Growing Up Irooni: Danesh Nosirvan on Speaking Up When Our Parents Couldn't
Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation
Chai & Conversation
4.9 • 548 Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2026
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Leyla sits down with Danesh Nosirvan — the Iranian-American creator known online for identifying perpetrators of public harm and holding them accountable through the court of public opinion. What began as a comedy career took an unexpected turn in 2021, when a single video calling out a child abuser went viral and reshaped the trajectory of his work entirely.
Danesh shares the story of his family's arrival in the U.S. after the revolution, growing up as one of the only Iranian kids in his Southern California school, and the quiet weight of watching his immigrant parents accept mistreatment in order to stay safe. That early sense of injustice, he reflects, is what now fuels his willingness to speak up on behalf of others.
The conversation moves through some of the most difficult chapters of recent Iranian diaspora life: the unifying surge of the Mahsa Amini protests, the painful fracturing that followed October 7th, and the ongoing struggle to maintain moral clarity when communities are pulled in opposite directions. Danesh speaks candidly about the cost of using a large platform to advocate — the stalking, the loss of income, the loneliness of being misread by people on every side — and why he still believes in doing it anyway.
Leyla and Danesh also discuss the cultural reluctance to hold powerful men accountable, the case of Jian Ghomeshi and his quiet rehabilitation in parts of the Iranian community, and what genuine accountability looks like in a media landscape that rewards outrage over reflection. Danesh closes with a meditation drawn from his anthropology studies — the contrast between chimpanzee and bonobo societies — as a lens for thinking about the kind of community we're choosing to build, both as Iranians and as humans.
A warm, honest, and at times uncomfortable conversation about identity, responsibility, and what it means to use your voice with care.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation interview with Danish Noshirban. I'm sorry, Janish, John? |
| 0:34.4 | Salam, al-Han. |
| 0:36.4 | Thank you, I've heard you speak Persian a few times on your channel, so it's always fun to hear that part of you. You taught me, kind of. Well, not like completely, but I mentioned to you before, back 10 years ago, I wanted to brush up on my Persian. I found your podcast, actually, and I was listening to that for a long time. |
| 1:11.4 | On my way to work every day, I just kind of listen to that as you were teaching your, I believe, newly husband at the time, or fiancé. It was not. It was not. It was my co-workers, now ex-husband. But common misconception. Oh, okay. My mistake. We were supposed to be learning Farsi along with them. And I thought that's such a fun concept. |
| 1:13.2 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 1:11.0 | That's an OG listener then, because a lot of times people are like, oh, I know you from |
| 1:18.0 | Instagram. And I'm like, I was working so long before that. But yeah, I do remember that story. |
| 1:23.9 | And we've been in touch for a long time. I've wanted to interview you for a really, really long time. You have a very unique line of work. So if we want to kind of start with the |
| 1:32.4 | present, what is it that you do and how did you come into this? It's a big question. Yeah, what I do is |
| 1:38.0 | I help people who need help. You might see viral videos online where people are victims of attackers or abusers or something and they need help identifying the suspect in the video or the person to their alleging committed whatever action it is in the video. And my skill is that I use my internet knowledge to find them and identify who people are in the video with very little information. |
| 2:01.4 | So I've read a little bit about the background of how you came into it. |
| 2:04.8 | But right now there's a lot of people doing this kind of thing. |
| 2:07.4 | But you're, you were very early on. |
| 2:09.8 | So can you say what you were doing before and how you came into this type of work? |
| 2:14.3 | Yes. |
| 2:14.9 | Yes. |
| 2:15.2 | I was, I was trying to do comedy to be quite honest. That's where that's |
| 2:19.1 | actually all of my knowledge and everything came from comedy. And my ability to find people is not |
| 2:24.9 | like a skill that I knew that I had. It could be from like years of like looking for work as a comedian |
| 2:30.0 | that didn't have much work. But I did that for a long time, and it wasn't really getting much |
| 2:34.5 | traction with that on TikTok anyway. And yeah, I saw one video. I saw one video that kind of set me off. It was this child abuser who was bragging about it online. I was like, that's not cool. That's not cool because, you know, the child's going to grow up and see that one day or like maybe other people at home who are being abused, children who see that video think, oh, what I'm going through is normal, |
| 2:54.4 | because this person's normalizing it. It just rubbed me the wrong way. So I was like, nah, you should be held accountable for that. So I just put her name out there. And I found it. And I put her name out there and the video went viral. And after that, people started tagging me saying, hey, you could |
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