What's Really Happening Inside Iran | Siyamak Khorrami

I'm from Iran and I've lived here many years but I speak Farsi and I'm in touch with a lot of people in Iran and every day I've been checking of what's going on using a lot of social media and the videos and content I'm getting from Iran right now. I'm talking with family members and friends in Iran. Today our host would be Jim Rickheimer who's a friend of the show who's been on the show many times talking about multiple issues California is facing. He's going to be interviewing me on Iran. See you Mac it's good to see you in a different chair. Well thank you Jim for having me. Absolutely listen the big issue that's happening right now is everything about Iran and you know based on when you see this podcast a lot of different things are going to change but it's the top of the news and I'm always thinking about the fact that here we have an asset like you who was born and raised in Iran to kind of tell us what's really going on in that country during this war how do people feel about the government the regime the changes what's it really like going on in Iran? Well there's a big discrepancy from what you're hearing in a lot of news media outlets and what's really happening in Iran in terms of the disconnect between the people and the government. A lot of people bundle the Iranian people with the government and they count it as one and they think this war is against everybody but really what's happening with this war is against the Iranian government a lot of the Iranians are not happy with the government and it's not just a few months ago there was an uprising if you recall right 40,000 people died a lot of the media outlets haven't reported on on this uprising and the death of the people when this uprising happened it was because of economical issues it happened at the bazaar in Tehran which is like kind of like where the shopkeepers are at okay it's like shopping malls but like old school right a lot of shops close to each other people were frustrated with the value of the currency dropping significantly and they started protesting and quickly other groups of the society joined and it became millions of people in the streets. How many people are in Iran how big is that? There's 90 million people. So 90 million we're talking about a major size country and did this happen throughout the country or was it just certain pockets? It started from Tehran which is the capital and then it spread to other cities this has been developing for many years. I got out of Iran 25 years ago before I left around the year 99 there was some uprising in the universities students wanted more freedom but they faced IRGC members came to the campuses and throw them from the top of rooftops balconies. And that's that make a point? Yeah and then people don't want to protest. It wasn't a student protesters 47 years ago that kind of started this whole thing or am I wrong? The revolution happened in 47 years ago the Islamic revolution of Iran happened and the idea was to bring democracy right and there was an Islamic component to it but from what we are gathering now from what I understand it was more of a Marxist communist revolution combined with some Islamic elements on the surface it looked like an Islamic revolution and they were supposed to bring democracy but soon after the revolution took hold they started persecuting a lot of the groups that were involved with with the revolution they went one after another after these groups so a lot of those students that did the revolution they end up fleeing Iran or they end up getting persecuted themselves or they had to get out of politics slowly but surely as this group that did the revolution became tighter and tighter they kicked out different kinds of people that were involved in the revolution okay when I was in Iran it was not good you didn't have freedoms and just for people to get a sense like if you were wearing short sleeves as a young person or if you were wearing nice jeans or modern jeans and somebody from IRGC didn't like it you could get in trouble if women would show their hair at that time you could get in trouble listening to music could sometimes get you in trouble so back even you're talking 25 years ago women had to cover their hair yes after the revolution 47 years ago this revolution happened the communist Islamic revolution women had to cover their hair okay and kind of the country went backwards but at that time people didn't know that they are moving this direction people thought things are going to get better but when I was there the regime the current regime Islamic Republic of Iran at least the basics were working you know you you didn't have much freedom but at least electricity was working the water was there and what happened was now at this time a lot of things have broken you know we don't have enough water we don't have enough electricity there people people are talking about that even in hot areas they don't have electricity so they can have air conditioning there's been a lot of corruption and at that time when I was going to school in in my high school in Iran there wasn't a lot of support for the regime there was some support but there wasn't a lot but you couldn't you couldn't speak out against them you wouldn't speak out against them but you would show it in your disagreement in different ways were you allowed how was it hard to leave back then I'm not here I hear these stories of people that I know that they're 12 13 years old and their parents got them out of the country and they didn't see their parents for 10 or 15 more years because their parents weren't allowed to leave some people that were minorities religious minorities it was very hard for them to get out it's also very hard to get out for people because your passport has no value unfortunately internationally getting visas from any country is very hard okay there is only a number of countries that give you visas with an Iranian passport oh really so if you you want to go to Europe it's not easy okay let's go back to like when you left where