Iran Doesn't Have a Future: The Most **** Country on Earth?
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
173.34198
Summary
In this episode, we discuss just how effed Iran is, from their infrastructure problems, to their sinkhole problem, their problems with the internet, their environmental problems, their infrastructure issues, and their water problems. We also talk about their drone program, and the future of the country.
Transcript
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hello simone i'm excited to be here with you today today we are going to be discussing just
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how effed iran is along so many metrics okay so we have done other episodes where we've talked
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about the rapid secularization that's been happening in iran and their fertility crisis
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because they have a fertility rate way low the united below the united states despite being
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a theocracy and a lot poorer than us so it usually means higher fertility rates yeah and and so
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obviously they've got all the demographic stuff but we're going to be talking about stuff that
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might be even more important to have than people like water air air air so an estimated 30 000 deaths
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nationwide every year in iran from air pollution they have some of the worst air pollution in the
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world we'll be going over this but their capital city tyran you know how in some cities you go to
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like mexico city is sort of this way where because they're surrounded by mountains they they they
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keep in all of the pollution they call it like it they have a word for it like some kind of inverted
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vortex of death yes so tyran is uniquely one of these areas tyran it's also uniquely bad at dealing with
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it and also the the floor like the streets like randomly collapse and you can like have sinkholes or
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what giant sinkholes where you can have like entire buildings or blocks disappear and i remember
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because i was like freaked out when i saw this because sinkholes are like one of my greatest
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fears they really are idea that you could just be driving and then falling to your death or sleeping and
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then your house is gone and all your kids are gone typical is that it's just strange one day someone's
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walking around going to work alive and then nothing people just disappear the earth just opens up and
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swallows them eerie so i ask i'm like okay google like how how frequently do these thinkholes happen
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and it goes oh well in toran you get a few of them a week and i was like a few a week city yes in their capital
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city it was like parts of the road disappearing and stuff so what kind of like do they have underground
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river like cenotes like in mexico they had an underground river until they drained it oh
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oh okay and you know i'm talking about oh hold on hold on there's so many more problems that they
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have i'm sorry wait no no no it's over if this is sinkhole city it's already over they've lost
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their entire geopolitical footing we're going to talk about that as well like iran's situation
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may be worse than china's right like like and this is coming for a lot and we're also going to talk
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about how they censor information on the internet how they censor information on phones what information
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they target what society they're trying to build and why like sand slipping through fingers they have
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nothing and will be nothing it is a very sad place but we'll also talk about a few wins they've had
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recently yeah their drone system specifically has been pretty popular okay uh which is like
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a technical thing that is going to be important in future wars are they selling their drones to
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russia or something yeah yeah okay the shahid drone which we'll go into we'll go into the shahid
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drone good for them all right i feel like now i just don't want them to have something
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so let's just run some projections on their current water rates for example by the way if if current
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practices persist only 20 to 30 percent of the current crop production will remain viable by 2045
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oh my gosh so they're going to need mostly imports yeah yeah not not awesome they also for water
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another fun one here is the term zero day came up for their capital city recently now they were able
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to get around it but as of october terran avoided a full day zero through emergency cuts 20 reduction in
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urban use and rationing but the risk persists into 2026 if winter rains fail residents already face
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12 to 24 hour cutoffs in the suburbs with tanker trucks supplying to poorer areas yeah this just
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sounds like lima peru remember when they just be like yeah we're shutting off the water today
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no electricity today yeah no yeah whatever so so lima is also going to run out of water in the next 20
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years yeah so that's honestly like a youtube video i saw where someone just walked around like terran and
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like met a lot of people you know one of those like i spent 24 hours it looked so much like lima to me
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even the air pollution oh yeah oh and lima has horrible air pollution yeah even though it's right
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by the ocean you you have it's it's like you know it's bad when your boogers are black oh god yeah i i
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saw in i was watching videos about iranian doctors and they were talking about how bad the situation is
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and they're like i can get a kid in in my clinic and i can be like here's what's what's hurting this
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kid you know and he's going to have long-term ramifications or die if this is not resolved
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okay and i can do my best to address it and then i open the door and the thing that was killing him
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just comes wafting back in because his family can't leave the city they can't go somewhere else
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they can't go take the waters in bath iran is they promised that they were going to give houses for
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everyone don't have windows just dark rectangles where glass should be monuments marking and
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unfinished ghost city parties are only alone though head 70 kilometers out west and you'll find
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hashed gurd built for half a million people home to 50 000 reverse course and head northeast
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there's gol bahar near machad three decades old still waiting for residents who never came
