Lex Fridman Podcast #334 – Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons
Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors.

The following is a conversation with Abbas Amnat, a historian at Yale University specializing in the modern history of Iran. My love and my heart goes out to the Iranian people in their current struggle for freedom. I hope that this conversation helps folks who listen understand the nature and the importance of this struggle. And now a quick few second mention of a sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Henson Shaving for great razor and shave, Inside Tracker for bio monitoring, Onit for supplements and Express VPN for privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Henson Shaving, a family owned aerospace manufacturer, bringing precision engineering to your shaving experience. This thing is a minimalist razor. 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Bam and the connection is super fast, plus it's stable. Everything's very intuitive, works on any operating system, including my favorite one which is Linux. But obviously on mobile devices too, iPhone all the Android devices. I have so many Android devices now that I feel like I am like a sheep herder and those are my sheep. But instead of being sheep, they are actually super computers. Although you can argue that a sheep too is a super computer. Anyway, go to expressvpn dot com slash lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the lexfreeman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here is Abbas Amnat. Let's start with the current situation in Iran. On September sixteenth, protests broke out in Tehran and quickly spread over the death of a twenty two year old Maza Amini. Eyewitnesses saw her beaten to death by the morality police. This is a heavy topic, but it's a really important topic. What can you explain what happened? The protests are now in their sixth week. The death of that young woman occurred, who was visiting Tehran as a tourist. Sparked something very deep that particularly concerned the younger generation. That is what you would call the equivalent of the Z generation in this country. Yes, they call themselves Daheh Hashdidi in Persian because Iran follows the solar calendar of its own as an ancient solar calendar. And this the the time that they were born, they were in the thirteen eighties. That's what they call themselves Hashdidi eighties Hashdidi for the eighties. And the well the circumstances that surrounds the unfortunate death of this young beautiful Kurdish woman is really tragic. She was arrested by the what is referred to as the morality police. Morality patrol called Gashte Ershad guidance police that is presumably there were two women fully clad that is officers serving on that force and two men. And nobody exactly knows what had happened. She had been beaten up and apparently there was no sign of any wrongdoing on her side. She was fully covered. It seems that there was some altercation in the process, and the outcome was that she was unconscious. Not necessarily when she was arrested, but in the course of the detention when they take them to a center presumably to re educate them. And she apparently collapsed and maybe my senses that she must have had some kind of a problem because of the skull being broken or something had happened and she died in the hospital the next day. And that through the social media was widely spread throughout Iran and almost the next day surprisingly you could see this outburst. Of sympathy for her, people are in the streets weeping because she was seen as such an innocent young woman twenty two years old. And the family, the mother and the father, also mourning for her. And being a Kurd visiting Tehran, this all added up to really turn her into some kind of a martyr of this cause. And that's what it is and her picture graphics that were artistically produced based on her portrait has now dominated basically as the symbol of this protest movement. And the protest movement goes on. Everybody was thinking or at least the authorities were thinking that is going to die out in a matter of a few days. But it became more intense first in the streets of Tehran by young women mostly probably between I would say seventeen eighteen teenagers to twenty two twenty three. Or thereabout and then to university campuses all around the country, and then even to high schools, and that also made it a very remarkable protest movement because first of all it involves the youth. And not necessarily the older generations, you see them around but not as many. Also, you see men and women together, young girls and boys, and they are adamant, they are desperate in the sense of the tone of their protest. And they are extremely courageous because they stand against the security forces that were immediately. Were sent off to the streets so and in full gear that is. So what are the the currents of pain emotion? What is this turmoil that rose to the surface that resulted in these big protests? What are the different feelings, ideas that came to the surface here that resulted in such quick scaling of this protest? Well, if you listen to the main slogan, which is the message of this movement, it's called "Women, Life, Freedom, Zan Zendeji Azadi." Which is a translation of actually the Kurdish equivalent, which is close to Persian being the Indo European language. And it's apparently initiated first in the Syrian Kurdistan, where they were fighting against the Islamic Daesh forces. Because they were attacking the Yazidis there and the women being enslaved, but the message as it moved historians are interested in this kind of trends. So it has moved to Kurdistan and from Kurdistan now being the message of this movement. Reflects pretty much sums up what this movement is all about. Women in the forefront because of all the one might say discriminations, the treatment, the humiliation that this younger generation feels. Well, not only the younger generations but most of the Iranian secular