The Jordan Harbinger Show - 746: Yass Alizadeh | Iran Protests | Out of the Loop

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Yass Alizadeh (@AlizadehYass) is a clinical assistant professor of Persian language and literature and the Persian program coordinator at New York University. Her research focuses on the layering of ethical themes in the ambiguously coded language of folktales in Modern Iran, the intricate link between politics and fiction, and the critical role of metaphors in the reframing of Iran’s classical oral tales. Welcome to what we're calling our "Out of the Loop" episodes, where we dig a little deeper into fascinating current events that may only register as a blip on the media's news cycle and have conversations with the people who find themselves immersed in them. Here, we talk with NYU clinical assistant professor of Persian language and literature Yass Alizadeh about the protests going on in Iran right now for people who may be a bit out of the loop. Listen, learn, and enjoy! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/746 On This Episode of Out of the Loop, We Discuss: What spark set off the current round of protests in Iran, and how does this differ from previous periods of unrest in the country? How did Iran go from a rapidly modernizing state to a tyrannical theocracy? Why the younger generations in Iran are standing up to the current regime in ways prior generations didn't dare. Iranian regime change vs. regime reform — who really supports each approach and why it matters. Where Yass sees these protests going, and what she hopes they bode for the future of the Iranian people. And much more! Connect with Jordan on Twitter, on Instagram, and on YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on an Out of the Loop episode, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation with NPR’s Guy Raz? Catch up with episode 404: Guy Raz | How I Built This here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider leaving your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. This is it. This is it. There's no going back. That's what people on the ground and the young Iranians say on social media, this is it. They're just moving forward and they're just doing what they have been waiting to do all these years. This is a revolution and it will end beautifully with a free Iran, free from the grips of IATO laws and IRGC. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Emmy-nominated comedian, Russian spy, economic hitman, or Cold Case Homicide Investigator.

Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and of course I love it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs as a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like disinformation and cyber warfare, China and North Korea, crime and cults, scams and conspiracy debunks, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start,

or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now, today, not really sure where to categorize this show. I'm thinking about starting a new series called Out of the Loop. I know you have skeptical Sunday and Feedback Friday. This would be kind of like our out-of-the-loop series. What this is going to be is whenever there's a really urgent current event that's kind of confusing, I think I'm going to do a breakdown of it because a lot of you ask me about this stuff. What's going on over here in Brazil?

What's happening in Iran? What happens in the Ukraine War of Putin loses? There's all kinds of questions like that that I think are really interesting that kind of don't fit elsewhere on the show. So I'm thinking occasional episodes every month or even less, depending on the level of global chaos. Now, today, the first one in this potential series, we all see the Instagram posts, the news clips, but I think like many global conflicts, especially these smaller ones and places we seldom hear about that are more regional or even domestic, all of this news goes in one ear and it comes out the other. Let's talk about what is going on in Iran right now for people who are a bit out of the loop.

Today, my guest, Yas Al-Alezade, a professor of Persian language and literature, who is from Iran, is going to tell us not only her personal story about living and growing up under the revolution, but what is happening now, along with some news that is sort of sneakily exiting the country from people that she knows, friends and family out there. Really interesting conversation, a little bit of Iran protests 101. And I think a lot of you, since you've asked me for this, this is going to scratch that itch. Now, here we go, with our first out of the loop with Yas al-Azade. Thank you very much for joining me. I know this is an unusual format for you. Usually you're up in the front doing all the talking, teaching. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. That's true. But this is very exciting and I think it's very urgent for any Iranian in America to talk about this. So I'm ready. I've been getting a lot of DMs on Instagram and emails from people that say things like be our voice, be our voice. We don't have internet, which is interesting and sort of weirdly ironic, right? Because if you don't have internet, how are you emailing me? How are you sending? me a DM on Instagram.

You might want to know that the internet is very, very weak. In Iran, it's very difficult to connect with people in Iran. They need VPNs, and we are supposed to buy VPN and send them VPN. Many people cannot afford it. They cannot find it. It's very difficult to connect with people right now in Iran, with my mother-in-law, with those people are not very computer savvy to be able to connect. So the Internet, is it off?

It's not off, but in order to get, let's say, on social, media, they need to have VPNs and the internet is, some parts of Iran are off, but other parts, it's, you know, some part of the town is off. The other part, you can have internet, but it's very difficult to go online and then go on social media because you probably know that Facebook is filtered in Iran, Twitter is filtered in Iran. They're all illegal. So even before these happenings, it was very difficult for people to kind of dare to go on Facebook. They all had fake names. Oh, so it was blocked. Not the content is filtered. You can't get to it at all at all. No, you couldn't. So you had to have VPN. So the VPN is something that everybody has to have in order to go on a social media website. But in all, Facebook and Twitter illegal in Iran.

And so, yes, yes, the internet is very weak. So some days I hear from my old classmates and my friends in Iran and sometimes they cannot even go online. So WhatsApp is how I connect. with my high school friends and some days they are there, some days they are not. My aunt calls my mom via WhatsApp. Some days they can talk together. Some days they can't because there's no internet. It's very difficult to kind of go online. But it seems like right now in Iran, there's these crazy protests. We're seeing some photos and videos leaking out and some from maybe from foreign journalists. But a lot of people who are living there are urgently reaching out to people like me to get attention for this cause. And so I'd like to back up because I think a lot of people are thinking, I've heard something about Iran. I've seen a couple of clips. There's a mention

in an article in the New York Times that's an inch wide or long or, you know, a couple of paragraphs. There's not a whole lot of information. What is happening right now in Iran? Thank you for asking that, Jordan, because today specifically is important to us. This is the 40th day from the murder of Masa Amini in the hands of the Islamic police. So today is specifically very important because people started to go to Saiz, which is her city and from all parts of Iran. And if you look at videos, you will see these huge groups of people walking for miles to get to her gravestone, to her resting place. People in. cars, people on foot, and it was an amazing picture to see. Well, I just heard a couple of hours ago

that the police has been surrounding the people who are going for the 40th day of morning and arresting and harassing and shooting at them. So it was unbelievably beautiful in the beginning, and then suddenly it got deadly, as always, with the Islamic police in Iran. I think for people who are saying, wait, who passed away? So for those of us who are really, really truly out of the loop, which is kind of what this episode is for. This is a young girl who was beaten to death by the Islamic police. But we have to, let's talk about why she was beaten to death. And what are the Islamic police? Is that just what police are in Islamic countries or is this different than regular police? Well, you could call them different things. This is a police that is

supposed to enforce Islamic laws per the Islamic Republic. So in the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, after the Revolution won, we had this militia, that started to form, and it was called Sapaa Posteran and Galaab Islami, the Islamic Republic police force, let's call it. And these people were basically vigilantes, militia, that got together and started this brotherhood to enforce the Islamic laws and kind of protect the regime. This is different from our police. This was different from the army. This was a group of really different type of people. They actually found legitimacy because they fought very hard in the Iran-Iroch War. We had an army.

