Digital Resistance: Using Tech to Empower Iranians and Take Down the Regime

YAHYANEJAD: It was a constant innovation that won the war, combined with logistics. And this is a conflict that we need both, we need technological innovation plus logistics.

DUBOWITZ: Welcome to “The Iran Breakdown.” I’m Mark Dubowitz. If you want to understand how the Islamic Republic survives and how it might finally fall, you need to understand the digital underground. My guest today is Mehdi Yahyanejad. He’s an Iran-based, MIT-trained physicist. He’s a tech entrepreneur and dissident who’s built platforms that punch far above their weight. He is the founder of Balatarin, one of the most important Persian language spaces during the Green Revolution in 2009, sharing information, exposing regime propaganda, and coordinating resistance against the Islamic Republic.

We talk about the regime’s ideology and why it’s collapsing, how activists are fighting a digital war against Tehran’s censors and repressors, and how artificial intelligence – yes, AI – could help take down one of the world’s most repressive regimes. Let’s break it down.

All right.

YAHYANEJAD: All right.

DUBOWITZ: Mehdi, welcome. It’s wonderful to have you.

YAHYANEJAD: It’s great to have me here. Thank you for inviting me to your podcast.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah. I’m introducing actually a new feature to my podcast, which is we usually give our guests only water, but today I’m going to give you some whiskey.

YAHYANEJAD: No, I definitely appreciate it. I’ve learned that it helps me to come up with better ideas, you know.

DUBOWITZ: Absolutely. We’re going to talk about the Islamic Republic, so as we say it at FDD, “If we don’t drink, the Islamic Republic wins.” So great to have you. I really want to start at the beginning. You have an amazing life story and your father was in the Shah’s army, and I think like many Iranians, he hoped the revolution would bring freedom.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: And I wanted to ask you about your dad, about your family, but also you were raised in Iran. You were educated in Iran. You left when you were in your twenties, I believe.

YAHYANEJAD: That’s correct.

DUBOWITZ: And you came to the United States. You trained at MIT. I’m going to get all into that, but I want to ask you, from your father’s perspective, when did he realize that this freedom revolution, this Iranian Revolution, was really an Islamist revolution and that it had really been hijacked by the regime’s thought?

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. My father, I mean, back in seventies, he was part of Iranian army, and of course, like a lot of other officers, I mean, he was trained during Shah. It was a professional army where they were very disciplined. They were dedicated to Iran as a nation. They were very patriotic and they wanted to see freedom, democracy in Iran. Back then, of course, a lot of Iranians had good feelings about Islam. They didn’t know what Islamic fundamentalism is. They just thought that maybe the Islam they’re practicing is, you know, they had the positive feeling about it. And a lot of people in the army, similar to my dad, were not necessarily happy with what was going on, for various reasons. I mean just mostly because of lack of democracy, and freedom, and what they perceived to be– I mean, they saw Shah as puppet. Not necessarily, I mean [inaudible]. Looking back at the history, we know he was not a really puppet, he had a lot of – he was trying to make Iran stronger and so on. But that’s how the perception was, back then.

And through my father’s experience, actually, I saw how the Shah regime fell, and how the army crumbled, and how the Iranian army didn’t protect the Shah. For example, my dad and some of his colleagues, they had promised to each other that if Shah would order the Iranian army to shoot people, shoot at protesters, they would defect the army. But Shah, of course, never did, and that never happened. My dad pretty much was sympathetic to the revolutionaries, but very quickly he realized that this is not the revolution they were looking for, and the Islamic fundamentalism is a beast that just caught them by surprise.

DUBOWITZ: Khomeini was really adept at this, wasn’t he? At really deceiving the Iranian left, Iranian women, people who were really trying to bring freedom, and democracy, and greater civil rights to Iran.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: And Khomeini was very good at actually co-opting them.

YAHYANEJAD: He was very good at co-opting them. I mean, he co-opted, of course, a lot of people who were for freedom in Iran. He also, of course, take advantage of all the opportunists who join his movement. I asked my dad, what was the time that you realized this revolution is not going to get anywhere? He said, “Actually, I saw the sign the very first day after the revolution.”

That was the day that army accepted, basically surrendered to the people. And my dad was joyful, and he thought that this is now – this is the first day of freedom in Iran and so on. And he was going to the base, army base. And on the way to the army base, he saw one of the officers who was one of the most abusive officers in the army against the revolutionaries, before the fall of the Shah’s regime. And he saw him on a back of a motorbike with Khomeini’s picture and driving on the streets of the city. Basically, the guy has overnight switched from totally being an abusive officer to a pro-Khomeini dedicated person, and riding on back of a motorcycle was a no-no for a disciplined officer in Shah’s army.