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at this rate likely never will so they just built these random housing things all over the country
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but all of the money was grafted because you know it was taken by the you know the imams whatever
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so these these how these apartment complexes are giant things of empty apartment complexes all over
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the country that nobody's living in that don't really function because they didn't think that oh we need
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to build them near where the jobs are so then you have this ultra overcrowded primary city
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what would a day zero mean for people if it actually ended up happening yeah households would
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have to queue for water rations eg 20 liters a day so basically you'd go to a line you get your water
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for the day and your family would have to be able to bathe laundry live off of that water and restaurants
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and and car washes and stuff like that would likely just be shut down
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but to continue here we were talking about the pollution yeah the health toll is a 30 000 deaths
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nationwide in 2024 up from 24 000 in 2023 ran alone saw 6 000 in the past year causes respiratory disease
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heart attack etc and year over year there's an 18 oh no they they say 18 of all er visits are
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linked to the pollution in turan so that means like two one out of five people who are going to a
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hospital are going because of the air pollution showing up because yeah the it's the place the
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literal city is killing them oh my gosh that is that is terrifying no no it is like living in hell
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it feels to me like when i when i look at this stuff like you know wonder people aren't having
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kids i mean one this must also be affecting fertility even if you want kids but you know yeah
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in addition you you don't just have polluted air you also have polluted water oh and i'll know is the
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air pollution we'll get to this and some of the data in a bit but it's increasing pretty dramatically
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year over year so it's only getting worse it's not like this problem that they've like abated
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right because in in china they've actually done a really good job an incredibly good job fighting
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air pollution yeah but china is full of chinese people and iran's full of iranians you know oh burn
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okay well look you can't there's some policies that wouldn't work in america because we're not chinese
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people either like remember when they tried to set up the semiconductor fabs in america they're like
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americans are not just not good enough at following orders to make semiconductors
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yeah they came here they're like sorry they're too retarded they're too retarded yeah that was
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that was the takeaway yeah and you could also you know this is yeah not awesome so you also have a
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problem with this stuff affecting the the farmlands and stuff like that oh and also i should note here
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you have daily outages that you were talking about of of power which makes it very hard to run things
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like factories and stuff like that the economist noreen robini predicts a collapse of the iranian
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government was in a year if pressures mount and others have been warning of civil war in the
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meantime the country is wasting money on things like mig-29s from russia when a mig-29 is completely
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useless against american f-35s which just shows that they're not even really like they're playing like
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an aesthetic game for grifting right i think this is also why they lasted so shortly when israel decided to
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bomb them to be like actually because their their actual defense tools were not very effective
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actually let's take a minute to talk about this so iran basically had this plan so if you want to get
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an idea of the geopolitics of the region okay you have iran's got like one real buddy and that buddy
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is qatar and the reason why iran and qatar are buddies is mostly because they share a natural gas field
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that goes under both of the countries and is one of their major income sources and so they have to
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play nice or they lose one of their major income sources and this is true for both countries aligned
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incentives are the best predictor of good collaboration yes so but but everyone else freaking
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hates them at this point but they've been able to maintain power because what they did is they funded a
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bunch of terror networks right so they qatar did or well both of them iran did but qatar did as well
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like because they were working together but they were trying to build up their their regional power
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base and so like you know saudi arabia might be like allied with like actually like the uae and
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like becoming closer to allying with israel and stuff like that and and the united states in sort of this
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axis but then what i randed is it would fund you know hezbollah it would fund hamas it would fund
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quote-unquote you know freedom fighters in in whatever region you know they had another area and like
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god i can't remember what other country that is but there were a number of countries where they
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basically funded they had done the the underground terrorist organizations that had like pseudo
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sticks okay yeah and iran spent a lot of money and a lot of time building all of these into capable
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actors for fighting and then what happened was two things first the the because because basically when
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everybody started bombing iran iran basically picks up its phones and it's like hey guys we've been
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funding you forever will you do something right like and all of them phone lines were dead for a couple
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reasons there was actually one african group that did end up launching a missile in israel but it ended
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up hitting a bus in gaza note here thinking of the houthis and they did send 200 missiles but all the
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ones that would have landed within israel were blocked by israel's defense forces which is why
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the only ones that did land landed in gaza that said i don't know if one hit a bus it hit something