A lot of the army officers were themselves in jail per the Islamic Republic, right after the Islamic Republic started. The Islamic Revolution, this is 1979. This is when a largely secular government of Iran is overthrown by Islamic fundamentalists, in short, correct? Well, it wasn't overthrown by Islamic fundamentalists because my parents, were in the revolution, the majority of Iranian people were in the revolution, a lot of many college students, doctors, nurses, teachers were in the revolution and they were not Islamic fundamentalists. Okay. But the group that won, in other words, the group that took control of this new country or a nation was the Islamic fundamentalist. I definitely want to make sure

that we realize that. Yeah, this is interesting. So this is revolution to get rid of this corrupt Shah, the king, and then power vacuum, and then instead of instilling another secular government that's democratic or has the best interest of the people in mind, kooky theocratic fundamentalists take over the government and then say, okay, we're going back to the Stone Age in terms of the laws. Yes. As far as the corruption of Shah is concerned, there's a debate about that. It was, really, Iran was a country that was developing very fast. The GDP was pretty high. People were very educated compared to their parents and grandparents. Women had a lot of freedom. They were in the job market. They were progressing. It was really a wonderful time to be an Iranian. But then in that

type of democracy, which it wasn't really a democracy, let's say autocracy, but with democratic inclinations, people won more than just kind of a middle class lifestyle. And that basically was kind of a start of revolutionary ideas. I had a cousin who was. was, let's say, a communist. He was in jail. During Shaw's time, he was a medical student, he was jailed, he was in prison. He was executed by Khomeini. So it was very strange times, but I wouldn't call Shaw himself a corrupt monarch because that's really not the case. There was overreach by the secret police, though, right? I mean, I remember reading a lot of stories from people saying that they were imprisoned by, I think it was, was it called the Savak? Is it by getting that real? Yes. You are right.

So these guys were also kidnapping and torturing students and other activists and things like that. So I think because I'm going to, and look, you're the expert, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say people don't spark a revolution because they want to upgrade from a middle class lifestyle to an upper middle class lifestyle. Usually there's more at stake, right? Yes. They didn't want to upgrade from middle class to upper middle class. That's true. But they wanted to have political freedom. Right.

Okay. And that usually happens when, at least in Iran, it happened when there was. a hugely growing middle class. And we had also the constitutional revolution in our background. So, you know, it's a country that knew what it wanted and it was waiting for a democracy to finally come with Shaw, although the lifestyle was pretty decent, but the political freedom was in there. And yes, Savag was cruel. It arrested people. My husband's uncle was one of the first people who was actually executed by Sawak, why Shah. He was also a communist.

He was a very young man, a communist, and Shaw didn't tolerate communist ideas, specifically because many of them really wanted to change the regime with force, as, you know, usually. With support from the Soviet Union, because, again, we're talking about 1979. The Cold War was frozen solid at this point. Exactly.

So, and there was a lot of pressure by European countries, especially and America, unshought to beat this wall against the Soviet Union. And he really felt that he was country was in danger. And it was. Soviet Union was there. It was our neighbor. We were scared of it, and it had a lot of power. And there were many young men and women who believed in the ideals that communism and Soviet Union seemed to bring to the table. And that's another show for another day.

But meanwhile, there's a revolution, there's a power vacuum, and then Islamic fundamentalists end up taking over. And my impression of the besiege and this revolutionary guard, the Revolutionary Guard Council, I guess it's called, it's kind of like, and I'm trying to analogize this, and I'm going to do a pretty poor slash offensive job at doing so, but it seems like what would happen if the worst of the worst, least educated, most isolated and small-minded, people in any given country actually just took over the government by force and now they're in charge of everything and they have no, I mean, these are like people that never had seen running water and now they're running the entire country. Well, I wish that was really the case, but that wasn't the case, Jordan. Yeah, not all of them were uneducated. These were Islamic

fundamentalists, but if you look at the leaders of Islamic fundamentalism all over the world, you will see that many of them have had PhDs and they came from really wealthy families. The same was true with Iran. Not all of these besiege and IRGC terrorists were uneducated. They just were idealized. That makes it so much worse somehow. They should know better and they don't. You have some sympathy for people with two brain cells when they do something like this because they're too ignorant to know what they're doing. But meanwhile, these are just power hungry people that absolutely know better and should have seen this coming. Yes. Yes. And because they were, we're talking about Islamic fundamentalists in a Shiite version of it though, because

When we talk about Islamic fundamentalism, we usually think of the Sunni version of it. When it comes to Iran, it's a majority Shiite country. So they had their Shiite version of Islamic fundamentalism with the grand Ayatollah as their Supreme Khomeini was the grand Ayatollah as their supreme leader. And so they try to kind of justify all the crimes that they did or the criminal activities that they did in Islamic let's say, text. In other words, there was justification for what they did. If they killed people, it was because these people were against Allah. If they, you know, imprisoned people, it was because these people were doing sacrilegious things. So that made it much more difficult to stand against them

because there's nothing worse than a theocracy that is run by a bunch of thoughts. Right. Okay. And people are going to say, what does this 1979, 1980s stuff have to do with what's happening now. And the tie-in remember is that this young woman was walking around, I guess, what was the deal? Her head scarf was unsatisfactorily covering her hair, and she was arrested by the police that are in charge of enforcing the religious laws. So these aren't traffic cops or people that come over when you've committed what we might consider an actual crime. These are people that walk around making sure people are, quote unquote, moral and following the laws of Islam in public. Is that accurate? Yes, it is. They actually start.

started working as Comite in 1979. So the first thing that these IRGC or, let's say, besiege people tried to shape was to enforce Islamic laws. And one of the Islamic laws is the law of hijab. Hijab. The head covering. The head covering. So it was from the very beginning.

The last time I went to school without hijab in Iran was when I started sixth grade in Iran, which was middle school. And I have, you know, I had a cute picture of me with my pigtails. and then that was the end of it. In the middle of sixth grade, they started to enforce hijab. So we had to wear a head covering, and from then on every year, it was just head covering. So this is a 43-year law that has been being reinforced all the time, all the time, and we are used to it. It's just that, you know, now and then the Islamic police arrest someone, and sometimes, you know, they don't.