middle classes since nineteen seventy nine basically. For the for the past forty three years, and they would think that these all basically symbolized or represented by the wearing the mandatory wearing of the hijab. Which is at the core of this protest. You see the young women if you look at many of these clips that comes through in the past six weeks. Women in streets take off their mandatory scarves, which is a young shawl or some kind of a head covering. That's all, and they throw it into the bonfire in the middle of the street and they dance around it. And slogans. So there is a sense of complete rejection of what this regime for forty three years forty three years have been imposing on women. It's not as it sometimes been portrayed a movement. Against hijab through and through, but it basically says you know there has to be a choice for those who want to wear hijab and those who want to remain without hijab. Yeah, the hijab is a symbol of something much deeper. Much deeper and actually before we get into that, it's interesting to note that in many of these demonstrations we see in the university campuses or in the streets you see women with hijab. Young women with hijab are next to those have to remove their hijab and they are together basically protesting. That's most interesting feature of this of these demonstrations and then men and women together against the segregation that the regime has imposed upon them for all these years. Now in terms of what it represents, as I pointed out, one is the question of the whole series of one might say civil and legal discriminations against women. You are considered as a kind of a second class citizen. You depend on your man is a kind of a patriarchy that has been institutionalized in the Islamic Republic in a very profound fashion. And that means that probably in matters of divorce, marriage and divorce, in matters of custody of your children, in matter of inheritance, in matter of freedom of movement, you depend. On your husband, your father, your brother, a male member of your family, your child even your your son could could be the case. And because of that, obviously a younger generation who is so well informed through social media knows about the world as much as an American does. American kid does probably sometimes more. They're very very curious. It's from what I hear or sometimes that I met a few of them outside Iran. You'll see that how this new generation is completely different from what the Islamic Republic wanted to create in its social engineering. It's basically the failure of forty three years of the Islamic Republic's act of imposition of a certain so called Islamic values on women. Then it's matter of education. You would see that there is segregation in the schools. One of the issues that now right now is at the heart of these demonstrations is that self services in many of the campuses of Iranian universities are segregated, male and female to different rooms to different halls. Now they are breaking through the walls virtually everywhere and sit together in order to basically resist the authorities who wants to impose segregation. In matters of appearance in the public, of course it it may seem to us as a kind of trivial and secondary, but appearance is important. Clothing is important. How you would imagine yourself is important. They don't want to be seen in the way that the authorities would like to impose upon them as this kind of an idea of a chaste Islamic woman who is fully covered and is fully protected. The idea of a male member of the family protects the female. That is what you would see at the heart of this rebellion, and of course that goes with everything else. The second part of this message, the idea of life. Basically means, if you like to use the American equivalent of this, the pursuit of the happiness. That's what they want. They want fun. They want music. They want dancing. They want to be free in the street. They want to have girlfriends. And live freely and don't be constantly looked by the big brother to tell them what to do and not to do or or not to do. So that is that they share virtually with the entire with the entire Iranian society as a whole. Although the older generations, that's a big puzzle. What you would see that the older generation don't so far at least don't take part as extensively as one might imagine. And this is variety of reasons. Perhaps you can get to that later on if you like. But as far as this younger generation, they don't care. They don't listen even as much to their parents as the older generations did. So all one might say even the nature of the relationship between the parents and the youth has changed. It's not the concept of again a a patriarchy. That a father or even a mother would tell the daughter or son what to do, because basically they have to negotiate. It's fundamentally a rejection of the power of authority, parents, government. Yes, it's that every person can decide their own fate and there is no lessening of value of the wisdom of old age and old institutions. Precisely that's what it is. And. They are surprisingly aware that where they are as a generation, so it's a sense of a pride as we are different from the older generation, from your parents who compromised and lived with the restrictions that the Islamic regime put on you, your grandpa, your their grandparents or the generation that actually involved in the revolution of seventy nine, the parents which were the middle generation, and these are the third generation after the revolution of nineteen seventy nine, and therefore they differentiate themselves in terms of their identity from the older generation, so that's the life part of it, and one can go more and more they want to access and they see on social media what happens in the rest of the world, they're aware they are much better digitally skilled than my generation for instance, and and they know about all the personalities they know about all the celebrities they know about all the trends that goes out