a lot more countries would accept it and less now or no actually at that time it was still very strict it was very hard before the revolution Iranian passport had a lot of value people could travel everywhere they were respected they were treated as people are wealthy they have a strong culture so being Iranian had a lot of value now it's very hard using the Iranian passport to travel I got out when I was 16 because I had family members that were here they were successful in the U.S. and other countries and they helped us get visas and we were able to go to Mexico City we got our visa we went to Mexico City and then from there we were able to get a visa to come to San Diego oh okay so it's not necessarily the country won't let you out it's that you can't get a visa to get in yeah and the country won't get you out if you're a certain age so if I was past 16 I had to go through draft okay then it would get very complicated getting out would be very hard and for some minorities is very hard to get a passport because if you if you say you're a Baha'i or you're a Christian or you it might be very hard for you to get even a passport if they don't want to give you a passport to to leave the country so there's that element too wow so if you go back to when I left at that time 25 years ago the students were protesting there were an element against this regime in 2009 there was other types of protests you know that there was an election Ahmadinejad got re-elected the president and people thought there was cheating right a lot of people came to the streets it was like called the green revolution people wanted to change and they were trying to reform the system because the other candidates that people wanted were part of this Islamic regime that didn't end well it didn't go anywhere was that the spring they talked about yes so who was in charge the U.S. government then who was it was during Obama and Obama didn't support them and Iranian people were very upset that Obama didn't support the protesters he stayed quiet about it okay and then there was the Masa Amini situation where women like freedom and she got killed because of showing her hair right and then people came to the streets and there was a lot of people this time they killed a lot of people and it was all over Iran in small cities it seemed like another fabric of the society another part of the society joined the movement of dissatisfaction with the regime and in the last one that happened a couple months ago it was almost everybody from they're just shooting people in the streets and what they did is they started shooting people on the streets and most people don't know this not only they shot the people that were in the streets whoever that was in the street would get shot killed they went to the hospitals and they killed the wounded in the hospital in the hospitals they raped some of the nurses that helped the people that were shot they bothered a lot of the people that worked in the hospitals then I also heard a recording from one of these IRGC leaders generals that was telling the other IRGC members why did you arrest people during that that you should have killed them if you would have killed them then it would be a little bit more people that have died we didn't have to deal with them now we have to have trials for them and we have to hang them and the international community would know about it and you might have as well killed all of these people so that's the way this regime dealt with this uprising and what happened was there is a big shock for Iranian people because the promise of Iranian regime was it's a bad regime but at least it's not ISIS okay a lot of people in Iran they thought this regime at least there's some element of rationality to them but after this killing the people now that know that this is kind of like ISIS there's no difference between ISIS and Taliban or Iranian Iranian regime what percentage of the people are supporters of the government they're like party members or whatever you call it that they'll go to the death for for the government it's very hard to tell there's no free data but from the numbers I've gathered and I've seen it's like we have been told about 80 percent of people that don't support the government but that was probably before the killings it might be maybe 80 more than 80 percent of people using the word probably incorrectly party members or you know backers of the government are involved in it the IRGC people IRGC people are smaller and then and then there's no IRGC people are smaller I think it's less than a million people the other people aren't armed in the RG they are not armed I tell you a couple of things about these attacks a lot of people in the U.S. don't know this but the Iranian people like the attacks they wanted the U.S. to attack them okay because they hate the regime and I've even seen videos of people that they're right by their house got bombed and there's this lady that's talking to the she's not showing her face but she's showing the damage to her house she said they just bombed by our house it got damaged and if they even killed me these attacks are justified because they killed our children a few months ago oh yeah and the regime deserves it yeah a mother or father that lost their kids they don't care anymore and this wasn't taking everything this wasn't their specific children but she said the same idea our children our country's children they killed those young people in the streets and she said even if they killed me it's okay I'm willing to give my life so the people in Iran are so fed up the elements that's fed up because there is that 10% 5% 15% whatever it is that are benefiting from the regime and they're part of the system so those people that are not they're really fed up they want change and after the killing they've kind of hit this dead end place where they don't know what to do how to fight the regime and and they are thankful for this bombing so that's my point that they don't have weapons we're not going to go on the ground there how do they go win how do they take control