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wait oh okay it's not very competent this is what happens when you give it to random extremists when
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you give them explosives but anyway so what happened was is israel first beheaded with the pager attack
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program which was incredibly effective and then the secondary attack what was that on hezbollah i want
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to say where they basically took out hezbollah which was one of these key allies the hamas is is
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basically tied down with the whole israel situation a little bit and then the people it was funding in
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africa were basically retarded which they didn't fully grok so that that basically is what happened
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every one of these plays that they had been investing in and investing in investing and fizzled all out at
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once right before everyone started bombing them and nobody came to their aid because nobody cares
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except for maybe china and we'll get to why china so this is one of the things on the other side here
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but the point i'm making here is iran basically made this big political bet in a network of terror
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cells that israel completely eradicated and so they don't have any geopolitical friends to fall back on
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they work with russia now with you know selling them more supplies and stuff like that but that's
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mostly only because they have similar enemies they're not actually very friendly with each other i mean
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keep in mind russia's occupation of the of the region that that they're not that happy about
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all right let's talk about the the water crisis so the crisis impacts over 88 million people virtually
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the entire population and that's agricultural lands over 80 percent of iran's territory faces acute water
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stress 80 percent of the territory is facing acute water stress oh no one talks about this
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with reservoirs rivers and aquifers at record lows 19 major dams are nearly dry and to rand's primary
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reservoirs like the amar kabri dam are at just 38 capacity the lowest in decades it is left
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rolling blackouts because keep in mind they're using hydropower as hydropower accounts for a
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significant portion of electricity at a 14 000 megawatt shortfall so like wait wait wait so
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hydropower typically happens when you have like really good river flows and whatnot yeah but so
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like what i mean i understand they drained their underground aquifers but why is their hydropower
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running out so they called it the rebuilding jihad literally i kid you not and what they did is
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after the islamists took over they went you can have a weight loss jihad it's it's fine yes yes after
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the it's like saying mind conf or something you know my strong this so they went around gosh i need
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to have a weight loss conf no i need weight loss is not your conf you need a weight no yeah weight gain
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conf so they they went around after they won and did that thing that idiot like communists often do
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which it's like oh well we're just gonna like build a bunch of stuff and so what happened in iran
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is because the people who were closest to the center of powers like the main grift sources
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were involved in dam construction specifically and oh damn construction they basically just had a
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cycle of never-ending dams the country has a i think like what some of the most dams in the world
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just like dam after dam after dam the problem is a lot of these dams shouldn't been built and they
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ended up causing water problems but then the other problem is is upstream of all the dams
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they've had huge problems with agriculture just using all the water anyway um so basically they
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got they got into this problem because they weren't actually doing work they were just
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building dam after dam after dam i mean keep in mind that's what i'm saying 19 dams are nearly dry
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that's a lot of dams to be nearly dry on so many so many dams yeah
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groundwater and surface water aquifers are depleting at 3.8 meter millimeters per year
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with rivers like the zahara day rude reduced to seasonal trickles and lakes vanishing entirely
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satellite imagery shows stark declines in water bodies around tehran and what's important to note
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here is iran actually used to have the largest body of fresh water in the middle east and they have
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depleted it to be i think at its lowest it was 12 of its original size and unusable at that point
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because it concentrated all of the like pollutants in it when it depleted that much when just everything
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around it basically died but they they then had this major project because people are like well
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iran says it recognizes this problem and it's going to deal with them and i said it said that about this
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lake 10 years ago and now it's only up to like 20 percent so like even if they do do everything like
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they said they were going to do is this lake it's unlikely to matter right so near term experts
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predict a point of no return within five years this is in water supplies if mass urban shortages
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and agricultural collapse overdrawing aquifers could cause irreversible substance and salination
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so basically yeah if they draw down the aquifers too much those aquifers become never usable again
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because of salvation problems yeah now one of the things that tehran is
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trying to talk about doing to fix this is move the capital
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so they want to move it south to the coast sort of near where dubai is okay the problem because
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they're like well we can buy a bunch of cheap land they're like sure and if you're from doing this
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the problem is is that this is also a a insanely expensive idea um they just don't have yeah but i
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mean like what are your other options at this point right like i'm all about declaring bankruptcy
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on tehran at this point yeah just build a few government buildings and be like hey we'll move
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the technical government here and more industry will build up around that well yeah and like honestly
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what are there there can be no industry as you point out on day zero if electricity doesn't work