outside Iran, so that's a second part of this message and then of course the third part is the word azadi meaning freedom or liberty, which is this longstanding demand of the Iranians I would say for the whole century ever since the constitutional revolution of nineteen six, Iran has witnessed this problem of authorities that usually emerged at the end of a revolution, to basically impose its own image on the population on the youth, and create authoritarian regimes of which over the course of time, I would say that the Islamic Republic is the worst, the sense that it's it's intrusion and is not only in the political sense in the for instance banning the freedom of speech, you know meddling with the elections, banning political parties all kinds of that things which are the political or civil freedoms but it's intrusion into the personal life of the individual, which is the worst kind in a sense as you would see that there is always an authority that basically dominates your life or monitors your life, so I and they do it in a kind of a very consistent fashion which makes this idea of freedom so important as part of the message of this new movement, you would see that in today's Iran there are no independent political parties, there is very little probably freedom of the press I wouldn't say that it's entirely gone, but it's fairly limited, there is enormous amount of propaganda machine which dominates the entire radio and TV system in Iran, it's completely in the hands of the government, and of course you would see this variety of other tools for trying to indoctrinate Iranian population across the board, so that's another sign of this kind of a sense of a sense of being totally left out, you are not belonging to to what's going on in terms of power empowerment and disempowerment, so that's that's the situation as far as the idea of a freedom of this concept, and these three somewhat miraculously and perhaps unintentionally, the three parts of this message complements each other because perhaps for the first time we see that women are in the forefront of a of a movement I hesitate to say revolution because I am not particularly happy with revolutions, revolutions worldwide in Iran have always been so miserable in terms of their outcome that we have to be careful not to use the word revolution yeah, so that's where where it stands now and the regime was thinking that well these are kids, they are going to go away and of course they are completely conspiratorial in their thinking, they constantly think that these are all the instigations and provocations of foreign powers these are the Great Satan United States this is Israel or these are the it's actually the supreme leaders that in so many words, his only response so far that he had in past six weeks with regard to these demonstrations is that these are the children of the sabak sabak being the security forces of the Shah state, that's forty three years later, he claims that the children seventeen years twenty years old kids in the street are the grandchildren or children of some imaginary survival of the Shah security force, so there is the idea is that these protests are internal and external saboteurs so people trying to sabotage the government yes and they are misled misled as far as they can go and then there is the Great Satan United States and other places are controlling sort of either controlling the narrative feeding propaganda or literally sending people to engage, I don't think that they have I don't think even they have that kind of imagination precisely to say what you have said that they would say that they are controlling the narrative they basically say no these are agents of of the foreign powers and their families are all sold out and they are basically lost their loyalties to the Great Islamic Republic and therefore they can be treated so brutally they can be suppressed so brutally which I haven't actually said what they are doing because I thought perhaps first we should talk about who these kids are in the streets before we move on about the response of the government but one major factor which seems to add to the anxiety of well the regime is extremely anxious now because they are in a position this shows that they don't have their lack of confidence in a sense that they would see them reacting in a very forceful way because basically they don't seem to have that kind of a confidence to allow this this message or the movement to air to be aired, but there one element which corresponds to that is that there is a expatriate population of Iranians worldwide, there are probably now according to some estimates close to four million even more Iranians abroad and they are all over the world from Australia New Zealand Japan Western Europe Turkey and United States Canada, so just to give you one example last last Saturday there was a mass demonstrations in Berlin by the Iranians from Germany and all over Europe Western Europe, and it was at least I think probably the conservative estimate was about one hundred thousand, so one hundred thousand Iranians showed up in Berlin demonstrating against the treatment of the women in Iran or the movement in Iran, the government thinks obviously this must have been some instigation by foreign powers and they want to destroy the Islamic Republic, and not only that but their propaganda is kind of ridiculous because I listened actually to how they portrayed it in the newspapers I listened to the Iranian news that is officially controlled government controlled news, and and in the papers there is much of the papers that are in the control of the government, one of them or actually the the major news program portrayed the demonstrations that ten thousand people showed up in Berlin and protested against the rising prices or rising rates for gas and oil in Germany, so that's how they misled in a very rather stupid fashion because probably ninety five percent if not hundred percent of the Iranians are listening to Persian speaking media outside Iran, so it's