Greetings, friends. I am Ram, and you are listening to Mastio Rusti, a podcast that I usually do in Persian.

It's a taboo smashing podcast of sorts where I just decided to one day turn on my microphone and start talking about subjects and issues that are considered to be very sensitive in my culture, being from Iran and all.

And in a very organic sort of way, it grew into something much, much bigger than I ever could have imagined.

This is the very, very first episode that we're doing in English, and the reason being because of what's going on currently in Iran, and specifically around the death of Masa Amini over hijab, and why it sparked a whole movement across the nation.

So we're going to try to give some context into this whole event that is continuously going on.

And I think one of the reasons that I'm trying to do this episode with my dear friend Jason Chams, who used to be a political pundit in DC and lived that sort of life.

But now he's a hipster bomb who lives in a van, so you probably should take everything we say with a grain of salt.

But why I think we may have some sort of input that we can add to this discussion and debate is I think we're both, we both have grew up on both sides of the ocean.

Jason, I'll better explain his side, but just to give you a really quick update of what my story is that I have lived, I was born in Iran, but I grew up in the States, went back to Iran, back to Canada, back to Iran, back to the States.

So I've equally spread my life between Iran, the United States, and Canada, and have a pretty good understanding of the domestic issues, what it comes to politics and society and culture in those respective countries.

So given that's the type of background and my own personal story of dealing directly with Islamic republics, violence, my father was an environmentalist by the name of Kovusayyid Amami, who was detained on false pretenses of espionage, and two weeks later, while in Evan prison, he was killed.

And subsequently, my brother and I tried to get my mom out of the country, and she was arrested at the airport, and it took us almost two years to finally get her out.

So I've dealt with this monster, and I know what kind of force they use in order to suppress and oppress any type of people that oppose them or get in their way.

That's sort of my story. I recently did a podcast with Michaela Peterson, so I think there's going to be a lot of English speaking people who are going to come to my channel who might be interested in learning a little bit more about what's happening, and I hope that I can add some sort of value.

And the same idea that I had when I went on Michaela's show in order to amplify the voice of our people, hopefully me and Jason can fill in some of the gaps of the topics that I was talking about.

Maybe I wasn't as coherent as I could have been, but hopefully today will be able to spend a little bit more time on what is actually happening and why it's important that you know what is happening and how it affects you.

So that's sort of my story. Jason, do you want to give a little background about yourself?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So similar to ramen, I live between the US and Iran on my life. My life is pretty much two parts living in Iran, living in the United States.

I was born to one Iranian, one American parent, and so this riff between our two countries has been an integral part of my life.

You know, before I knew about politics, before I knew about society, any of these things, just as a young person, I would experience the differences between the two cultures that my mom comes from being American and my dad comes from being Iranian.

And then when I turned eight, my dad took us to Iran. I lived there for 20 years.

I didn't even know it, but when I started living there, as I learned Persian, I immediately started training for what later became my career as an interpreter.

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