they can go to the streets and just get shot again even if it's 10% of people have the weapons I mean what changes it so that's a good question and and it would be for us to watch what will happen but there is another key point that is good to know about that there is a big conflict between the leaders now there is the government which is like usually runs everything but it's really not really the government so there's a president there's there's different ministries there's different secretaries secretary of state security foreign affairs but they they are really not a lot of it's like a shadow government that's running everything and they have 70% of iran economy they're controlling with their companies kind of like state-owned companies but they're tied to IRGC okay there is a big conflict between these two groups we'll see where that goes there's some internal infighting because IRGC has been attacking all of the countries in the area right and they've been kind of very irrational so they're attacking countries that actually lobbied so that the us won't won't go to war with them right they're attacking those countries it just doesn't make sense right they're hitting infrastructure and they're hitting different types of places there is a conflict among these type of people that are in in charge in iran it's really unclear who's in charge in iran right now our government's negotiating with somebody are we negotiating with the right people do we know who the right people are so the challenging part is this like somebody in IRGC that has been motivating everyone in their system by saying death to america every day cannot make a deal with america after they killed the leader like or it cannot even general make a deal with america it's going to be very hard okay because their staff will kill them right every day you'll be waking up and you'll be motivating me we gotta go to war with america death to america how are you going to negotiate so it's going to be very hard for those people to to negotiate the people that want to negotiate they probably don't have much power in the system the ones that really have the power and they have the excited part of the iranian government that is going into the streets and they want to fight which is a small number very small number those guys may not want to negotiate it's going to be interesting to see when president trump was saying we're going to find somebody that's popular in iran that's liked by the people that person unfortunately doesn't exist so because even those presidents that got a lot of votes they were not popular in iran because the in iran you can only vote for four or five people that the government chooses so what happens is you don't have free elections somebody gets 20 million votes is because that person was maybe the best out of the worst right you know so you picked the one that was not as bad as the other ones in this mix to be your president when they when you look at what was going on there the conversation when this all kind of happened as i recall was the shah's son yeah and there was like power behind him and then he could be uh and you could see where that would work but if he can't get in to get and he said he didn't want it for himself he just wanted to get a democracy going yeah but if nobody's controlling the levers that come in you notice we don't hear about him anymore right now so maybe they're going to bring him into the you know picture later so he's very popular in iran yeah which is which is fascinating to see that which is good you get everybody on the same page once they take control what's happened is that iranian government the regime has done anybody that was against them they purged them right or they killed them if they were outside the country they felt threat they went after them he's the only figure that people like in iran from what i'm hearing majority of people because they're calling his names and i'm even hearing from people distant relatives and people that i've talked to they all like him they trust him because of the family legacy that right component is like people trust that family and they had a better life under the shah the shah and his grandfather they did really good things for iran so iranian like like him they trust him so that's that that's another thing in this in this mix but going from where people are today right to having a leader like that or democracy or a path to democracy that's that's a big question how it could happen but what i can tell you is the majority of the people of iran don't want this regime there's another component to all of this i think the only tool the iranian government has is propaganda they are very good at it and the american media is getting fooled by them and their propaganda is not just stuff on twitter things that they say their propaganda is by hiring people in the u.s whether they paid them or whatever they got them to do to come and talk about their narrative on american tvs we're in the media space i've been observing this propaganda and i've even heard from some expats that are iranian that the iranian government approached them when they were going into universities if they had an important role in an american university the iranian government approached them to pay them to work with them and now some of those people are getting interviewed and they are giving a different message they're not telling you it's 80 20 90 10 the support for the the people that are against the government is 80 20 or 90 10 they're saying it's 50 50 or they're coming up with propaganda they're saying look we're divided in america to half the country is democrat half the country is republican maybe over there half the people like the government half the people don't like it but it's not like that unfortunately this is happening by credible university professors people that have 1 million followers on twitter i i watched this professor from a good university in the u.s going on this show and saying that there is no way the u.s can attack iran because iran has this amazing defense system they bought from