DUBOWITZ: But the key was he was an opportunist. He’d been very abusive, and he certainly was going to be very abusive as, now, one of the henchmen of Khomeini and the regime.

YAHYANEJAD: Exactly. So Khomeini was able to basically recruit a lot of these opportunists at the time. And the next few years, he cracked down on a lot of factions who supported the revolution and brought victory for the revolution. And we know the history. So basically the fundamentalist Islam became the main component of this regime, and they started exporting it throughout the Middle East and all the things that – to Lebanon, to Iraq, to Syria, and so on, to Yemen. So a lot of these things came as a surprise to a lot of people who back then were hoping for something positive in Iran.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah. Well, we had Roya Hakakian on our show recently, and she said the same thing. She was a teenage girl who lived through the Islamist revolution, and it was the same thing. They really saw it in the beginning as this opportunity for hope, and for freedom, and for the lifting of censorship. And she’s a poet, she’s an author. She loves books. And she thought all of a sudden, now these are the books that I can read. And then all of a sudden, the darkness of the Islamic Revolution descended on her and her family, and they fled.

I want to ask you about your life early in Iran. You studied at Sharif University, right?

YAHYANEJAD: Mm-hmm. That’s correct.

DUBOWITZ: It’s Iran’s top technology university, kind of Iran’s MIT.

YAHYANEJAD: That’s correct. Right.

DUBOWITZ: Did your first degree there, and then you actually went to MIT.

YAHYANEJAD: That’s right.

DUBOWITZ: Tell us a little bit about that story. How did you get from Iran to Cambridge, Massachusetts? How did you get to MIT?

YAHYANEJAD: Sure.

DUBOWITZ: And tell us also a little bit about what changed for you when you got to the US. You left the Islamic Republic, you come to the United States of America.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: You’re in your early twenties?

YAHYANEJAD: That’s correct. So when I was growing up in Iran, we were at the time that there was no freedom of press. There was no internet. We actually were kind of blind to all the abuses that Iranian government has created. There was- for example, in eighties, they killed a few thousand prisoners, and international community didn’t know much about it at that time. People in Iran didn’t know about it. We didn’t know about it. I didn’t know about it until I left Iran. So we were living in dark, pretty much. I left at the time that Rafsanjani was still president in Iran.

DUBOWITZ: So what year was this? What year was it?

YAHYANEJAD: It was 1997.

DUBOWITZ: ’97.

YAHYANEJAD: I left in ’97. It was right before Khatami got elected. The only experience of dissent I witnessed was, once, one of the student groups had a sit-in and some of the Basiji militias, they tried to break it up and so on. So I saw it firsthand, but still it was just one incident in four years.

DUBOWITZ: Right. So the student protests, as I recall, please correct me if I’m wrong, were more in the late 1990s. Right?

YAHYANEJAD: That’s correct.

DUBOWITZ: 1999 or so.

YAHYANEJAD: Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: Right.

YAHYANEJAD: The first biggest incident was in 1999, so two years after I left Iran. But what happened was, of course, there was that two years of free press that was – not completely free press, but compared to what was going on before, it was huge early on during Khatami’s presidency. Before, of course, the regime totally cracked down, and shut down all the newspapers, and so on. But then I came to Boston. I was just getting exposed to American free media.

DUBOWITZ: You’re a young Iranian, you’re at Sharif University, you can apply freely to MIT? And then get–

YAHYANEJAD: It was very hard. Not that many people, of course, got in back then. We were pretty much probably the first generation of – there was a big gap in immigration from Iran. So, from ’79, when a lot of people left Iran, to late nineties, when it became the first generation of Iranian students from Iran who were able to get into American universities. I went to Turkey to take GRE exam, which helped us to get in and so on. We had to go on a bus for 36 hours or something, to get to Istanbul, because the exam wasn’t happening in Iran or TOEFL exam and so on. But we had solid, I would say, education in Iran. I was part of the Physics Olympiad team in Iran. Then, I think after pretty much our first generation, more Iranian students came to the US, and came to Canada, and so on. And, of course, a lot of people who were not happy with what was going on in Iran, that was major reason a lot of people left.

DUBOWITZ: Right. But obviously you need entry visas to get in the United States. But did you need exit visas? Did you need permission from the regime to leave and go to school?

YAHYANEJAD: No, you didn’t have to get the permission.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. And did the regime come to you and say, “Hey, Mehdi. You’re going to MIT. That’s great. Lots of opportunity. Congratulations. By the way, here’s some of the things we want you to do for us.”

YAHYANEJAD: They didn’t. Actually, there was one physicist, very successful physicist, who stayed in Iran, and he was against the fact that we were leaving, because I think he came from more patriotic background. He was like, “We have to stay despite what is happening in Iran,” and so on.