a BBC Persian there is Iran international there are at least five or six of them that's probably really important to highlight that Iran is a very modern and tech savvy nation, not just the young people probably more than more than I feel sometimes when I compare myself to what they are doing, since nineteen seventy nine the earlier years for a decade or two, they tried in a very crude fashion to restrict access to media outside Iran because this is all through dishes okay and satellite dishes are everywhere you know if you look at the you know buildings of small houses small towns and villages in Iran there is always a dish and they watch all kinds of things through this and particularly because of what's happening now they listen to all the news broadcasts from all this media and they're extremely active, there are probably some of them even twenty four hours or close very extensive coverage of every clip that comes through, so what the government is doing now the Islamic Republic is that they restrict the entire internet they shut down the internet but they cannot afford shutting down the internet because much of the business much of the everyday life much of the government affairs depends on the internet like everywhere else and Iran is extremely if you if I hear from many of the colleagues and friends you know it's like in certain respects it's like Sweden where you go there there is no more currency and for very good reason because there is so much inflation that that the banknotes are worthless in a sense so everything is true you know sweeping your card, and that the entire system is in a standstill because people cannot buy food they can you you go to the supermarket that's how you would do it you you order food to come to your house which Iranians at least the middle classes the more prosperous middle classes doing all the time, so they deliver everything and because of the COVID it became even more and they have to pay all through this system, so what happens is that now they are estimating that every day fifty million dollars the Iranian government or the Iranian economy is losing because of slowing the internet plus the frustration is growing because you can't order food, among others, I mean they are they are in touch with I mean WhatsApp every Iranian virtually every Iranian, that has education and education in the sense that has gone through the high schools and universities knows how to use the WhatsApp, so there is a big middle class like you said secular middle class in Iran and there there is a lot of at least capacity for if not revolution then political ideological turmoil, and a huge amount of hatred, so the hatred is growing, yes hatred of the of the policies of the regime of isolation that's a huge point that you hear a great deal about, that we don't want to be isolated we don't want to be humiliated Iran is not but this this miserable regime that is ruling over us, we have a great culture so there is a sense of a pride in their own culture some of it you know Islamic some of it pre Islamic so they there is a huge sense of a pride in that and they see that they cannot communicate with the outside world they they want to travel abroad which they do I mean for one thing the Iranian regime never actually for majority of the population never put restrictions it's not like Soviet Union where you have to have a you used to have a permission to move from one place to another, and then of course the the Islamic regime since nineteen seventy nine basically chased away or destroyed the old middle class that's my generation basically or my parents generation these are the secular middle class of the Pahlavi era in the hope that they can do this social engineering and create this Islamic society of their own, the bad news for them was that that didn't happen and that memory persisted and the middle class that was created since past forty years is much larger in size than what it was because there was of course the demographic revolution that's a very that's a very foundation of it is the demographic revolution, population in Iran I've written an article about it actually, population in Iran since the turn of the century last century that's twentieth century population of Iran was about nine million or so, is now eighty three million and that is since nineteen seventy nine the population was thirty five million between the past forty years it's basically doubled so it's eighty three million although one of the great successes I don't want to bore you with the details about the demography but it's important in it, demographics is not boring you well you can see that the birth rate was very high otherwise you wouldn't have doubled your population in matter of four decades, but Iranians because of the urban shift to an urban population because of the growth of the middle class because of the education, they basically the pattern of the of growth population growth changed Iran used to be two point eight or three percent birth rate in around nineteen eighties I would say nineteen seventies nineteen eighties now it is one point one, and it's one probably the most successful country in the Middle East in terms of the population control despite the government a consistent attempt to try to encourage people to have more kids, middle class refuses to do that, and this is middle class not only anymore in the capital but this is when smaller towns and cities places that used to be villages, now you look at them they have a decent population fifty thousand hundred thousand and they live an urban life and they don't want to be subjected to that old pattern of agrarian society when you had ten children or eight children and of course it's much more advanced in terms of in terms of health and medicine so you don't lose lose children as they used to the antibiotics there is always of kids to survive and therefore if you have ten kids you stick with ten kids you don't end up with four as it used to be in the past, six of them would have died in the in the