And just like any other dictatorship, it's very arbitrary. But the law is there and it's part of the criminal law. It's written. The law of hijab is part of the criminal law in our, you know, laws. Everybody's familiar with that. When we see the police, we try to pull our head cover, you know, our hijab lower. It's very automatic. When we see our principals in school, when we see our even many professors, we pull it down,

we pull it down to make sure our hair doesn't show. It's very automatic. And if you look at the videos of Iran, you will see that. So, Masa Amin is a victim of that law. the hijab law, and these people, these thugs have been doing it since the very beginning of the Islamic Republic. Right, but instead of giving her a ticket or arresting her and saying, hey, you know what to do, you're going to spend the afternoon inhaling secondhand smoke while we berate you, they beat her

and she died. Yes, because, you know, now this is not 43 years ago. Back then it was a country of 30 million people, and now it's a country of 80 million people. Oh, wow. And because of social media and, you know, the level of education among these people and the level of, you know, after 43 years, it's very difficult to kind of follow stupid laws, inhumane laws as, you know, sheepishly as, let's say, we did back then. There's usually these girls don't want to get into the van and they try to. The police van.

Right. Yeah, the police van. And they try to kind of resist this and they try to argue with them. It's not that early years of the Islamic Republic where we, whatever they said, we would follow because we were scared to death of these people. Now, as you see, there is this uprising of revolution. These young people are not afraid. They're on the streets day and night. All the universities are, the students are doing things that I could have never even fathom doing during my years in Tehran University or Ferris University of Mashat.

This is a different generation. It's much braver than we were. and, you know, they don't follow the rules as probably sheepishly as we did back then. It's interesting to hear that because when I hear people talk about Gen Z or whatever in the United States, it's they're lazy, they can't show up, they don't have their stuff to get. I mean, it's not a whole lot of very positive commentary. I tend to disagree with that. I think, I mean, you're a teacher, so you see the pluses and the minuses, of course, of this generation.

But I think it's really interesting to look back at your home country of Iran and look at the current generation. Did your opinion change now that you see them on the streets risking their lives to rebel against theocratic government and the regime in Iran? Did that change your opinion? Or were you always pretty positive about the youth of Iran? No, it actually did change my mind. I was hopeful. I was hopeful because I knew that this abnormal regime, this abnormal way of ruling would not continue for a long time. I knew this day would come. But I was really just, you know, it blew my mind to see young people so young on the streets and not being afraid. I would think probably older people would go on the streets, people my age, people who have

had it up to here. But then I realized, oh, my goodness, no, it's actually the young people who are leading this revolution. These are 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds, college students. Yes, it was a surprise, and I'm very proud of them. So to clarify, the reason that they're out on the streets now is they've had it up to here, as we just mentioned, but also what sparked this one, was the death of this young girl because it just highlighted for everybody on social media in a

viral way that not only are you being oppressed by ridiculous laws by people who are living centuries in the past and trying to enforce this on you, but it really just fill in any blanks here. I can imagine very few things that would highlight for you that you have absolutely no future and no freedom than having somebody your own age beaten to death by the police for not wearing the right kind of head cover. It really circles, underlines, bold font, the idea that you have absolutely no rights, nothing is getting better, things are maybe even getting worse, and that unless you do something about it, the rest of your life is going to be worrying whether this happens to you or one of your own kids or friends. Exactly. And that's what the young Iranians are saying on social media

because I have cousins in Iran. They're much younger than me. I have children of my cousins. and I'm constantly on social media speaking with them. And yes, there's no future. They just want major change. They don't want reform. They have given the chance to this regime more than enough. They did it with Khatemi. They did it with Rouhani. These are previous presidents of Iran, which are still underneath the Ayatollah, right? So the system in Iran, you might have a president, but still at the top is this council of supreme leaders who are just basically religious figures that can dictate who can run for president and what the president is even allowed to do, correct? Right. Exactly. And that's in our constitution. So the Grand Ayatollah or the Supreme

Leader who was Khomey, he could veto everything and everyone. And so yes, there are presidents, but these presidents are part of the system. None of these presidents, none of them has ever been somebody to look up to, to hope that they would bring change. Except that when you live in a desperate situation. You hang on to whatever is available. And that's what Iranian people have done. I visited Iran during when Khatami was going for presidency and I voted for him twice. And during Rohani, I had already realized that this was a mistake. But many of my family members voted for him the first time, not the second time, but the first time. These are Ayatollahs. These are Mullahs. They are followers of the Supreme Leader. They don't want change.

They don't want reform. They just want the status quo, but maybe a little bit of kind of more tolerance because you cannot have the pressure high all the time. It's going to blow up, and that's what has been happening. It seems like often the president is just a heat shield for the molas and the Ayatollahs. Again, I may be off here, but if I'm really controlling everything and I say, I'm going to let you pick from these three people who are all going to do what I say, but I give you the illusion of choice. And then you choose the one you think is maybe the most liberal for the youth. And then he comes

up with ideas and I say, no, no, no, yes to this one, but only half of it. No, yes, and maybe. And then those are the laws and policies that get implemented. I'm throwing a bone kind of to the population, but at the end of the day, I'm still the one in charge. I'm still taking, I'm still making all the rules. I'm still allowing and not allowing certain things to take place. And of course, we also see the massive amounts of corruption. I follow this Instagram account that follows, it's a little creepy, but it follows the grandkids of some of the Ayatollahs and the high-ranking Iranian government figures. And they're in Paris wearing shorts that would probably be classified as underwear in most places and dresses that are almost completely transparent and spending $10,000 a day at a hotel

and going out to a nightclub and getting lit. It's a kleptocracy where the top seems to be siphoning off the money, just like any other place that has absolute pay. power concentrated at the top. It's absolutely true, and I follow him too. He's a lawyer, actually, and I really like what he's doing. Hopefully, he's going to do something officially kind of kicking them all out of Europe and America and Canada. Hopefully, I'm not sure if that they will come or not, but you're absolutely right. It's just that, you know, this is the facade of Islam, and then underneath, there's so much corruption. And it's just, you know, immorality. It's just corruption, immorality, taking advantage of the situation.

lack of humanity, you name it, everything that you would think is evil and bad these people have and they have no mercy and they have no understanding of humanity and I have no compassion for any of them. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Yas Alizade. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers and creators every single week, it is because of my network and I am teaching you how to do that same thing. You might not need it for your personal life. You might not need it for your business, but you need it for at least one of those things. And this course, it's about improving the way you think about relationships.

It'll make you a better networker and a better connector. But the important part is it will make you a better thinker, and it's not gross, it's not schmoozy. That's all at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, many of the guests on our show already subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Yas al-Azade.