DUBOWITZ: Right. This brain drain of really smart Iranians who are leaving.

YAHYANEJAD: Yeah. He was against the brain drain and so on. He stayed in Iran and, each time he was going to the conferences, he hadn’t done his military service. They had to leave some bail to be able to leave and so on. He was bothered with this process to the extent that he went to head of the Parliament, back then, who was [Gholam-Ali] Haddad-Adel – and he’s connected to Khomeini through some … I think his daughter married to Khomeini’s son. So he found Haddad and said, “Look, each time I want to go to a conference outside Iran, you are creating so much problem for me. If you continue to do this, I’m going to leave Iran.” And this is one of the stars, a very successful physicist, in Iran. And Haddad came back and said, “If you are unhappy, just leave. We are happy if unhappy people leave who are not satisfied here.”

DUBOWITZ: So you get this opportunity at MIT, you come to the United States. Now, it’s the late 1990s, and you’re exposed to the US. I want to talk a little bit about that eye-opening experience. When you land in Cambridge, and you’re obviously at one of our top universities, and you’re meeting people from all over the world, and you’re experiencing American democracy for the first time in all its glories and in all its challenges, what was your reaction?

YAHYANEJAD: I was totally blown away. It was really amazing. Coming from Iran, that was, you know, especially that time, it had no internet. It was like coming from total darkness to Boston, which is like, there are all these amazing universities. There are all these amazing lectures that happen all the time. These are all the famous people, were admired, and they show up, and you could just go to their lectures. There might be 20 people listening to them, so you had the chance to–

DUBOWITZ: Right. But you’re like a kid in a candy store, now?

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely, absolutely. NPR was on at my dorm, kind of listening to all the debates that were going on, and so on. I know these days NPR doesn’t get a good – I mean, there are people critical of it, but it was really just hearing all the debates and people who were openly debating things on the radio, and newspapers, and so on.

DUBOWITZ: So compared to the National Islamic Republic Radio, it was more open.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: The boundaries of debate were broader.

YAHYANEJAD: Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: Right.

YAHYANEJAD: Yeah, it was a totally different one. It really influenced me in terms of – I am a strong believer in free speech. I think, at the end, I believe logic and arguments based on logic have value in itself. And I think a lot of things; people have to just kind of discuss them and debate them and get to the bottom of the issues and find solutions. That experience, plus and then I went to West Coast, and I was in Bay Area, and of course I was right at the beginning of all the social media revolution in Bay Area. So, the time that Facebook was started, Reddit, Digg, and all those other websites, I saw that too. So I thought we need to do something similar for Iran, and I created this website called Balatarin, which back then it used to work similar to Digg, if people remember what Digg was. But then we modified it, now it works more like Reddit. And it became huge in Iran. In four months, they had exponential growth in Iran. This is 2006. And then it got blocked in Iran. And actually there’s a funny story behind that. Michael Ledeen was–

DUBOWITZ: Michael Ledeen, who used to be at FDD, who actually just passed away.

YAHYANEJAD: Yes, I heard that news. He had a blog back then. He posted something that Khamenei has passed away, because Khamenei, he hadn’t given a speech for two months. And Michael Ledeen posted this on his English blog. One of Balatarin users translated from English to Persian, posted on Balatarin, and then the rumor caught on in Iran and everyone’s questioning where Khamenei is. Somehow the regime was so sensitive about Khamenei’s death rumor that they blocked Balatarin. They blocked Iranian Revolutionary Guards, mostly Rezai. He had the website called Bustop. They had made fun of Balatarin for posting this rumor. They got blocked. Just by acknowledging that rumor, they got blocked too.

DUBOWITZ: So, it was probably the best thing that happened to you because all of a sudden popularity surged. By the way, anybody inside the Islamic Republic right now who’s listening to this podcast working for the regime, please block the podcast because it’ll only increase the popularity of what we’re trying to do here.

YAHYANEJAD: So that’s how we got blocked at the beginning. But then the next few years, of course the user base grew because people started using VPNs to get to the website and so on, proxies back then. 2009, there was a conflict in Gaza. I don’t know if you remember, it was February, 2009. Again, there were people on Balatarin who were, I mean, they were against Hamas. Iranian government took it on itself to punish Balatarin, so they launched a hacking attempt to take down the website. The website was down for two weeks.

DUBOWITZ: And by the way, just to understand, because like Reddit, you’re not curating this, right? This is an open platform where people are just logging in and expressing their opinion on the site.