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you can't run factories it like it doesn't matter like either way tehran is it sounds like they're
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oh you want to talk about how bad this is so so remember i was talking about the dams
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they've built over a thousand dams since 1979 oh wait they're run by a group called the water
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mafia quote unquote and then mafia 87 percent of the water is used by low value crops that are being
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grown based on subsidy driven farming so they're so irma the second largest lake in the middle league
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and vital fresh water a body spanning 5 000 square kilometers in the northwestern iran
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it supported millions through fishing agricultural tourism but over the past past few decades it has
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decreased by 90 percent in size because of piping millions of cubic meters from rivers like zab
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starting in 2017 that connected to it and you can you can see pictures of it you'll see like giant
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ships and stuff just like in in a desert now oh my gosh oh i think i've seen these i mean i'm sure
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there are lots of places like this but they they said they were going to fix it back in 2019 and
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basically nothing happened well yeah what can you do though you can't fix this like problems like
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this you really can't fix this is also a problem in places like california you know like the in the
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american west where we're drawing down the okalala aquifer and there are issues with the colorado
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river like this is not like water water is a big problem yeah all right so let's talk about
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because we had another video on the secular theocracy we already talked about how quickly
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people are one leaving islam globally which we should probably do another video on but specifically
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within the theocratic state of my brain and this is why i always say like catholic integralists are
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just completely numbskulls i'm like okay guys look at your catholic majority countries that's where
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deconversions are having the fastest i mean right like it does not work look at the islamic
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theocratic countries when you do the clapping for emphasis is this cultural appropriation from
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woke culture though it's cultural appropriation from woke people but you're doing it because
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it's insensitive like you're doing it to trigger them i'm doing it to trigger people yeah okay just
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just i'm trying to do my clapping like a woke person um it doesn't it doesn't work right like
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it it tends to lead to higher rates of deconversion and lower rates of religious observance yeah when
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you force it on someone for like when you when you pay someone to practice their hobby they start
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to freaking hate it like this makes sense we all know this yeah but where this is cool is when we
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were doing that survey we were talking about a survey that a lot of people were like hey this survey
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may have been carried out incorrectly or may have had bias to it and i'm like yeah okay i'll buy that
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but since then there has been leaks from the iranian government's own studies oh so this is the
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iranian government study the ministry of culture and islamic guidance via university of tehran do
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we have a ministry of culture yeah it was conducted in late 2023 and i will go over the various
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information they have here so daily prayer rate it fell from 78.5 percent in 2015 decent to 54.8 percent
00:21:05.340
late 2020 a 30 percent drop over eight years that's not even up to this year when the other
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study was showing more of a drop ramadan fasting never fast increased so so in 2015 only 5.1 percent
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never fasted for ramadan that increased to 2023 to 27.4 percent dude this is this is where like
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middle eastern countries getting so obese they need to fast when they need more ramadan i guess the
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ramadan is pretty bad because you're just eating so much in yeah so quran reading keep in mind this
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is also a government organization in a country where you can be like jailed for not being muslim enough
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like these numbers are definitely under reporting things but even these numbers are extremely dire
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never read the quran 9.1 percent in 2015 never read the quran in 2023 yeah 19.2 percent in 2023
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self-identified as highly religious so these ones we only have 2023 okay so highly religious was only
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42.6 percent in 2023 and not religious or lightly religious was 24.3 percent in in that year by by
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the government survey and then if you look at support for separating religion from politics
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that went from 30.7 percent in 2015 to 72.9 percent in 2023 this is their authoritarian theocratic
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government doing a survey of their own populace saying 72.9 percent want a separation of church
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that is shocking a 138 percent increase it points out 85 percent of respondents said societal religiosity
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decreased over the past five years so yeah i bet so the other study that we looked at showed even
00:22:58.220
higher numbers so this was the garmin religion study done in 2020 so shia muslim identification they
00:23:05.400
had it only 32.2 percent in 2020 a sharp drop from what officials said which was 96 percent
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no religion was 22.2 percent and then plus 8.8 percent for atheists so that that brings it to around 30
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percent were no religion or atheists that's that's crazy well can you blame them the air is killing them
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the water is running out welcome to muslim sensitivity training it is important for us to understand
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why the muslims feel the way they do first of all there's no sex until marriage in the muslim world
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now this would be fine except that in the muslim religion you also can't jack off and what do we
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know about the places muslims live they live in sand now put yourself in the shoes of a muslim
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it's friday night but you can't have sex and you can't jack off there's sand in your eyes and probably
00:24:02.000
in the crack here and then some cartoon comes along from a country where people are getting laid and
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mocks your profit well you know what i'd be pretty pissed off too 47 percent do do daily prayers not