after the age of five actually but now because of that you see that this urban population in the cities have completely different demands, and of course the education is important that's another area of how the social engineering of the Islamic Republic went away because they were thinking that you know the growth of the population the growth of the educated higher educated middle classes in their benefit or they could not even control it in a sense now Iran in my time probably had in the nineteen seventies probably by the time of the revolution at ten twelve universities, now it has fifty six universities all across the country, and there is something referred to as the free university Azad which has campuses all over the country it has three hundred and twenty one campuses all around Iran, what does that mean in many respects this youth that were brought up in these families even in small towns in very traditional families in families that belong to that kind of a more religious loyal to the clergy or to the clerical classes, their children can now move on which particularly women because in in my times it would have been unheard of that you would have a young woman of eighteen or seventeen eighteen nineteen, from a traditional city such as for instance Yazd or in in in in Sartistan Iran. To move on elsewhere for education, as you do in this country, okay. Now it's completely accepted that a woman wears her job because he is forced to wear her job. To go to a university completely on the other side of the country. And this movement of the population, not only because of the universities, but in general, if you now visit Iran. You hear accents, local accents, provincial accents, all over the country. That is a Azerbaijani Turkish accent from the northwest of the country. You can hear it in the far provinces in the south, and vice versa. So, and Kurdish, for instance, or even more marginal regions such as Sistan province in the southeast of Iran. Which has been the subject of this recent massacre when they actually attacked the population when demonstrating and killed a fair number of at least sixty people. So this movement of the population, this creation of a larger middle class, the better educated middle class, much better educated Iran has. Eighty six percent literacy, which I think probably I haven't checked that, but probably is better than Turkey even. Is probably better than anywhere else in the Middle East. And it sounds like there's a that's quickly increasing, so because because of the movement because of the growth of a education system that's. Iran has one million school teachers, which may not seem as much if you are in the United States, but it's a fairly big number actually. Can you linger on the massacre? What happened there? Well, the Sistan province is a Baluchi ethnicity of Baluchi ethnicity. Baluchi is a particular ethnic group in southern Iran which is Sunni rather than Shi. Majority. And we should say that most of Iran is Shi, is Shi, and those are that's a branch of Islam. Shiism. Yes. Let's maybe just briefly linger Shiism and Sunni. What? Just let's not get into it. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do a one sentence summary, and that maybe which which is what most of Iran is. Majority of the population of the Muslim world are Sunnis. That are these are main street if you like to call that. Actually, Souna means that kind of a main street. Can you actually linger on the Sunni Souna? She she she means a party, means those that belongs to a party of Ali, which was goes back to the early Islamic history of seventh century. I mean I'm almost lingering to the silly notion of pronunciation and stuff like that. So ah ah means part like what. What is the extra I at the end? Yeah. Shee means belonging to the Shi community. Yeah. Shea means a person of Shia. That if you say are you a Shia? Yes, I'm a Shia. Yeah, and she is the community. Community. And in English, when it was anglicized, it becomes Shiite. So if you say Shiite in today, it's perfectly acceptable. And of course, I myself in my writings always. Switch between one and the other. One of my books is always Shiite. The other book is always Shi, and that hasn't been settled. This, but the Shi population is the smaller compared to the Sunni population in the world. In the world, in the world, but in Iran is the opposite. The Iran and Iraq, and possibly now Lebanon, are the three countries who barely Iraq and Lebanon have barely majority Shi population. Whereas Iran is a large Shi population due to its history of conversion to Shiism. That by itself is another story. But in the sense that the way that historically it evolved, the center became more Shi. And the peripheries remained Sunni, so you have communities of the Baluchi in the southeast. You have the Kurds, a large portion of the Kurds are Sunnis. They have Shi as well. Then they have the indigenous religion of their own ideal, was called Aliak, which is the religion of indigenous Kurdistan. There are Turkmans in the northeast of Iran who are also Sunnis. There are other communities in the Chorasan region in the in the peripheries of Afghanistan. There are also Sunnis, and you have some Arab population, Arab speaking population in the Choristan province in the southwest of Iran, which is also or across the Persian Gulf. Is there a lot of conflict between these regions? And also, like if I blindfolded you and dropped you off in one of the regions, would you quickly recognize the region like by the food, by the music, by the accents, by so on. Yeah, the answer to your lovely question, which I think I hope it would have happened to me, is that yes, you would see different cultures. Yes, but different food, most important different accents. Yeah. Or different languages, so they have dialects. There's Baluchi's a different language altogether. But or so for that matter, Kurdish, which is closer to Persian because they are Indo European languages. But Turkish, Azerbaijani Turkish, which is probably closer to