china and a day later the iranian leadership was gone right and the same professor goes back on the same platform and probably many other platforms and says the iranian government is going to close the Strait of Hormuz and there's no way the u.s can open it up right but he doesn't apologize that he got that part wrong before before this is happening right now there is a ton of propaganda like that i looked up this professor and their connection to china i found out that they're connected to the chinese communist party to the ccp i don't know if this professor is getting paid by the chinese communist party but they're working with the university in china it means that they could be getting paid or they are getting a lot of respect when they travel to china they're shown a good time so they end up working as a part of the propaganda tool of the chinese country same thing with the iranian regime they have people here that are lobbying our congressmen senators they have visited the white house many many times and these organizations are funded by the irgc and the iranian regime so it's something that people should pay attention to every time they're watching television try to figure out if that guest is for the iranian government are they working for iran government or is this a genuine voice yeah because it's either true or not true either it's 50 50 or it's not and what the problem with democracies like in our country is that the public can change on you an elected official will be out of office so like right now thank god we haven't had a bunch of deaths like we could have anywhere else if we did the u.s citizens could fold in a second and just all of a sudden go against trump and not want them to do anything and the other side wins you also see that the people in control of iran when you hear things like you know they're going to bomb power plants and bomb bridges and they tell the public cold go hands in hand with your children and stand in front of those places they don't care about people's lives or people die they just don't care they want to stay in control and if and if millions die but they still stay in control fine so it's almost like they're never going to give up it's almost like they have to die in as horrible as they don't want to lose this power yeah because because if they if they're just not willing to give up power then they're going to die fight to the death and there is another element you brought up children and why people are not protesting right now in iran one of the things that was they were told on television the iranian government told them if you come out we'll kill you right and then the iranian government is recruiting kids as young as 12 year olds and they're putting these kids with guns in their hands and they're showing the public look these kids have guns they can kill you at the same time when people were not protesting a lot of people inside tehran in these high rises they would say death to the dictator and they would chant from their house okay at night you could hear that people are chanting death to the dictator and i saw videos where they're shooting at these apartments just shooting at the buildings because people were yeah bullets come to towards people and they they have to dodge the bullets so the regime has tried to control the streets by having trucks go by with bullhorns and people and they're playing some islamic like quran type music loud to show that they can control the streets right so people don't go out but it's very important for the american public to understand this because they're giving really big help to iranians right now maybe maybe majority of the american public don't understand what this war means for the iranian people but from what i've gathered from what things i'm seeing online and connections to people in iran the iranian people are thankful majority of them but is there a way they need arms is there a way for us to get arms in there and i know that all the different countries and without getting into all the politics of i mean you have the kurds and stuff like that that have their issues but you know would they be somebody we would funnel arms through to get to well i guess they try to give them arms and maybe the arms didn't reach to you didn't reach them yeah and the thing is people of iran don't like iran to get separated right and some of the courts a lot of them are pro iran anyways but the small minority they're kind of they were always wanting to separate yeah it's a problem but there is other types of tribes in iran that potentially that maybe they can get involved we'll see where like in afghanistan they had the northern alliance and they killed those members before they took over obviously are there groups out there or no or no and there are tribes but not as strong as that we'll see where it goes we have to watch closely to see what happens but we'll see if if people within the country within the army they can do anything about it because the army is different from irgc but these people and our army is different than the irgc so they have their own leadership they have their own leadership but these people have been perished all the time so they're used to being slain yeah and and probably the leaders are pro the regime i don't know details about these the leaders of the army but i know the regular iranian army members probably regular people and they don't want the regime a lot of them probably don't want the regime a lot of the people that work for the government also may not like the regime are they conscripted in now at a certain age are you required to do military service draft so one of the things that somebody was pointing out so those are regular everyday people yeah and and a lot of these regular people know how to use guns because they need their military draft but that's another question would would there be a fight in the streets and what would that look like but from what we can tell from iranian people they're really fed up with this regime yeah well i mean this is absolutely amazing to talk to you about you know your