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performed 60 percent and then they had done another poll that showed even more where they showed a
00:24:20.140
rejection of religious rule 66 percent and support for secular separation of religion and state they got
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81 this was in in 2024 wild wow i don't i mean you mentioned earlier that one economist was expecting
00:24:39.860
basically some kind of revolution or serious social unrest what do you even do though you know like if
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someone was like oh like oh malcolm we're gonna you know put you in charge of iran you first you'd be
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like no thanks but like if you had to be put in charge what would you even do normalize relations
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with israel in the united states they could like their citizens want them to do it right like yeah
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but then normalizing relations with israel in the u.s isn't going to bring their water back
00:25:06.240
right but it would allow them to sell their oil at a higher price which is 80 percent of their
00:25:11.920
country's profits at this point but then you you be incredibly dictatorial about any form of
00:25:18.820
corruption public executions for that okay no i mean i do think you should have public executions
00:25:24.300
for corruption i think you need to be really harsh on corruption and i would because i think that
00:25:29.540
when when you get what people don't understand about corruption like i think corruption is worse than
00:25:34.620
murder the reason is is because the long-term effects of it are much worse if you amount to
00:25:40.020
murder more people essentially it basically amounts to murder of cities of thousands of children a year
00:25:47.480
rather than i guess when you consider the number of people even just being hospitalized due to poor
00:25:51.280
air quality right now yeah like yeah if you fudge your report like an environmental report or something
00:25:57.600
like that and that ends up with no water in 10 years or something like that or a dam breaking in the
00:26:04.600
city below it ended up flooding or right yeah no okay fair point yeah and you need to i mean i guess
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yeah even consider the the role that government corruption in russia played in their like in the loss of
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soldiers lives yeah the reason why i say corruption execution for all corruption right is because
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people will say well i didn't know that this would lead to a dam to break i didn't know that this would
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lead to and you've got to be like well you know that we we do you know public torture and execution for
00:26:34.440
any form of corruption so just don't do it do not and and you really need it in a place like iran
00:26:40.600
because it's so normal within the culture there it's it's just such a intrinsic part of persian
00:26:48.200
culture historically going back you know hundreds of thousands of years you need to just come in with
00:26:54.360
a whip and be like we're not going to allow this anymore and we're going to root it out really really
00:26:59.500
aggressively and i think that that could fix a lot of these problems quickly i mean keep in mind if you
00:27:05.020
drop the subsidies for the food crops that that are basically just being paid out to keep people
00:27:10.780
quiet and not revolting in these areas then you could drop the water use in these areas spend that
00:27:15.440
money importing the food instead and do an actual moving of the capital to a new location like there
00:27:21.740
is a way around this it's just that they would never do it because as soon as they hear move the
00:27:25.940
capital to a new location they're like what an opportunity for for corruption right like what an
00:27:30.560
opportunity to buy land in the region and hike up prices and then make sure the government buys it
00:27:35.800
at 10 times the price and blah blah blah blah but here are some cool things you might not know about
00:27:40.180
iran okay yeah give us some cheerful endings so you know they're having this huge problem with
00:27:45.200
fertility below the us's it's like 1.4 why you're gonna say good stuff did you know that ivf is free in
00:27:51.580
iran oh good for them also they have some of the best gender transition surgeries a lot of trans
00:27:58.960
people of course forced or death but they do but like actually there's a lot of medical tourism to
00:28:04.720
iran and there are there are special travel agencies that sell medical tourism to iran even of like they
00:28:12.080
address things like are you concerned about being gay and going to iran like here's how it's safe like
00:28:17.120
they they really like and there are a lot of very woke people in the u.s and canada who have gone on
00:28:22.260
the record saying like okay well i i don't support what iran is doing but capitalism ruins my ability
00:28:32.620
to transition in the u.s so i have to it's not even a choice i have and i know that iran has developed
00:28:39.580
many of their good methods by forcibly experimenting on their own citizens who happen to be gay but i just
00:28:46.100
don't have a choice because capitalism they just don't care they don't care they don't care that
00:28:50.800
these were developed not experimenting on gay people but what iran used to do is force gay people
00:28:54.400
to gender transition to make them not gay yeah but a lot of the surgeries that they performed were
00:28:58.740
experimental yeah yeah uh which is funny that the the modern left saw this and is like that that seems
00:29:05.600
good that's like no it's not good but it's affordable so yeah it's not good but it's affordable so did you
00:29:13.020
know that they also give interest-free loans of ten thousand dollars upon marriage slash childbirth
00:29:18.800
that's super common in islamic countries it seems they also give housing priority to families with
00:29:26.660
over three kids and child allowances of twenty dollars per child per month oh twenty dollars
00:29:32.480
that's gonna well i mean i bet that goes far in iran i mean it's not gonna get you an ipad but you
00:29:38.020
food's pretty cheap in a lot of these sorts of places maybe you you can you can buy your daily
00:29:43.440
pack of air for that yes there we go baseball references in this episode as president of planet
00:29:50.620
spaceball i can assure both you and your viewers that there's absolutely no air shortage whatsoever
00:29:57.400
yes of course i've heard the same rumor myself yes thanks for calling and not reversing the charges
00:30:04.100
what are some other fun ones here they also restrict the degrees that women can get which
00:30:21.700
is another really cool thing they do in iran another cool thing
00:30:25.860
oh boy so and so i love you so it's so funny having you on this show the whatever base camp
00:30:36.540
you're humoring me with that name yes since 2012 iranian universities have imposed gender-based
00:30:43.740
quotas and bans on women for 77 to 80 fields affecting over 30 institutions this reverses women's
00:30:50.280
dominance 60 of students in the 1990s and ties into conservative pushes for islamitization of
00:30:56.260
education i mean on the bright side we we are able to point to iran as strong evidence for why
00:31:04.140
restricting female academic choice doesn't improve birth rates so iran is the sacrificial lamb
00:31:11.600
demonstrating to it's a sacrificial lamb i'm happy to make yeah we often point out here we don't have
00:31:17.740
a problem with iranian culture we we have an iranian president in this country right you know
00:31:22.320
like maga is all about iran given that trump aesthetically persian yeah yeah you got a link
00:31:28.120
to that video you made the song song of it i'll add the song to this one but trump is culturally persian
00:31:35.400
i do not know how he sorry as somebody with persian friends and white waspy friends if you if you
00:31:42.960
have have you seen the ballroom designs for the new east wing oh my god are they horrible
00:31:47.520
persiany nonsense well i don't know have you seen the freaking oval office i mean at the gold it just
00:31:52.740
keeps like racking up it's like a like a dragon's den in there but but the point i'm making here is
00:31:58.160
from my cultural perspective it comes off as very tacky because i have a waspy aesthetic perspective
00:32:03.400
you know we live in like a farmhouse that's you know minimally decorated and you know stuff like that
00:32:08.720