So this protest went from Tehran, and other cities to even smaller towns. I mean, it seems quite widespread throughout the entire country. And is that impression correct? It is. And we have never had anything like this ever in the past 43 years because we had the 2019 uprising. You probably know about that. And that's actually, I was going to Iran for my dad's funeral about two weeks after the November uprising of 2019. And there were those police force all over my hometown of Mashat, which is the second largest city in Iran. They arrested so many people. Allegedly they killed 1,500 people, and that's what Reuters announced many newspapers and media, including New York Times, which we, as most Iranians,

detest New York Times because of its stance with regards to the Iranian protests and how it has continuously supported the Iranian regime voices. Really? The New York Times. I guess I'm not paying attention to that. That seems so ironic in many ways that the New York Times would support. I'm trying to think of how you could possibly support the Iranian regime, and nothing comes to mind. This is a bit of a detour, but what's going on there? Because in 2019, I remember watching the protests and being pretty hopeful. I mean, you see people on roofs throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, and you think this is finally happening, but I guess when 1,500 people are murdered by the police in a few days, that does tend

to put the lid back on the container, at least in that year. It did, it did, actually. One of the heroes of that uprising was Nabid Afkari, who was, to us, the epitome of the young hero that everybody looked up to. And he was imprisoned and then with false charges, he was executed without, we call it murder. It's not really an execution because there was really no court and no legitimacy. But yes, they could stop that uprising from turning into a revolution, but this time they cannot. New York Times, yes, it has played a horrendous role in the past, let's say, 20-something years since the second term of President Obama because of the coming up of Nyak, this national Iranian-American council, who was in charge of lobbying for kind of starting a relationship between the government of Iran and the government of the U.S. and the nuclear deal that you probably know about was all the work of NIAC. And NIAC had a pretty good base in both Washington, D.C. and New York Times. And since then, New York Times has always tried to kind of downplay the legitimacy of the protests in Iran and the demands of the people.

So while we, Iranians, are for regime change, New York Times is for reform. And this has never been hidden. It has everywhere all over their, you know, their articles that they have published. They actually recently, they published an article and downplayed the idea of hijab. They said that, well, hijab is really not an issue in Iran because if you're in the northern part of Tehran, which is our capital, and northern part is this wealthy part of Tehran, people don't really wear hijab. And that's, you know, very possible. You know, if IRGC or these Ghashir Shah, Islamic is not looking, your scarf might fall. You might even have a nice coffee in a really brilliant coffee shop without having to put your hijab back on. But if you're a student, if you work in a bank, if you're a nurse, if you're a doctor, if you're an engineer, if you work in any office, be private or public, hijab is enforced and it's the law. So I think articles like that really hurt the Iranian people and have been hurting the Iranian people because that's, that's a why this revolution, which, you know, it was an uprising, it was a protest, now as a revolution,

came to be such a big surprise to people who didn't really thought, oh, well, Iranians want reform and it doesn't, you know, things like that. The argument that in one small part of one city of in the country of Iran doesn't normally have to wear a, that's such a ridiculous argument. That's like saying crime is not that bad. Just go to Fifth Avenue in New York City. There's not that much crime, and the police are there all the time. or the, no one's shopping.

Well, look at Broadway Times Square. There's plenty of people outside. America's back. It's just such a ridiculous argument that you can take one neighborhood in one town, especially in the capital, and say, this isn't a problem or this is a problem. That's ridiculous.

I never knew that about the New York Times, specifically with respect to Iran. You know, the same argument that went with, oh, well, there's no crime in New York City. The same people who made that argument, make the argument that, oh, well, hijab is not a big deal in Iran. To me, they all, they come from the same.

Sure. Meanwhile, I think we can all see that hijab is obviously a big deal if you can get beaten to death for wearing it improperly while you're out walking and minding your own business, which is what happened to this poor young girl who sparked these protests. You touched on this a little bit earlier. Why is this protest different from the previous protest? You mentioned now it's a revolution. Is that classification coming from you or is that something that comes from other sources in Iran? What makes something a revolution versus just a widespread protest? Well, I'm not a politician. Neither am I as political science. It's not my first thing. But I have the experience of living in the First Revolution in Iran, and I have, and I'm in contact with the people in Iran who are on the streets. And the protests are usually directed at a specific goal. They want to achieve a goal. It's not as widespread. Now what the people are chanting on the streets, this is regime change. They're attacking a hominy. They're really cursing him left and left. which is very interesting. It's the things that are saying to Khomeini will probably would be censored on any, you know, official TV. This is the Grand Ayatollah. So you're thinking that this is like North Korea and somebody saying, you know, Kim Jong-un is a fat bastard and then lighting an effigy of him on fire. You just don't do that in a place, or Vladimir Putin or something like that. You just can't get away with that normally. And now it's a daily occurrence. They never did that before. it was always targeted at maybe the president or talking about the price of gas, which was something

that sparked protests before or the price of eggs. We had kind of the price of egg as something that sparked protests. And now it's different. First of all, it's all those previous protests and more and more and then some. And then something added to that is the airplane, the Ukrainian plane with 176 passengers that was targeted by IRGC right after Osam Soleimani was killed by President Trump. And 176 passengers, the majority of them Iranians and not just Iranians. These are Iranians who had moved to Canada and were Canadian-Iranians. So people like me who went back home to visit their families during Christmas break, there were students, they were doctors, they were engineers, they were very, very, the majority were very young. These were young people went to visit their family. They were targeted.

The plane was down and IRGC did it. They denied it for a few days and then they finally said, yes, we did it. IRGC is like, what can we compare that to? Is that like the FBI kind of thing? I mean, it's a little bit more Islamic fundamentalist FBI or is it more like a militia that just protects the regime as opposed to working for the country? So if you look at the motto of IRGC, it says that our goal is to protect the Islamic Revolution. Okay. It says nothing in it about protecting the Iranian people or the borders of Iran. That's the job of the army.

But our GCS was specifically formed in order to protect the Islamic Revolution, and that's their mantra, and that's their goal. So whatever is the goals of the Islamic Revolution, including it spreading it to other countries, you know, the Quds force in Syria, they have forces in Iraq, they have forces in Lebanon, Hezbollah. They are protecting Hamas in Palestine. All those are part of the kind of the threads of IRGC. This is very foreign, no pun intended to us in America, because when we think the army, the goal is to protect the United States.

When we think the police with much debate now, you think their goal is to protect the sanctity and the safety in, say, the city where they work. And again, I know that's getting more and more flexible these days. but we don't have anything that would where the job is to protect the government, right? Even the Secret Service whose job it is to protect the president and investigate other, in the past financial crimes and things like that, they're not an army that goes out and protects the government, right? That just doesn't really exist here. And it's not even just the government.

It's the people in the government at the top, right? It's essentially like a militia that's controlled by the people at the top and nothing more. Am I fairly correct here? You are, but it's not just the government, because the IRGC is in protecting the Islamic Revolution. In other words, Islamic Revolution is more than just the government of Iran. Their idea is that, okay, so Iran is one nation. Yes, but then, you know, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and anywhere else.

So in other words, it's the ideology that they are protecting. It's more than just the body of the government of Iran. the ideology of the government of Iran. So this would be like if there was a international communist army supported by the Soviet Union, and that was in Vietnam and in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe and in South America. So this organization essentially tries to transcend Iran, even though it's headquartered and sponsored by Iran.