experience growing up in iran and then what's happening now and actually talking to people out there appreciate all that information and as the things happen in here we'll have you come back on again and talk about what's happening around because it's clearly going to continue to change and it's clearly going to be the top news for the united states i see a mac i've known you for a long time you've been doing california insider for about six years and now you've got a new show why don't you tell us that the name of that show and what it's about it's called market insider and believe it or not my background is really business before getting into journalism and getting into media was accidental for me we are starting this show called market insider before it's more of a business show it's a business and economy show okay we're trying to help people navigate through this disinformation and misinformation because a lot of times news has a financial impact on markets on economy on your investments how should you get a job which field you should get into which states you want to live in which countries you should go or try to do business with all of these things that are happening in the news they have an economical impact for people and through this show we want to actually cover these things so people can make better financial decisions for their future and you've had a lot of different interesting topics in there what are the hot topics that you've done that this new show's kind of lit up and people started to watch so we've done a bunch of episodes on real estate what's happening with the markets it's a confusing time for real estate you and people are always interested in real estate they want to buy should i buy should i not should i sell whatever and we've talked about private credit like there seems to be some questions about private credit and private equity space the financial markets and how the economy is doing is are we are we going to have a recession because of this war are things going to get better we have also done things on employment and the job markets and commodities like which are commodities a good investment right now or are things changing shifting which commodities are interesting to look at also what type of jobs you want to get involved with where the job market is headed so your guests what kind of guests do you look for the goal of this show is to teach people from our guest experience we're trying to learn how they analyze the data that they're seeing how they analyze the news and ultimately we're teaching people to become long-term investors a lot of shows that are out there they're very quick fast where's the market going tell us what's going to happen next right here we are trying to learn from our guests how they make their analysis and how they make decisions in the long run and ideally if we get to talk to top-notch economists ceos people that are analyzing different industries like analysts we can learn how they do their work and teach our audience at the same time we can understand what's happening with the news what are the impacts they're seeing and hopefully our audience can become really good investors in the long run well i noticed when you get some of these people that have been in the business for you know 10 20 25 years whatever and they know their industry they start telling you stuff that there's no report out there there's no data you can get that comes is collected your morgan stanley guy doesn't know about it and your um your different you know finance people don't know because they don't know how someone measures something we talked about before you know how many houses are available there's a way to figure out how many houses are available and your people that get out there they measure the world completely different than normal when people do it yeah like for example somebody we had somebody on the show that talked about the gold movement and he actually his firm has analyzed what times does gold move okay who's buying gold what part of the world is buying gold and they figured out it's a lot of the purchasers come from asia oh it was interesting to see how these analysts go about finding out the information and how they end up making predictions the predictions are fine sometimes they're right sometimes they're wrong but it's very interesting to to see well yes what kind of data they will look and how they measure and i i wouldn't even think of that but the united states got 300 plus million people other parts you got billions of people they sneeze it's going to make a massive move in our marketplace i just i've always thought you know it's our market not the rest of the world's market yeah and that market is a small market the gold and and silver and those type of and it's a smaller market and that's why some central banks and some other people in asia are buying these commodities they're actually moving the price but it's interesting to see how these people look at the and also the ceos that come on the show they have a vision they see what's going on in their industry and they're telling us firsthand what they're seeing versus you reading it in a newspaper or through a filter of of a journalist a lot of times journalists may not understand the story and this is what i've seen as well and when you get somebody that's an expert in the space they can come and tell us what they're seeing so so it's market insider how often are you going to have a we're going to start with two per week and then we're going to have two exclusive episodes for epoc tv okay with the same guests but they're teaching something special on epoc tv different than the podcast they did different than the content that that's publicly available excellent and that's coming out now that's coming out already we have had three months of it and we've had some fascinating interviews and you were one of the guests and there are others that have come from different spaces from real estate different industries and we're going to expand it when you interview people you kind of look at their formative years