosis, all the things that you normally think about with somebody that is in practice, but also pursued training in the field of behavioral medicine or medical psychology. That's the point where you're physiological functioning and your psychological functioning merge and interact with each other. When I got through with all of that, I did a year's postdoctoral training in forensic psychology, psychology and the law, which gave me a really broad lane, you know, clinical, medical, forensic psychology, and across 50 years that comes in pretty handy to have a broad lane and then when I got into the television side of things, it gave me a really broad lane. We started with a mission and we said on our show, we want to deal with the silent epidemics. We want to give a voice to those people that don't have one. We want to change the narrative in America about mental health and mental illness.

2:04And I think we've done that at least in a small way. We've contributed to it. I probably learned more from all of you than I did through all the schooling, although of course it all comes together. Before we dive in, a quick thank you to preserve gold for sponsoring the real story. They're the only precious metals company I recommend. There's a special offer on your screen right now and in the show notes. I'll tell you more about it a little later. And a lot of the lessons apply across so many areas of life. And one of the things I've learned when people tell you who they are, when people show you who they are, you need to believe them. I mean, that's just a basic principle of human behavior. And that holds true whether you're dealing with individuals, families, communities, or whatever. And I want to talk about that today. Sometimes it seems like I'm talking about politics and I'm really not. I'm talking about human nature. I'm talking about cultural issues. And in more than five decades of studying and working in the field of human behavior,

3:07both individually and collectively, certain core psychological principles have proven to be absolute bedrock as reliable tools for predicting future conduct. What people are likely to do or not do. And these predictors, as I say, hold true whether you're dealing with individuals, you have families in parenting challenges or whatever, communities, states, or even nations, or most among those bedrock principles is the one you've heard me say before. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. The best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior. You have the ability to predict the future. The best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior. Now, think about that. We have lots of tools. We have tests that we can give people. If you're hiring somebody, for example, and you want to know if that person is going

4:10to work hard, show up on time, or be lazy and steal from you, I can give you lots of tests to give to that person. Personality tests, give you a raw shocking plot, give you a MMPI or a millen multi-actual. I can give you all these psychometric devices. But the best thing I can do is get a good history of that person. The best thing you can know about what they're going to do as an employee is find out what they did at the last job they were in. The last job before that they were in. The last three or four jobs they were in. If you want to know if they're going to work hard or steal from you, find out if they worked hard or sold from the last people they worked for. The people before that that they worked for. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So get a good history. See what people have done across time. Not far behind that is this. As I say, if you listen carefully with discernment, and I'll explain what I mean by that in a

5:14minute, people will tell you who they are and what their true intentions are. Now take a look at this information. Should make surprises few and far between when human nature is the driving or outcome determining force, paying close attention to patterns of behavior and to the motivations behind the representations people make is of particular importance. Understanding why people or groups say and do what they're saying and doing is of course profoundly relevant. Now this principle you can find it in a textbook, but it came from watching over and over what happens when people ignore it. A spouse who has cheated twice tells you it will never happen again. After the first affair, I did make a vow to Dan that I would never cheat on him again. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. And you want to believe the tone and the tears, the sincerity in the moment.

6:18Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. A business partner who has broken every prior commitment swears this time is different and too often the people around them mistake remorse at being caught for real remorse and commitment to genuine change. The question a lot of people are going to ask is are you sorry for what took place or you sorry you got caught? The only real evidence is the track record. Words can be cheap in the moment they're spoken. It's just easy to say it, but patterns are expensive to build and really hard to fake because they require consistency across time, circumstance and conditions. Think about that in your own life. We'll be right back. We work hard our entire lives to build well for retirement. If your retirement drop 30% tomorrow, would you be ready or would you just have to wait

7:18and hope it comes back? The last thing any of us wants is to watch our retirement accounts shrink every time Wall Street panics, the dollar drops or global uncertainty rises. That's why so many successful Americans turned to gold to help protect their retirement and preserve gold is the only precious metals company I trust and recommend. Let me be frank, gold is not for everybody and I do not give financial advice, but I do urge you to get my free wealth protection guide from preserved gold and learn about a special offer to receive up to $20,000 in free gold and silver. Call 844-718-2642 or text ask fill to 50505. Who are people you know that just across time have consistently shown you who they are? And I'll bet you can come up with good examples. You've probably got great friends that across time have shown you who they are.

