'Life, Made Possible:' An Exciting New Direction for Outliving Iran

Expanding the vision of my Substack —and career

Dear readers,

If you are familiar with my story, you know that I’ve suffered my share of injustices — from growing up in a violent slum, to losing friends to the Iranian dictatorship, to escaping and being forced by cruel immigration laws to choose between enslavement and starvation, to arriving in a politically and spiritually hijacked America that threatens my hard-won freedoms instead of protecting them.

I will continue writing about all of it, exposing the dark side of humanity and of this country—the parts everyone is ignoring.

But that is not the most important thing about me, my story, or the world.

Despite the tragedies I’ve experienced, I am an unyielding optimist with a lot of youthful energy. It has been that energy—my high excitement about the world—that carried me through otherwise crushing traumas.

Since I was a child, my biggest strength was a childlike fascination with the life-giving technological marvels of civilization. To say I loved technology would be an understatement. The first time I saw a smartphone or a laptop, I was seized with a reverent excitement, as if in the presence of something sacred. I wanted to touch it, learn everything about it, form my life around it. Everything that made my life tolerable in Iran was made in the free world. That is part of why I left.

When the malign forces of the West pushed me to my lowest—undocumented, robbed of my future, homeless, and battered—it was technology that held me up. Not as an abstraction, but concretely.

I sought to understand where the chocolate muffin I loved came from. And I saw, as if in a flash, all the hours of planning, ingenuity, trial and error, and ceaseless work it took to plant, grow, and harvest the ingredients—to transport them, lower their price, generate the electricity for the oven, set up the bakery, protect it from criminals, ensure the muffin wouldn’t make me sick, and ensure I wouldn’t die if it did.

I realized I should appreciate these things more because I was oppressed, not less. In another age, a foreigner seeking shelter on the shores of a xenophobic nation would almost certainly die. Yet I had survived—held up by the benevolent hands of civilization, by the ceaseless work of millions of people, dead and alive, who had made food abundant enough, electricity cheap enough, medicine potent enough, and life bearable enough for me to withstand those colossal injustices and remain standing.

I found I had more to learn about humanity from that muffin than from the deportation police. As complex as the deportation machine is—with its anti-human morality, its racist philosophy, its thousands of enforcement officers—it is not nearly as complex or difficult to execute as a chocolate muffin. No oppression machine is.

All the reasons I escaped Iran were present in that muffin.

There is enough bad, wrong, and ugly in the world to justify endless depression, bitterness, and hatred. The dark side of humanity is real, and we don’t know enough about it. But we know even less about the bright side.

I’ve always found the half-full, half-empty metaphor unhelpful. A glance is all it takes to see the water in the glass—it’s effortless. But it takes real effort to understand the life-giving side of the world. It takes stepping back from our grievances, identifying the technologies that made our lives possible, and learning about them with the pure excitement of a child.

That is what my new show is about: Life, Made Possible.

Each week, I’ll cover a technology that has made our lives possible—everything from machines and scientific breakthroughs, to social technologies like the institutions, laws, norms, and systems of cooperation that allow us to thrive together. I’ll explain the history and ideas behind each one, and relate it to my story. You’ll receive the essay plus a YouTube video. It may take a little time—I’m still learning how to work with graphics software—but I promise it will be worth it.

I’m very excited to share it with you.