That's how Qasemso-Laymani was actually killed in Iraq, you know, when he was killed. He wasn't in Iran. He was in Iraq. And it was, we call Iraq the kind of backyard of Iranian government. And that was the case, now less after the recent events. But it was the backyard of the Iranian government. And so is Lebanon, the Hezbollah. We know that they are, you know, the children of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Soleimani is a, we need like a two-sentence definition of who this was. So he was one of the kind of OG, IRGC, was he a general? Is he kind of the head of this organization internationally in many ways, at least from a military perspective? Yes. So in that rank, in IRGC, they don't have ranking like they do in the Army because the ranking in the Army comes with education, with experience with, you know, kind of a very formal way of getting the ranking. But in IRGC, it's the brotherhood of ideological ideologs, of militial ideologues. And so, yes, he was the equivalent of a general, but in the IRGC style of things. They still called him general when they are translating his epithet. And he was killed by a drone strike, authorized by President Trump, and supported by quite a few

people in the military because this guy was responsible for so many deaths. And I think some people were against that because they thought it would provoke Iran as well. So again, that's another thing. When Qasem Soleimani was killed, many Iranians really rejoiced over it. If Qasem Soleimani was alive, you would see so much killing and murder and mass murder on the streets of Iran nowadays. If you see less of that, it's because Qasem Soleimani is not there anymore. And we appreciate it and we appreciated back then. Because he was such a hardliner, he just had no mercy.

No mercy. So this protest is spread throughout the country. I assume it's no longer simply because of the death of this poor. young girl. It seems like this, the initial protest was about that, of course, and about the wider implications of that. But now, something that I didn't know about Iran before researching this was there's something like 38 different ethnic groups. And that's, even that's, I'm sure, debatable because there's probably subdivisions in there that just aren't on the old census. And these are groups that have longstanding grievances. It's not just Persians in Iran, contrary to what you might

figure if you've ever lived in L.A., you just assume that everybody in Iran is Persian, because that's it seems like there's Kurds, there's, in fact, dozens more that I literally just can't even name off the top of my head. Yes. Iran is a big nation and it's a nation of different ethnicities, different languages, different cultures, different religions. Yes, that's true. And we are very proud of that. And that has been always, this is nothing new to us. We're used to that. It has always been a place for all of us and we are proud of that. We have, you know, for me, my father is Kurdish. My mom is Persian and it has, it was never a question of, oh, well, you know, two ethnicities or two languages because my grandma, my father's side, she never spoke Persian ever, all her life. And my father

communicated in Kurdish with her or his family. Yes, Iran is a country of many ethnicities and many languages and many cultures and religions. That's true. And Masa Amini, her name is actually Mahzina Amini. But, you know, the Iranian regime didn't allow. her parents to give her the Kurdish name that they wanted to put on her. And this is another thing with the Islamic Republic that even names would be censored after the Islamic Republic was established. And so they gave her this Mahsa, which is a Persian name, but they wanted to name her Gina. So is Iran's current government kind of sounds a little hyperbolic? Is it sort of like Persian supremacist, right? if they're censoring people's names, if they're ethnic names from another subgroup of Iranians,

a minority group, if you tell somebody you can't name your kid this because it's not a Persian name, it certainly sounds like it's run, the country's run by one ethnicity and everybody else has to submit to that. Is that accurate? No, that's not accurate. Actually, you might want to know that they didn't even allow Persian names to stay in the birth certificate of people. This is an Islamic government. So what they want is an Islamization or, you know, Islamizing of the country. And the Kurds, not the Kurds of Khurasan, from which my family is from, we are from the Kurds of Khoreasan, Shiites, but the Kurds in Kurdistan are Sunni. This is a Shiite regime that does not tolerate Sunnis. And it has been ethnic cleansing. It has been religious cleansing. Iran of the Sunni

population as well. It has been really awful. and horrendous, horrendously awful to Sunni minorities, to Kurds, to anybody, and any ethnic group that does not fit into the Islamic version of life that they want to have for Iran. So no. So it's still a supremacist government. It's just not a Persian supremacist. It's Islamic supremacy. And only the quote unquote right kind of Islam as well.

So everything else is simply not tolerated and transformed via legal pressure or extra legal. pressure or force to conform to Shiite Islam. Yes, but their version of Shiite Islam. Right, of course. Because, you know, the ideological version of Shiite Islam. I gave you an exit because you said names that I was thinking about in my middle school was called Rudab. It was a pretty old middle school in my hometown of Mashad. And then right after the revolution, one year I went to the school, the year that I wasn't wearing their job. This is the first year of after the Islamic Republic was established. It was still had this old name, Rudal Be, and then the year after, they changed the name to Zainab.

So Zainab is a pretty religious, she-eyed religious name, and Roudab was the name was a very Persian name, kind of a symbolic name for us because it's a mythological character, it's a mythological woman. And so, no, they actually, it comes in Shaaname, which is the Book of Kings, but they change it because they have no tolerance for Persian names either, Persian culture, Persian names. Our new year is the first day of spring. It has always been limited and they wanted to do away with it, which is not Islamic. Our traditions or rituals in Iran are, many of them are non-Islamic. And it's very, we have always been in this kind of standing resisting our own

Iranian heritage against this Islamic usurper, Islamic regime. In previous generations and before the revolution, Iran, of course, still had all these different ethnicities, but it seemed a lot more of a melting pot, right? You had Zoroastrians and Persians and Kurds and all of these other different types of Sunni and Shiite Islam and other groups that existed, co-existed pretty peacefully, and now a lot of that independence or autonomy has been stamped down upon. And so this would explain why the protest or the revolution now has spread throughout the country because you've had this pressure of these groups being trampled upon since 1979.

possibly before that, depending on who they were, by the government. And now is finally, it seems like the security forces have lost a fair bit of control. Because you're talking about day 40, other protests in Iran have not lasted this long, correct? They didn't. I don't think an American can actually imagine what it is like to live in a country that is not just a dictatorship, not just an autocracy, but a theocracy. So it's bad and worse and the worst. And it's the worst that you could imagine. That's what Iran is.

And they arrested one of the doctors that was a forensic doctor. And yesterday he announced that none of us forensic doctors of Iran agree with the official report of the Islamic regime about Massa Amin's death because the regime tried to say, oh, well, she was sick. That's why she died. But the forensic doctors came out and said, no, that's not true. We do not accept it. And so they arrested this man. Dr. Meheran Fri Duni was arrested yesterday because he came and spoke on behalf of the forensic doctors of Iran.

And I think that's important. Also, the prisons of Iran are full of political prisoners who were not just arrested today or yesterday or in the past month, but in the past year, in the past two years and in the past many, many years. So this uprising is about 43 years of oppression. I think I should also say this. I was in eighth grade. I had finished eighth grade. It was July. It was summer. Summer in my shed is pretty hot, pretty warm.