you go to trump stuff and i show you pictures of like persian houses and trump's house you're going to
00:32:16.620
be like oh my god like yeah it doesn't scream martha's vineyard in the trump properties it
00:32:22.500
doesn't scream i have a line on repeat that i don't know if people get but i assume they would
00:32:27.240
where i'm like where are his pictures of old boats and fancy boats and horses yes and it's a thing that
00:32:34.460
like if you've hung around waspy houses models of fancy boats and paintings of boats and paintings
00:32:43.460
of horses were like a thing and yet you know like we've been to mar-a-lago right like trump's got
00:32:49.920
none of that and this is like on the water in miami right here trump didn't i mean he acquired
00:32:57.080
mar-a-lago and mar-a-lago before he acquired it or he does before maybe maybe there's pictures look at
00:33:03.300
pictures of his house no i'm just saying mar-a-lago used to be a presidential retreat
00:33:06.260
it was owned by the u.s government but but it's decorated in his style if you look at pictures
00:33:10.740
of his penthouse his you know his new year penthouse no it's all very no pictures of boats you see no
00:33:16.020
so clearly i don't have a problem with persians if i'm okay with trump as the u.s president right you
00:33:22.260
know i'd also point out here that when i was talking about persians being very you know tempted by
00:33:28.800
corruption when contrasted with other cultural traditions trump definitely fits that as well
00:33:34.680
a lot of people are like like the trump family is very obviously done some corrupt deals that benefit
00:33:40.300
themselves there's there's been some grumbling about this i do not like corruption come on every
00:33:46.960
morning on the front cover well not there is no front cover of drudge it's all front cover but like
00:33:51.920
drudge is always like new thing that what i want to watch though is whatever like i want like a public
00:33:58.060
reality tv saga of like baron trump i want baron trump dating i want baron trump doing corrupt
00:34:03.860
deals i want baron trump no but the thing about the way that trump does it which also kind of comes
00:34:10.040
off his sort of version is i think one of the reasons less people are mad about it is because
00:34:14.420
he's so blatantly obvious about it like that's the thing is we don't care that much about corruption
00:34:21.000
like the american id we care about authenticity like authentically corrupt and he jokes about it like
00:34:27.620
he hams up about it like joe biden is like okay i'm gonna like get my son and we're gonna send him
00:34:35.380
to like work with these other countries that are gonna like funnel money into like private accounts
00:34:40.660
and pay for like phony consulting gigs and and trump's just like hey you want to start like
00:34:48.360
a crypto coin son and we'll call it trump coin and then in an election cycle like that'd be cool right
00:34:57.540
like like it's like not even like okay we're gonna hide that it's tied to my presidential campaign
00:35:02.740
we're gonna hide that it's no no we're gonna use the same branding i love it anyway so so with the
00:35:12.260
fields that women were banned from were stuff like mining nuclear petroleum engineering based stuff
00:35:16.880
accounting chemistry computer science business education consent counseling math oh so just make
00:35:23.100
women study useless degrees like like i know it's funny because typically in in in in countries where
00:35:29.820
women have fewer rights and less freedom they go disproportionately into STEM fields because
00:35:34.740
they have to make money and like they don't get choices and typically when women have more freedom
00:35:40.300
and more social autonomy and empowerment they they disproportionately choose the the fun soft
00:35:46.920
non-STEM thing so it's really weird that iran was like that they did the opposite they're like let's
00:35:52.900
force women into the fields that they would have if they had freedom i don't get it take that women
00:36:00.880
you're only allowed to do that fun easy stuff now get out of the mines whatever it's very strange
00:36:08.720
uh by the way what are the other things is causing the collapse of the roads and stuff like that which
00:36:14.540
is kind of cool given how old the city is is there's over 600 square kilometers and this is just mapped
00:36:21.900
of ancient underground aquifers under terran so those like aqueducts yeah like aqueducts under the city
00:36:28.560
that they built yeah like a thousand years ago better than like following into some french crypt
00:36:33.580
full of skeletons i'm sure they've got their skeletal crypts as well or something god um why hold on to
00:36:40.780
the dead bodies people cremate them and turn them into diamonds cremate them and turn them into diamonds
00:36:48.160
we need to go on alibaba and get a diamond making machine for ashes oh my gosh by the way we're talking
00:36:54.780
about how quickly things are sinking by the way the city itself terran sinks keep it going here i'm
00:37:01.560
saying centimeters and not millimeters it sinks 10 to 30 centimeters per year so they're like venice but
00:37:09.880
like without the range of the year the city is sinking imagine what that would do to your house's
00:37:14.260
foundation well yeah but also like keep it they look like peru and not like bougie peru not like
00:37:20.560
where we lived but we're like yeah close to the airport peru where it's just these like stacked
00:37:25.860
clay-like houses that look just like they're on cinder blocks and falling apart so so let's talk
00:37:30.440
about how i ran to censorship because that's pretty interesting as well oh we gotta head out okay
00:37:34.520
i'm late all right we'll do this well you can yeah i can i can step away and you can because
00:37:39.760
this is good stuff we'll do it later okay i don't want to miss out i want to know what happened yeah
00:37:46.540
you get to hear about come on i'm sure you're gonna find it fun to learn how they're banning people
00:37:50.600
from using cell phones and stuff like that yeah yeah i can't wait okay good i'm looking forward to
00:37:57.100
literal hellscape literal hellscape tried to finish this episode but i ran out of time i freaking hate
00:38:04.900
you this is how this is how spousal abuse starts this is how oh my god why am i married to this
00:38:13.600
princess as of october 2025 internet penetration is 85 population that's 78 million users
00:38:19.880
but internet freedom is heavily restricted in iran so internet filtering and blocking over 50
00:38:26.200
of global websites are inaccessible including social media instagram and facebook has been
00:38:31.080
banned since 2009 with periodic lists news outlets bbc persia voa and tools like vpns illegal since 2024
00:38:38.040
although 80 of users evade via smuggling tech in may 2025 cyber freedom areas were introduced for
00:38:46.760
elites granting uncensored access to select groups what that's crazy cyber freedom if you're the elite
00:38:55.300
you can do what you want but most people know wait a second do i like this idea i don't like this idea
00:39:02.320
i don't know like maybe there are some things you should only unlock when like you can be
00:39:09.180
responsible with it no this is why i'm really against like porn banning because as soon as you
00:39:14.040
ban porn then you need to ban vpns and if you ban vpns and you can tell what anyone is doing online
00:39:18.360
at any time okay which is very dangerous for intellectual freedom okay especially we have
00:39:23.160
urban monocultural government in power i would can't go on okay deep packet inspection so the dpi
00:39:31.080
monitors traffic so they like literally monitor the traffic with things like i assume ais apps
00:39:36.760
like apparate state approved youtube alternative tracks users journalists face arrests over 100 in
00:39:43.140
2025 office raids and threats from straying from the official lines a new untrue content law passed july
00:39:50.720
2025 criminalizes fake news with up to five years in prison targeting critical reports oh and then state
00:39:58.880
media irib dominates algorithms on domestic platforms amplify pro-regime posts so it's a
00:40:05.660
pro-regime post the algorithms and the platform that's specifically meant to implement it and during
00:40:10.100
elections or crises bots flood social media with disinformation like it's like they have the bots
00:40:16.560
and they try to make it look like everyone agrees with them within their own country to try to maintain
00:40:21.540
this belief and consensus they also do partial blackouts so stealth blackouts a 2025 innovation so they're
00:40:28.220
getting more sophisticated at this was making vpns illegal this stealth blackout concept that came