8:20They're not fair whether friends they're there for you not some of the time but all the time. You probably also know people who've shown you who they are in a bad way. We can easily relate to this principle in the context of marriages and business partnerships. But it applies with equal force to nations and presidents from Carter in the 1970s to Trump today. They must reckon with the fact that it always applied to understanding the Islamic Republic of Iran. The pattern not the moment since 1979 when death to America first echoed through the streets of Tehran during the revolution that toppled the Shah before any American sanction before any American strike before any provocation at all. The rhetoric and the conduct of the Iranian regime have moved together. Now think about what I just said. The rhetoric what they were saying and how they were behaving moved together not occasionally,

9:27not coincidentally, consistently, consider the timeline not as a list of isolated incidences but as a single behavioral signature repeated under wildly different conditions. 1979 to 1981 under a democratic administration extending secret diplomatic channels through Hamilton Jordan to resolve the hostage crisis. The regime's own negotiating counterpart was later executed and attacks on Americans continued after the hostages were released. The 1980s under a Republican administration attempting quiet back channel diplomacy, the effort collapsed into scandal with no lasting change in behavior. Alright, let's jump to the end of the 80s. 1989 when an American president publicly extended the benefit of the doubt, quote, good will be gets good will to a new, ostensibly more pragmatic Iranian president.

10:29The regime answered with continued sponsorship of terrorism against Americans. Alright, let's go to the 1990s under a different American party, a different American president, a different geopolitical movement, a ran declined even a basic diplomatic courtesy of meeting its counterparts at the United Nations. Heartless jump ahead to 2007 when direct bilateral talks were authorized over Iranian backkillings of American service members. The killings continued. 2015 when a nuclear agreement offered sanctions relief in exchange for temporary nuclear constraints. The relief reportedly financed the regional militia and missile activity. The deal was meant to diffuse the years following when successive American offers to revive the same agreement were extended. Flatly rejected. The present moment under a return to maximum pressure paired with a genuine diplomatic

11:35offer sanctions relief, a path to reintegration, a $300 billion investment framework. The regime continued strikes on shipping continued threats against American citizens, continued proxy attacks through Hezbollah, and continued construction at nuclear facilities in apparent violation of the agreement's own terms, and a threat to assassinate the American president. Seven American presidents. Both political parties, five decades, radically different approaches. Coersion, engagement, financial incentive, military pressure, quiet diplomacy, public diplomacy, in every single case, the same outcome. That is not a coincidence. We'll be right back. There's no shortage of sleep products on the market, but there's one that my senior staff swears by, including my CEO and my chief of staff.

12:38It's called sleep cream. Now, I don't personally use CBD, and I'm careful about the products I talk about, but I do trust the people around me. Sleep cream, it's not a pill, it is a lotion. You apply it before bed, and according to my team within minutes, they feel calmer, and they say they get an amazing night's sleep. Now, if you'd like to try it for yourself, go to sleepcream.com and claim your exclusive Dr. Phil trial. Ready for better sleep? Try the only sleep cream Dr. Phil recommends. His own staff uses it and loves it, and you will too. Go to sleepcream.com now to claim your exclusive Dr. Phil offer. That's sleepcrm.com. Try it risk-free with our 30-day money back guarantee. Again, sleepcream.com. In behavioral terms, that is a signature. Why the strategic gap explanation? Look, that's this strategic bluster.