I went to get my documents and my transcripts from my middle school, whose name had changed from this Rudeaubert to Zena to get my transcripts to go and enroll in high school. And I had just gotten a haircut. This is 1980s. I had just gotten in my Olivia Newton John haircut. So a few hair was flying off of my hijab. And it was like, you know, July. So the school was officially closed. I went into the principal's office hoping that my nice vice principal was there. But lo and behold, she wasn't there and the principal was there. And she was such this cruel woman with full hijab covering and very angry all the time. And so she said that is not going to give me my transcripts, and I will take the dream of getting into high school

to grave with me. And for two weeks, my parents would call and beg for the transcripts to be released, and she would say no until one day my vice, you know, assistant principal, who was this nice woman, who was also working in that place, from since before the revolution, she finally pick up the phone and secretly, without the principal knowing, she gave me the transcripts to go and enroll in high school. What I'm trying to say that, this idea of her job has been always there, has always been there from the very beginning of the Islamic Republic. And this is nothing new, but, you know, Masa Amini had to be this martyr for us

that kind of became this secret of this secret name, as her mom calls her secret name or this wonderful name of this person. revolution in Iran that was long time coming and we were waiting for the state to come. And we were pretty excited that it is here. Tell me a little bit about when you were living through the transition of the Islamic Revolution. It's very interesting that you went from what seemingly a very normal life, getting your Olivia Newton John haircut and walking around with no hijab to being denied your transcripts

because of some, I mean, I'm going to say this in a callous way, some old bag who wanted to push her values off onto you and decided to punish you because you didn't care for those values. And now that becomes in a theocracy, so a government dictated by the rules of religion, essentially, that seems like it's very treacherous territory because you can go to jail for not wearing your headscarf correctly, for, is it true, you can go to prison for singing and dancing? I remember a few years ago there was a music video from some Iranians and they all got thrown in jail because they were dancing to a Farrell song. Do you remember this? Yes, of course I remember, but I was also in jail for dancing and singing, probably singing, but I just danced at that party.

The answer is yes, it's very treacherous, and the second answer is I have experience of going to jail. The first time I went to jail was it was my best friend's wedding, and so the RRGC just broke into the party and arrested all of us, and that includes old people, young people, including the bride and the groom, and they took us to this newly confiscated, because we are talking about a very strange times in the history of the Islamic Republic is right after the Islamic Revolution, a few years after the Islamic Revolution. The war had started.

It was at the time of Cultural Revolution, which was a copy of the Cultural Revolution in China, but probably, well, in my standards, much worse. They were a kind of cleansing the universities and a workforce of the people who they thought did not belong to this new Islamic system. And so, yes, they would arrest for hijab. They would arrest for dancing.

They arrested us. They took us to this confiscated house. They were also confiscating people's properties. The people who were not in Iran. The people who thought were the enemies of Islam, the enemies of the Islamic Republic and things like that. And so we spent one night in jail, that jail, which is the beautiful house of a person,

and then the next day they let us go. A few months after that, I was arrested at, birthday party with my sister, my husband, a few families. We were in this party and then we left the house. We were getting into the car and then we saw these group of men who just run to the car and say, stop, stop the car. And then they arrested us. They went into the house, arrested the birthday girl, everybody who was in the house and they took us to jail. We spent two nights in jail, of course, the birthday girl and her husband and the family spent huge amount of time in jail and they suffered so much. For us, it was three full days and two nights and it was probably kind of an unbelievable

experience for me, for my sister who was much younger than me and there were a few other younger boys and girls in that party. But that's the first time that I saw with my eyes. how the Islamic police tortures people because they would flog people in front of our eyes for like a hundred flogs, 100 lashes. And every five seconds, they would look at us to like at me, my sister, and the other guests at the party, and they would say, you're next.

Oh, my God. You're next. How old were you at this point? I married very young. I was 18. I was just a newly wet, and I had just turned 18. And your sister was younger than you? How old was she?

She was 14. And you were in prison with your 14-year-old sister looking at people getting beat up by the police. And every five seconds, they would look at her, look at me, because women and men, of course, were separate, and they would tell us that, you know, we're next. We're going to be flocked next. We were interrogated one by one, my 14-year-old sister, me, the other people present in the party would be taken to this kind of court-like room, and they would kind of interrogate us about the party. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Yas Alizade. We'll be right back.

If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other considerate and supportive listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of those are listed at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. That page is searchable, the deals page. Also, you can search for any sponsor using the search box on our website as well over at Jordan Harbinger.com. Thank you so much for supporting those who support us. it really does keep us going, and it makes it possible to continue making these episodes week after week. Now for the rest of my conversation with Yas al-Azade.

What are you supposed to say about a party that you were at? Yes, we were at a party. Well, why? It was a birthday party. We were celebrating their birthday. Was there singing and dancing? Yes, it was a party. Were people eating and drinking?

Yes, it was a party. I mean, imagine just kind of how pathetic this police officers or these groups of police officer's life is when they're interrogating a 14-year-old about a party. It's pathetic and invasive and ridiculous all at the same time. People died over this. I mean, people would die over being flogged and lashed over going to a party. If you probably have heard of the novel Persepolis by Marjohn et Satrapi and Shiraz beautifully about the happenings in Iran of post-1979 and how famously one of the young men who was at a party when the IRGC breaks into the house, I want to arrest everybody. And the reason why it was traumatic in addition to that is that

we were all at the age where we wanted to go to college to the university and that very specific incident could be the end of our education. And that's how actually it happened to me because two years in a row at 18 or 19, I was not allowed to go into the university. I would get the letter from the Islamic Investigation Bureau with a form questioning. How old were you at the time of revolution? Were you part of the revolution? Do you believe in the ideals of the Islamic Republic, blah, blah, blah, things like that. And I had to get signatures proving that I was Islamic enough 18-year-old. So I actually entered college at 20 because of that. And that's a story of itself. But yes, So one of these young men threw himself off the building and died because he didn't want to be arrested by IRGC.

Oh, gosh, that's horrible. I know you didn't speak up publicly before because your family, your father was living in Iran. I know that since changed, and this is a hard question, do you think it was worth being quiet and muffling your voice while he was there? I mean, I understand doing that for the safety of your father. It's clear that a government like this would go after your family. Do you have mixed feelings about that at all? I do have mixed feeling about that because I think I've lived in this country for about 25 years. And I was always quiet and I always, you know, tried to do the, you know, it's, well, it's my life's story.