00:40:34.000
out this year where they isolate domestic users while maintaining global routing e.g mid 2025 tactics
00:40:40.680
reduce speeds by 95 without alerting outsiders the mian group documented a major 2025 shutdown lasting days
00:40:49.060
costing 170 million in digital economy losses they also block cell phones access so how does this work
00:40:56.060
they partially shut down target data 4g 5g throttle to 2g while voices in sms may persist full cuts
00:41:03.980
occurred via bgp rerouting or power grid interference in 2025 power outages for energy crisis is exacerbating
00:41:13.080
this so they sort of route which areas are not going to get power as well to handle the fact that they
00:41:18.680
know they're getting blackouts anyway gosh this is so dystopian but not in the fun sexy way
00:41:23.880
right frequency examples routine during protests e.g 2019 bloody november that killed 1500 amid a week-long blackout
00:41:32.100
in june 2025 israeli conflict a 12-day near total mobile internet cutoff left millions offline for 24 hours
00:41:39.100
there were since 2019 post restrictions extended into october blockaging blocking messages apps
00:41:45.220
users resorted to using phones on star lakes smuggled or illegal but 70 percent of iranians reported a total
00:41:52.200
isolation during the recent crisis so you're being struck by israel and the government like if you
00:41:58.300
cared about your citizens or like they cared a lick about their citizens life you would want them to
00:42:03.060
have access to real-time information about what's going on during this crisis but no they get attacked
00:42:08.900
and their first thought is how do i keep my own people from rising up and overthrowing us you know because
00:42:14.300
that's what they think mods are asleep take over god yeah but i think it shows you know when you
00:42:21.080
bomb iran or something like that what the government sees is this is israel siding with its populace
00:42:26.660
against the government wow yeah why else would they be doing this yeah and i think that this is something
00:42:31.600
that people do not understand they think that this is a conflict with iran's people against israel
00:42:36.540
when it is not it is a few elites uh that are that are you know really handling this crisis and
00:42:43.380
the real reason they handle it is is interesting i think just as a separate note here uh was in the
00:42:49.380
elite circles in the middle east there's something of a like a dominance hierarchy that's based on how
00:42:55.300
much you can f with israel and you're seen as at the bottom of this dominant no sorry not even israel
00:43:00.100
specifically the jews it's about effing with the jews the more you can f with the jews the higher on
00:43:05.380
the dominance hierarchy you are the less you f with the jews and the more you try to work with
00:43:09.760
them the lower on the dominance hierarchy you are and even if you don't actually personally have
00:43:14.460
animosity towards jewish people if you are in these elite circles you will feel like you need to do this
00:43:20.680
for social status signaling reasons oh my goodness it's like a weird flex thing anyway tactics used
00:43:28.040
shutdowns that produce prevented real-time sharing a.g videos of floods or sinkholes so they often do this
00:43:33.920
when there's natural disasters and obviously why would they just so people aren't as aware of
00:43:39.080
how often they take place well i mean so remember when we talked about like the the crisis with the
00:43:45.860
water yeah when this led to like widespread sandstorms in august they shut down cell phones in these
00:43:51.980
regions that are experiencing the actual crisis
00:43:55.220
anyway if if you're talking about vpns they're used by around 60 of iran's 78 million users so you know
00:44:05.240
they are widely used but not as widely used as you'd think there's still 40 of people who don't have
00:44:08.940
access to them but they're they they're like very dangerous to use because a dpi can allow them to trace
00:44:15.520
vpns basically they detect a vpn protocols open vpn wire guard blocking 60 to 70 percent of known
00:44:22.400
vpn servers weekly in october 2025 new dpi layers disrupted even obscure providers so it's getting
00:44:29.020
harder and harder to use vpns because the internet is like checking does this look like they're using
00:44:33.740
a vpn and they can just find the protocols and then turn them off
00:44:37.520
yeah ip whitelisting the holonet only allows for pre-approved ips cutting off of vpn endpoints
00:44:46.840
during the june 2025 conflict related blackouts 95 of vpns connections failed for days domain seizures
00:44:53.720
vpn provider sites are blocked new ones are targeted within hours via ai driven scans legal
00:44:59.720
crackdowns in july 2025 untrue content law criminalizes vpn use with penalties of one to five
00:45:05.460
years one to five years in prison so yeah smuggled vpns via usb or dark web are pricier 10 to 20
00:45:14.380
a month versus the free pre-2024 ones risking scams or malware as well yeah i mean imagine you sell
00:45:21.440
somebody what you tell them as a vpn but you're really recording all the naughty stuff they're doing
00:45:24.440
then you threaten to send it to the government and you can get a good oh oh no throttling and stealth
00:45:31.420
blackouts during crises in october 2025 protesters mobile data is throttled to two gigabytes 0.1
00:45:38.180
megabytes rendering vpns unusable even if connected oh my gosh well that's a clever way to
00:45:44.040
make them impossible to use smuggled starlink terminals there's about a thousand in the country
00:45:49.640
offer uncensored access but cost five hundred dollars plus and require illegal hardware regime
00:45:55.080
janitor signals in september 2025 and border patrols see skits so they're scanning for these and
00:46:00.840
attempting to block them so yeah now we'll talk about one good thing that's happening in iran um
00:46:06.700
is their drone program it's been pretty popular um so and they're they're pretty inexpensive so you
00:46:13.820
can get a shaheed 136 drone for twenty thousand dollars a unit and they're mass produced at about
00:46:19.280
seven to ten per day and they're about huge hit with three thousand exported to russia 2022 for ukrainian
00:46:25.560
strikes and they've been used by the hussies versus ships on the red sea versus the you know
00:46:30.860
one million dollar missiles that you have with a lot of american missiles you got the mahari r6 which
00:46:36.100
costs around a hundred thousand dollars this is a medium altitude reconnaissance on armed uav with
00:46:42.700
a hundred kilogram payload this was exported to russia and venezuela and pretty popular and then you've
00:46:47.780
got the new shaheed the shaheed 129 to 149 which is one to two million per unit and it's a medium
00:46:54.380
altitude long endurance like a u.s reaper with a 2 000 kilometer range armed with missiles and bombs
00:47:00.300
and this is seen regional use in syria and yemen and then they also have the aliba 5 which is the
00:47:06.440
tactical drone for fifty thousand dollars short range recon strike vertical takeoff you know what
00:47:11.460
you're typically thinking of when you're thinking of drones because a lot of these other drones look
00:47:14.080
more like gliders and this one is you know also getting pretty popular and iraqi's militias are using
00:47:20.120
it another positive note for them is their economy is stable only in that it has nearly completely
00:47:25.680
collapsed anyway and 80 to 90 percent of their income it's coming from or sorry what percent is
00:47:32.180
it i can't remember i said it earlier it's like 85 percent it's coming from oil and on the downside
00:47:36.480
80 to 90 percent of their oil is coming from exports to china so that's that's not good when you
00:47:42.980
have you know that level of concentration and keep in mind that requires things like the you know
00:47:48.100
suez canal staying open that requires a lot of very tricky things to make work for iran and it requires
00:47:54.620
going past a lot of water dominated by countries that don't very much like either iran or china very
00:48:01.920
much like india so a very precarious situation if that was ever blocked off for them which interesting
00:48:08.900
is that china really hasn't pushed back on on this you think they would exercise more attempts to
00:48:14.440
control them but they they haven't they i mean they have done some some you know stuff within the
00:48:20.360
country but they they haven't gone overboard and part of the reason is i think it's because 60 or
00:48:24.620
something a fairly high amount of china's oil is actually coming from iran so they i think the main