13:39Tough talk. Deployed for leverage. And what I mean is like, okay, so they talk tough. Any negotiator is going to do that, right? It's a negotiating posture rather than a genuine statement of intent. Every negotiator postures. Every state actor manages perception, but posturing by definition is supposed to be flexible. It bends towards advantage. A fair-minded critic would point out that regimes routinely strike narrow transactional bargains. A hostage release, a temporary nuclear constraint. While still maintaining maximalist rhetoric on everything else, and that this gap between limited cooperation and sweeping declaration is itself normal statecraft rather than prove a been wavering intent. That argument deserves a real answer, not a dismissal. If it were correct, a regime merely talking tough for leverage, should somewhere across

14:42five decades and seven administrations have found at least one moment where genuine de-escalation served as interest better than continued hostility and taking it seize that moment. Instead, the outcome has never varied regardless of what was on offer. Sanctions relief didn't soften it. Investment funds didn't soften it. Direct presidential outreach didn't soften it. Public assurances of goodwill did not soften it. When a behavior pattern holds constant across every condition that should, in theory, produce variation if the behavior were purely strategic, the it's just strategy explanation stops doing any explanatory work. At that point, the simpler and more parsimonious account is the correct one. Psychologically, the stated intent and the demonstrated conduct are not two separate things

15:46being managed independently. They are the same thing. The rhetoric is not amassed over different true intentions. It is a description of the actual intentions delivered honestly and acted on consistently. Let's do a succession test. If there was ever going to be a moment where this pattern broke, where a genuinely different set of intentions might finally surface, it would be now following the death of the regime's leader of nearly four decades in a direct military strike in the ascension of a successor operating under conditions of maximum vulnerability, maximum scrutiny, and maximum incentives to signal a break from the past. That is exactly the kind of discontinuity that psychologically tends to expose whether a stated belief system was situational or structural.

16:46People under acute stress and threat to survival tend to reveal not conceal their core commitments. There is neither time nor cognitive bandwidth for careful strategic performance when the underlying structure itself has just been shaken to the core. Look, crises don't make heroes or villains. Crisis simply reveal who people truly are. What followed this crisis of leadership? Well it was not moderation. It was intensification. The son who inherited the title inherited the identical rhetorical commitment. Reasserting the same 25 year countdown to Israel's destruction, his father had first voiced a decade earlier, describing Israel in the same eliminationist terms and doing so publicly on record months after a strike that killed his own father.

17:46And while the United States was actively signaling openness to a deal, if succession under existential pressure was the moment that should have produced a different answer, the answer that came back was no different at all. This is precisely what the past predicts the future principle would forecast, and precisely what a purely tactical rhetoric theory would struggle to explain. Tactics adapt to new information, identity commitments, the things people and institutions actually believe about themselves in their purpose, persist through leadership change, through military defeat, through incentive structures that would reward abandoning those thoughts, those commitments, and adapting something new. And look, there's a cost to getting this wrong. There is a well-documented cognitive bias that makes this mistake so easy to repeat, and that is the tendency to overweight the most recent, most emotionally salient signal,

18:53a softened statement, a diplomatic overture, a moment of apparent flexibility, while underwaying the much larger base rate of established behavior. It feels sophisticated to say, well, maybe this time is different. I'm flexible enough to recognize opportunity. It feels naive to say the pattern always holds. But the discipline runs the other way, recognizing a stable pattern isn't cynicism. It's just paying attention to the evidence a person, organization, or regime has spent decades providing. Iran's theocratic leadership has been remarkably almost generously clear about what it wants and believes across two Supreme leaders, seven American presidents, and every available diplomatic and economic instrument the United States has tried. The pattern doesn't require interpretation. It requires only that we stop discounting it every time a more comfortable story pops

19:59up. And people tell you who they are, show you who they are consistently across decades, regardless of incentive. The responsible thing clinically and strategically is to believe them. The sentiment death to America, chanted by this regime in the streets of Iran, appears to be the real story. We just need to not be in denial and understand what they truly want and value.