No one wants to listen to it. And I wanted to go to Iran. I wanted to take my children to Iran to see my family. That was important to me. But the majority of Iranian people who have left Iran and live in America, Canada, or Europe are quiet about their experience. partly because they were worried about their family who is still in Iran, and partly because they were afraid to kind of not being able to go back and see their family. So it's a very difficult thing to choose between like one personal story. We know it's really more important than personal

and seeing my family. And at the time, it wasn't just my father, but my mom, my younger brother, I have a huge family in Iran that they still live there. But after my father died, I realized that I wasn't even sure because if it was worth it or not, maybe if I taught, it would have helped some people recognize the evil that this regime is, and I never really talked about it. No one that ever hired me. I've been teaching for a long time in the United States. And none of the institutions that hired me knew the story that I actually lost my chance of getting into the university for two years.

and how difficult it was to find signatures that they would say that I'm an Islamic enough person to be able to get into the university. Things like that matter. But it's very difficult to be an immigrant and try to make a living and just, you know, have a normal life and then be also a political person on this side of the waters. What do you hope will happen in this new revolution, this new round of protests? Well, I hope the students and young people who are on the streets will achieve their goals. And that is the complete change from the scenery right now. We have a corrupt

regime, which is an Islamist regime, and has been torturing people for the past 43 years. It has been denying them the basics of human rights. As you see, corruption doesn't really begin and end with hijab. It's everything and anything. It's about the dignity of making a living. And if you're a teacher, making a good living, if you're a college professor making a decent living, and none of that exists in Iran. People are poor because of this regime. They work hard, but they don't earn as much. It's horrendous the way people have been suffering in Iran mentally, politically, psychologically, and emotionally. Women are not allowed to sing in Iran. I don't know if you know that or not. I did not, but that's, I mean, it goes hand in hand with not being allowed to go to a party, so no big

surprise. There is a very, very important song that the day that Masa Amini died, this beautiful young man made this really wonderful music for Masa Amini and the Iranian protest based on the tweets that people put online. And of course, he was arrested. And this song has become, kind of has spread all over the world and people from Finland dance to it and Germans are singing it. The Dutch are dancing to it. It's just because the beautiful thing is that, the tweets that were put for Masa Amin and Iran the day after Masa Amin's death, well, he's a singer, is an artist. So he took all those tweets and then turned it into a song, and it's so meaningful.

And I didn't tell you this, but dogs are forbidden in Iran. Having a dog in your house is forbidden in Iran. I think that should matter to dog people in America. That's crazy. You can't have a dog? I guess you can't have a pet in general. What about a cat? You can't have a cat. Dog is considered sacrilegious in Islam.

Yeah, Haram. So they don't allow dogs and they kill dogs. And so the idea of, he says in his song, for the poor dogs that were murdered. That's why I think this song matters. This kind of culminates the ideas of why there's this revolution and what are the demands of this revolution. So I hope that young people that are on the streets, university students can achieve their goal of toppling this regime. That's what they want. They want regime change. And hopefully we are their voice and we hope. help that they achieve their goal. People are going to ask, why aren't women allowed to sing? I think the answer is, it's just un-Islamic, but tell me a little bit about why that is the case, because it's just so ridiculous. It's up there with being arrested because you're dancing in a Farrell video that you

make on YouTube. It's just, which we'll link to that video on the show notes. You'll be a surprise what gets you thrown in prison in Iran. Yeah, so it's an Islamist regime. If we understand what Islamism is, then none of this will sound as a surprise. Islamism means that what is not as a woman, well, it's about men too, because when I was in Iran, male students were not allowed to wear short sleeves. And to this day, men are not allowed to wear shorts and short sleeves. Short sleeves they are now allowed to wear because the Islamic police cannot really do much about it, but shorts are still illegal on the streets of Iran. Women's voice is considered sexual to them. So it's all about sex, by the way. The whole thing is sort of founded on the idea

that men have an uncontrollable penis that can, that you see everything has to be stopped in order to block the uncontrollable penis. Sorry to be crude, but that's really, it's so ridiculous. It's like you just can't, couldn't possibly have any sort of free will and behave yourself. Got to be the woman's fault that your penis is acting up. So a woman's voice is supposed to be alluring when a woman sings. Her voice is supposed to be sexualized agency, let's say, or sexualizing agency.

I don't know, a provocative agency. men and women are not allowed to kiss in public. And of course, you know, if you ask them, they're going to say, oh, well, they're allowed to kiss in public. But when, you know, the regime from the very beginning arrest people based on their relationship. So if, you know, a man and woman kiss on cheeks, by the way, in public, the police is allowed to come and say, what's the relationship between the two of you? And if they're not father and daughter, brother and sister, uncle and niece,

then you're done. You're done. You're going to go to jail. What about husband and wife? We didn't say that. Well, husband and wife, because the culture that they've started is so, so kind of incriminating that, no, definitely not. They don't kiss in public. It's not illegal. You can kiss in public, but no one does that. Because it's not worth being asked by RGCR, your husband and wife. My husband and I, when we traveled in a row, we had to have our birth certificates with us because they wouldn't allow us to get a room together. You know, it's that serious. So kissing in public definitely not a thing in Iran. It's problematic.

It's a culture that they've been trying to enforce for 43 years, you know, between the execution of my two cousins, who were brothers by the Islamic regime and all the books and cassettes that we would have to bury in the ground every time they would say, somebody would call and say, oh, IRGC is coming to her house, partly because my dad was the uncle of, these, the two executioned young men. And just because we were just ordinary middle class people who they knew were not following the Islamic Republic or the rules of the Islamic Republic, who would bury books, would bury cassettes, would bury pictures in our garden because we didn't want IRGC to know that we had books that were considered illegal because from right after the Cultural Revolution, they made a huge list of the books that were illegal. And these were books that were written by Iranian authors mostly. So even our photo albums, we had to bury them because everywhere that you would see a picture of my mom or my dad drinking or dancing, and they did a lot of that

before the revolution, they had to be buried because this is not a group of people. This regime was very fierce with whoever didn't follow the laws of Islam, the way they wanted them to follow. So that's what we did. But also my dad loved making wine. And because alcohol, post-revolution was illegal in Iran, he would make his own wine. He would, you know, buy grapes, beautiful grapes, or they would bring us from the north of Harassan, these huge piles of grapes, and then we would stump on them and make wine, and he made the best wine. But a lot of times we would have to get rid of this wine because we were afraid that IRGC was behind the door, at the door. We would get a phone call or somebody would say, they know you're making wine,

so we would get off the rid of the wine. Probably one of the most beautiful experiences of my life is that after my dad passed away, and I went to Iran for his funeral, all the cousins were sitting together and drinking the wine that he had made, and it was, without exaggeration, the most delicious wine that I've ever had in my life,

and I think that's something about how this regime treated its people and how we resist it. You know, my father, resisted. My mom resisted. It's not that this generation, this younger generation that is resisting, but our generation resisted. And my dad's generation, these people were about 30 years old when the revolution happened. And for the rest of their life, they tried to resist. They tried to keep normalcy within their household. So my dad would, let's say, get us, my sister and I, violin lessons, but the violin teacher had to come very early morning on Fridays before anybody would

knew that there is a violin teacher in this house, and my dad had to cover all the windows with as much fabric and paper that he could so that the voice of violin wouldn't go out. Because as you probably know, chess was made illegal in Iran. I did not know that. So this is like anything that's even remotely. I mean, the violin is hardly something where I think, oh, first it's violin and extra smoke and crack in the alley. Classical instruments and chess hardly vices that tend to get people in trouble. Yes, it's unimaginable. It's unbelievable. But they thought the chess corrupts the brain of Muslim children. So they made chess illegal. Playing cards was illegal. But then my mom always had her friends coming and secretly playing cards together in an afternoon, sipping coffee and playing cards. So people resisted. The reason why you see today that this young generation is doing the uprising and just saying no to everything is not, is because they have learned. from the mothers and grandmothers and the generation that lived before them.