we we talked before about you know being raised in iran and in high school you came over to mexico city yeah why don't you pick it up there because i don't think people know the business career that you've had and what you've done before you got into being the host um a california insider and the market insider give us from like 16 18 years on of which direction your life went so i was 16 in mexico city i went to high school american school in mexico city i learned spanish there i was lucky and then i moved to san you went to american school in mexico yeah for just a year okay yeah and then i came to san diego and i ended up in university of san diego after that i i had a family member that invested in a company in china and he sent me to china to watch the money wait so slow down how old were you then i was 22 so 22 years of age you went to work in a company that a relative owned in china and he needed somebody to that he could trust that he could put in charge of finance because you know in china there's a lot of corruption and it's very hard okay to tell what's going on and at that time i was wearing a suit and a tie didn't know anything about anything i went to china and i had two things going for me one was that i could use the language barrier to my benefit how's that you can hide inexperience in it i didn't know much about business and what was going on but i could hide my inexperience inside the language barrier you don't understand what they're saying yeah you can always go back and say i don't understand what you're saying or you know the transition doesn't work and you can always go back and analyze and there's another thing i looked older than my age so then i could pull off that role that role was an amazing role we the company was a life sciences company it grew from 30 people when i got there to 300 people in two years and i was leading the finances for the company in that time i really understood the chinese system and there is a lot of corruption and there is a lot of bureaucracy and i came back my head got really big i was 24 at that time i thought about starting a hedge fund without having any experience in fundraising and the timing was perfect imagine somebody with no experience trying to raise money in 2008 yeah doesn't happen it didn't work out so then i started an it services company in san diego and from there that that company grew it was a lot of it services and gentlemen your brand new company it's called skyriver it we help small medium-sized businesses with their it needs from help desk to infrastructure to security a lot people need security and support and i was there till 2016 and then i started getting in touch with epoch times because they were covering issues that i knew about that nobody else was covering because you'd been you've been in china you were there for a couple of years you saw the actual corruption and and how business was done there so when you're reading the epoch times nobody else is talking about what the epoch times is talking about yeah and then also in 2014 i realized they're doing organ harvesting to people in china oh and i didn't know about that when i was in beijing i was shocked about it so it was after you left china after i left china i figured out in 2014 that they're doing organ harvesting in china a prisoners of conscious people that practice falun gong or people that are some house christians tibetan monks uyghurs they're subject to this organ harvesting and i couldn't believe it until i met with some human rights lawyers they told me about this is going on and i was shocked by it how could i not know about it i speak four languages i've lived in different parts of the world and and i was at that time i was all over the media how could i not hear about this and in 2016 there was a house resolution about it and i was sure that the mainstream media in the u.s will cover it unfortunately when they did the ones that covered it they actually covered it with the slant towards china the chinese government needs to do this they had interviewed the chinese communist party members and that's when i realized there's a problem with the media here too i got inspired to join epoch times so you went from it and tech business to media and what was your were your first jobs or whatever with with epic times i was on the business side and i was helping them generate income from videos and partnerships but you still have your business i still have a technology business in san diego i have a good partner that's helping me run it runs it and you spend your time here you know your family member had you in there to watch the money but it was it it's to make sure that the payoffs were done correctly well the way we didn't pay too much off or whatever well the thing is you don't go into china thinking that there is that much corruption but unfortunately everyone that's working for you that's doing any purchasing they are coming after them and there was meetings where i'm sitting in a meeting and i know that my people are working for the vendor yeah they have the vendor's interest unfortunately right a lot of that has to do with how the chinese communist party damaged this society because people have different sets of morals right they may not be able to tell the truth all the time there's there's a lot going on in that society which we can discuss later yeah okay we're seeing mac you've had a pretty interesting life you speak four languages you've had to leave a country from one country you end up going into a communist china and now here you are doing media it's really great to have you on the show and have all your input that we need to learn about what's going on in the world from some media that we can trust thank you so much jim thank you for being here tell us what you think about this conversation we had with jim rickheimer do you agree with some of these points or do you have different opinions you can always email us at siamakacaliforniainsider.com or comment we read all of your emails and comments i'm siama karami this is california insider we'll see you next time