the Turkish of Turkey, Republic of Turkey, or to the Republic of Azerbaijan in the north. They're the same basically. Actually, if you would have looked, that's a fascinating picture. If you have looked at the let's say even nineteenth century early twentieth century linguistic map of Iran, you would have been amazed. In the number of dialects, in the number of languages that has survived, and this is an ancient country, is an ancient land, and it's a lot of mountains all around it, or big deserts. So there's a sense of isolation. So you would say here and there you see a different community that speaks differently. All ancient traditions and languages. Yeah, and because of the great number of invasions that Iran witnessed over more than two and a half millennia. Of course, there are all kinds of cultures were introduced into Iran. There are all ethnicities were introduced to Iran, mostly coming from the northeast of Iran from. From the lowlands of Central Asia and beyond, and and continued into Iran proper. So, but now what has happened? That's what my point that the writer to make. Century of modernity or modernization. Has produced a national culture of great length, great strength in a sense. I would say I ended my book, the book on Iran Iran modern history. Basically saying that despite everything else that has created so much trouble for today's Iran, there is a sense of a cultural. Identity that is very strong, and I think I can say with with some confidence. That despite this, despite this regional identities that are still there and they are great and they should be celebrated. Today, if you go to to Kurdistan or if you go to Sistan, they all can speak Persian. They all have an education in Persian, so they all basically are becoming part of whether they like it whether they like the regime in power or not. They have a sense of belonging to a culture and an identity with the center. And of course, the idea of a center versus periphery in Iran is very old. It goes back to ancient times because when the name of the country was the guarded domains of Iran. This is the this is the official name of Mameluke Mahrusi Iran. Namely that it was recognized that this is not just one entity, but it's a it's a collection of entities like the United States of America. Exactly, exactly. But the United States of America, in a sense, you can say that it was a very successful. Well, it remains to be seen how successful to be continued to be to that that was basically invented created that you would have this sense of it in in the case of an old nation which has been on the map of the world for three thousand years, two thousand five hundred years. This is not an exaggeration. I'm not a nationalist per se, but I mean if you look Persian on the map of the world in ancient times, it is still there as it is today. Very few countries in the world are like that. That they would have that kind of a continuity over a course of time, and that's not without a reason because there was this sense of a. Center versus periphery that had found some is that there's a huge amount of tension, but there is also a sense of belonging. To something and state is very much at the center of it. I mean, that's why the concept of a state matters for the creation for the shaping of of this culture. What happened is therefore you can see that today in answer to your point about traveling blindfolded. Is that you would be surprised to see how much people share? And in terms of, I just give you one anecdote: in 1968, I believe must have been. I traveled to Azerbaijan. I used to travel and actually photograph. Not blindfolded. Mostly. Well, yeah, not blindfolded. No, no, not blindfolded. So I went to a bazaar in the city of Koi, which is in the northwest of Iran, on the border with what is today the. Republic of Turkey, and I went to the bazaar and I was interested in the kind of a leather work that they produce. So I tried to buy some stuff and they were surprised to see that how few people knew Persian. So they could not communicate in Persian with you either. They have to ask somebody from some other store to come and translate for you. This is 1968. So even though the official language was Persian of the country, that's still. Yeah. So what are they teaching school? So it doesn't matter. Was Persian. But this guy. It doesn't go to school. He hasn't been to the school or he was not fully exposed to it. And but guys usually are very conservative places. So it's stuck in my mind. Now in recently in 2004, I was traveling to the same area, not to the same city, but to the same area. And I was amazed to see how the youth, as soon as they would know that you were coming from somewhere else, opening conversation with you talking about the latest movies that was produced in the West. And it's not only Hollywood. Of course, there is a huge amount of fascination with Hollywood and Western cinema. Cinema is a major thing. Filmmaking is a major thing. So these kids in the city of Ahad were asking me, we're having lunch, asking me, okay then, what do you think about this producer, not producer, this director or that actor. American. American European as well, but mostly American. Were they speaking Persian? It's a complete Persian that I would converse with them. Do they speak English too? Interesting. Yes, actually you would be surprised to see what percentage of the Iranian youth. At least in big cities, are fascinated with learning language, and for a reason because they think that's the way to get access either on social media or eventually leave Iran. Unfortunately, and and because they don't see a future for themselves in the country, either you have to be part of this. Part of this regime, or if you hate them and you don't like the way of their life, you look up outside. You know I was having drivers to drive me around the country in the cities around Iran. And the guy was a young, extremely well educated, well dressed, and we would have looked at him. We could have found him in any street in any