I asked you what you hope will happen. What do you realistically expect to happen? Because the unfortunate truth is usually, and in the past, security forces just start murdering hundreds or even thousands of people to get these kinds of protests and unrest to end. Well, they haven't, although 250 people were killed and murdered by the regime in the past month, but they have been much softer, let's say, on these people than they were in 2019 uprising because of the power of social media partly, because of the hashtag Basa Amini, hashtag Iranian revolution. They didn't imagine this happening. And also because all eyes are on Iran right now, you probably know that Reisi came to New York about a month ago. Raeisi is the current president? Yes. So Raeisi, who's the

current president of the Islamic Republic, came to New York City about a month ago, and there was a huge protest at United Nations by Iranians who came from California, from Toronto, from across Canada and America to protest Racy's presence in New York City and in the United Nations. Basically, what we said was that he doesn't represent us. It shouldn't be allowed, because you probably know the history of Racy. He was in charge of killing six. 1,000 Iranian prisoners in 1980s, which, yes. 6,000.

6,000. 6,000 Iranian political prisoners, and Raezi was in charge of the judiciary back that. It's a history that probably the West either doesn't know about it or doesn't really care at this time, but Iranians know and Iranians care. So when Raezi came, it was kind of the beginning of all these protests. outside of Iran and then inside of Iran because of Masa Amin.

The reason why this is different from before is because of the worldwide support for Iranian people in Iran and because of Hamid Islamai Lian is a man who lost his wife and his daughter in the Ukrainian airline that was targeted by RRGC and 176 people died in that were murdered in that plane crash. Basically, I think that's why this is different this time, the power of social media, the power of support by the World War II community and how Iranians are not backing down. There is uprising and protests in universities across Iran every day. The doctors and physicians of Iran have announced that they support this uprising. There are strikes all across Iran. And so this is more than a this is a revolution and it might take some time, but it's going to win. Thank you so much. This is really, there's a lot here that I didn't know despite having researched this. So I think a lot of folks that are formally considered themselves out of the loop are now firmly in the loop. And we will watch with

wrapped curiosity what happens here in Iran over the next few months, because this doesn't seem to be slowing down. They're trying to keep the news away from us from getting out of the country, but it certainly does not seem to be losing momentum. So there's something happening here is this could be the big one, so to speak. And with any luck and with the blood and suffering of hundreds of thousands of young people all over the country, this could be it. This is it. This is it. There's no going back. That's what people on the ground and young Iranians say on social media, this is it. They're just moving forward and they're just doing what they have been waiting to do all these years. This is a revolution, and it will end beautifully with a free Iran, free from the grips of ITO laws and IRGC.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Jordan. Of course, I've got thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a sample of my interview with Guy Raz, who hosts NPR's How I Built This. He shares his number one secret to getting a great interview, how asking difficult questions during the interview serves both the overall story and the guests being grilled, and it's kind of nice to just riff with somebody else in the business. Here's a quick bite. I came to NPR as a 22-year-old intern. I was very lucky. You know, I really wanted to be an overseas reporter, and the stars were sort of aligned in the right way where I got the job. And I was totally terrified. You know, I was sent to Berlin to be the correspondent for NPR. Don't mess this up. Oh yeah, and by the way, you're going to Bosnia

tomorrow. And that was how I began overseas as a foreign correspondent. Bearing witness to historical events, being somewhere where they're unfolding in front of your eyes in real time, is thrilling. It's absolutely extraordinary and fascinating. I mean, imagine if you were standing at the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989. Yeah. It's an extraordinary feeling to be in these places, and I was able to witness history unfold in front of my eyes many, many times. There's really a sense. There's really a secret to interviewing people, this is my secret. If you really want to get a good interview from somebody, you need to honor their story. You need to honor them. If they're coming to talk to you, and the way you honor them is you learn a lot about them. You spend the time. You do the work. And if you

do that, there's a better than 50% chance that they will appreciate that and respect that. I mean, those wow moments, they're real because what I do in an interview is I completely leave the world that I'm in. I completely leave the surroundings, everything, all the chaos, the noise, you know, Trump and politics, I just leave it, it's out, it's all the noise. COVID's gone. It's like when you see a movie. I am just in that person's world. For more, including the one teachable quality all entrepreneurs seem to have in common, check out episode 404 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Guy Raz. I hope you all enjoy that, a bit of a different format, a bit of a bit of

of a different topic that maybe we wouldn't normally touch on the show. So I'm curious what you think about these out of the loop. My other ideas are Brazil, what happens in the Ukraine War of Putin loses, things along those lines that might be a little bit outside our normal wheelhouse. I'm also open to suggestions. I think we're going to turn a lot of stuff down, especially if it's political or something along those lines. But I think these small primers like today's was, this is by no means a full rundown of everything going on in Iran or the history of Iran or the revolution or anything like that. It's just a wrap-up so that you can be literate at your next dinner party or conversation on this subject, and you can consume the news on this subject with a little bit more background.

I like this format. I think it's something we could do occasionally. I'd love to hear from you what you think about this particular episode and about this type of episode in general. We're going to fade out with a theme song of the revolution here by Shervin Hajipur. It's called Baray. And this is apparently the rallying call for much of the current counter-relivene revolution over there in Iran. Big thank you to Yas Al-Azade. The links we mentioned on the show will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts are in the show notes, videos up on YouTube, advertisers, deals, and discount codes,

all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me right there on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same systems, software, and tiny habits that I use. I do this stuff every day. It takes like two, three minutes a day. My so-called secrets are free for you over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. It's not gross and schmoozy. There's not a weird upsell afterwards that's like high pressure. I'm not going to friggin' try to call you. Many of the guests on the show, subscribe, and contribute to this course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. And let's admit it. That's where you belong. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends and family. If you find something useful or interesting, if you know somebody who's curious about this Iran thing, or somebody who maybe is spouting a little bit of misinformation, or would just be interested in learning more on this topic, please do share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us

is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. for fear, to be wakht of busied, for my, my, my brother, for our, for our

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Foray of a bhaasabody, for a daughter who had a man, for a son. Zendigy, azzality, a lot of freedom, this episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard,

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