00:48:30.320
thing is that they're afraid of iran retaliating as well one of the few countries are actually afraid
00:48:35.720
of where they really should be equally afraid of every country on that shipping line which i mean they are
00:48:39.820
that that is what the taiwan situation is really about they need to get taiwan to break our ability
00:48:46.120
to blockade them by blockading the strait of malacca and they they will do anything to see that happen
00:48:54.060
not that it matters because their fertility rate is garbage and taiwan's fertility rate is garbage and
00:49:00.740
neither of them is going to exist as meaningful power players in the future you can see our videos on
00:49:04.540
that i mean it matters to people who are extremely short-term oriented so yeah that's that's like
00:49:11.140
98 of people by the way malcolm i was going to talk about the current political deadlock and stuff in
00:49:16.200
the country but i don't really care just you know what country isn't politically deadlocked these days
00:49:20.560
honestly i mean the united states sorry we're in the middle of a government shutdown yeah i know and
00:49:26.840
we're winning because we wanted the shutdown we're walking around walmart and one guy's talking to another
00:49:31.980
guy he goes the government keeps the most powerful country in the world can't stay shut down much
00:49:36.660
longer he's like no he's like well we need the government to work and the other guy was like no
00:49:40.600
we don't no we don't that's the way many republicans feel i just love that well overheard in walmart it's
00:49:47.100
it's the best i'm just saying like if we end up cleaning up as much as the the demographic shifts
00:49:52.080
make it look like we're going to as soon as you know the supreme court case comes through and
00:49:55.860
redistricting happens it's it's bad like it is it is you know moving to a more of a political
00:50:01.400
consensus within our country until until the democrats can sort of reposition what they
00:50:05.820
they stand for i mean love you someone i love you too i'm really glad we're not in iran thank you
00:50:15.100
for not being born there yeah but it also means we probably shouldn't you know as long as we can
00:50:21.400
keep them from getting the the nukes do not waste time because the war was iran and war is not going
00:50:26.820
to be around for long just let them do their thing and they're genociding themselves right now okay
00:50:32.660
similar to your stance with europe i mean that's why you're in you're in favor of in general this
00:50:38.760
this move toward isolationism you're like why invest either from an antagonistic or supportive
00:50:45.440
standpoint in these countries that are choosing to not inherit the future so yeah there's a few
00:50:51.540
countries worth investing in because they've got good tech and decent fertility rates like israel
00:50:54.820
australia you know new zealand but like not europe not not iran anyway love you to death have a good
00:51:01.980
one bye all right take us away captain well i'm not i gotta find my notes okay one because you've not
00:51:11.620
been like iran we even talked about iran since iran allowed to play with nukes anymore like i don't
00:51:20.980
know where this came from this is out of left field for you so not exactly we've had sort of a
00:51:26.880
series of how effed is x country how x is y country oh kind of how asma gold has that whole like
00:51:33.820
what on earth is going on in spain japan i mean we did it with like france recently we did it with
00:51:41.460
you know china yeah and and like what like malaysia nepal yeah it's part of his ongoing series
00:51:47.300
yeah we did it with one one country so i think that it's it's good to just keep our fans and to
00:51:52.180
be a source for our fans of economic information right like not economic what are you thinking like
00:51:56.880
geopolitical information you know well you're yeah i need to know i don't i have no idea what's going
00:52:01.400
on in iran right now if there's people getting their news from us you know shouldn't we be ensuring
00:52:05.920
that they're getting like sort of a cohesive and and we might even do a counter series to this like
00:52:11.960
this country is uniquely not effed that would be nice really only two countries that fall into that
00:52:18.440
that's the united states and israel well yeah all the all the anti-semites watching this are not
00:52:23.540
going to want the israel i basically already did that video i think it was on like the jews will own
00:52:28.100
the future or something or why you need to be nice to the jews we've had like a billion of those
00:52:31.300
episodes oh yeah but this one's going to be a little different and i learned a bunch of stuff i
00:52:35.560
didn't know when putting it together i'm excited school me all right what am i making it for dinner
00:52:43.020
i haven't decided what what what what is the easy for tonight i you know what could be fun tonight
00:52:48.580
is remember when you made just the cake the the fish cakes with the sauce and you did it with dashi
00:52:57.360
and then you froze two of those fish cakes well one thing i love is lo mein if we have the ingredients
00:53:07.400
for it try cooking like noodle lo mein i don't know if we have lo mein noodles we don't have any like
00:53:13.880
we do have lo mein noodles we bought them the last time we went all right i'll i'll check and see if
00:53:19.060
not are you asking for pho with because i do have the meatballs what are they called um what are they
00:53:25.680
what are those people called the vietnamese we bun bun ma oh oh is bun cha no i'd rather just have
00:53:33.580
pho if i'm doing pho but i'd love it if you could see if you could do lo mein tonight but if you can't
00:53:38.340
do lo mein just vegetable lo mein yeah or just lo mein if i could add in some chicken would you want
00:53:45.700
chicken no okay i want to just get lo mein right first and then we can try making it i don't have
00:53:52.320
bell peppers i don't have chives i didn't ask for vegetable lo mein i said lo mein you just literally
00:53:57.360
want noodles and sauce that's the way noodles are usually served no it's with vegetables there's
00:54:04.760
stuff there's chicken there's vegetables that's like saying like oh give me a chipotle burrito bowl
00:54:10.180
rice please that is the way that i have eaten lo mein most of my life as lo mein all right well i love
00:54:18.680
you and i want you to have what you want so i'll work on it you don't have the ingredients if i have
00:54:23.220
vegetables would would you be okay with you have vegetables put them in okay i love you i love you
00:54:31.100
too and if you i got just this situation run away is over i ran away you ran away they're running away
00:54:40.440
we're all running away to what it ran i ran yes i'm punning you yeah you're you're not like
00:54:48.380
grimes who live off the puns all right okay sorry bye that was toasty right now oh where what
00:54:55.920
toasty's feeling outside and she got out of the car and she's talking to him oh okay oh yeah i'm
00:55:00.440
really okay got it strides through hallways decked in gold so bright like a sultan's palace glowing day
00:55:09.940
and night marble pillars glimmer echoing his name a persian king or president one and the same
00:55:20.660
and shimmering drapes plush rugs under each foot a fortress of bling that no one can refute
00:55:32.600
gold leaf on the ceiling mirrors everywhere he's bold he's brash who else would even dare
00:55:42.420
where are the paintings of boats of horses so rare random cottages and frames why aren't they there
00:55:51.800
and where the model ships decked out in their coats we're asking our first persian friends show us those
00:56:09.760
like something out of ancient lore or so we state halls paved in splendor shining under the light
00:56:19.360
surprise surprise he's got style though it's quite a sight
00:56:23.980
he claims he's classy with flair unmatched a thousand chandeliers perfectly dispatched
00:56:36.220
grand turret big fountains exotic mystique all hail our persian prez so lavish unique
00:56:45.560
where are the paintings of boats of horses so rare random cottages and frames why aren't they there
00:56:55.380
and where the model ships decked out in their coats we're asking our first persian friends
00:57:06.320
every corner gilded every surface gleams like sha era fantasies fresh out of dreams
00:57:18.320
marble upon marble a treasure trove of hue yes it's gaudy but hey it's trump through and through
00:57:28.720
where are the paintings of horses so rare random cottages and frames why aren't they there
00:57:38.320
and where the model ships decked out in their coats our gilded persian president please bring on those boats