YAHYANEJAD: That’s correct. That’s correct. So they tried to take down the website. The website was down for two weeks. We got it back and we got so much support from our user-base, and also everybody else. The website became the central place, back in 2009, for all the freedom-seeking Iranians. And when the 2009 election went wrong in Iran, and basically the green movement started back then in June, 2009, Balatarin became the central place for all the things that are happening in terms of coordinating what’s happening on the streets, in terms of the messaging. And Balatarin, up until to that point in Iran, you either had Iranian government messaging and media, or reformists who were basically a faction of the Iranian government who just–

DUBOWITZ: It’s worth reminding everybody. So, it’s 2009, there is a re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, clearly a fraudulent re-election, a rigged re-election by the regime, and Iranians take to the streets, millions of Iranians, many of them in sort of north Tehran, middle class Iranians yelling “death to the dictator, President Obama, are you with us or are you with a dictator?” And also, “where is my vote? Because I’m voting in this election and it is clearly not an election, it’s a selection.” It’s a selection of Ahmadinejad and it’s fraudulent. So you have this massive uprising and the regime responds obviously with brutal force. But what’s interesting is that this platform, this Iranian Reddit that you’ve created, becomes the main platform for discussion, for coordination amongst Iranian opposition.

YAHYANEJAD: And what happened was through that process, I mean, up to that point, I was mentioning, Iranian government and reformists, they were the ones who were pretty much controlling the discourse. But through Balatarin, Iranians who were against the regime, they found each other. So that was the first time the anti-regime discourse that now these days we call it Barandazi, like overthrowing the regime discourse. It got formed because all these people were dissatisfied with the regime, they just didn’t know that there are all these other people who are out there, they have the same beliefs with them, they just haven’t found each other. And through Balatarin, they found each other, that discourse started. And of course, Balatarin didn’t have the kind of technical resource that they moved to other places like Twitter and Facebook and so on. But what I want to say, the overthrowing the regime discourse, even though they were opposition groups before that, before 2009 and so on, but it became, pretty much, very popular and caught on after 2009, I would say even around 2012, 2013.

DUBOWITZ: Well, I think you’re pointing out something very important, which we’ve discussed on this podcast, which is really this sort of growing recognition amongst Iranians. Now there are supporters of the regime, the opponents of the regime, but amongst opponents of the regime is sort of the sense of, well, we can reform the regime. Khatami, Rouhani, Zarif, there are these regime insiders, and maybe even Rafsanjani. They’re pragmatists, they’re moderates, they want to reform the regime, they want to make the regime less repressive, less aggressive. And maybe if we just go and show up in these elections and we choose a Rouhani or a Khatami, they can bring reform and openness and improve our lives.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: But I think then what you’re pointing out is really, actually, there are millions of Iranians who have now not only abandoned the regime, but believe the regime cannot be reformed, it has to be overthrown, and you’re providing them with sort of this first social media platform where they can now understand if they’re not alone. There’s actually literally millions of other Iranians who feel the same way.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. And that discourse pretty much took on. And starting in 2017, we’ve had mass protests. I mean it’s been so far four major mass protests that have, I would say… I mean of course when these things happen, some people thought that it is the end of the regime and so on, but I see them more as breakthroughs. So they kind of show that yes, there is a crack, there’s an opening to take down the regime. I think one thing I want to bring up is all these things happen, a lot of them unexpectedly. Nobody was able to predict it, and we have to see them as breakthroughs because we are at the war with this regime, we just weren’t prepared. We didn’t have the logistics, we didn’t have the resources to take advantage of this breakthrough and expand that front. So four times they happened, we just didn’t take advantage of them. Of course they closed, but they are going to happen again, we just need to be–

DUBOWITZ: And that’s what I want to talk about. In fact, I think as we’re recording this podcast, there are significant protests right now in Iran amongst Iranian truckers who are engaged in a significant and national strike. Unfortunately, it’s getting very little media attention in the West. But once again, Iranians were on the streets 2009, then they’re back on the streets 2017, every year, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, ‘21, ’22; “Woman, Life, Freedom,” back on the streets, brutally repressed. And now we’re in 2025, and sure enough, Iranians are back on the streets. It’s that persistent and courageous view amongst Iranians that, we are just going to continue to come back on the streets and express this now, I think, persistent and consistent chant, which is to overthrow the regime, death to the dictator. And again, asking another U.S. president, “Are you with us or are you with the dictator?” I think unfortunately President Trump is engaging with the dictator on another round of nuclear negotiations, and we can get to that, but what I want to talk to you about is digital resistance and the real risks.

So you’ve been part of weekly calls for a number of years with activists inside and outside Iran. What’s been working in that coordination and what’s still far too dangerous to do? Tell us a little bit about these discussions.

YAHYANEJAD: In every situation, you need to know the context, and the people who are there are our source of information to understand the context. When you are in a conflict, you have to understand the details, the mechanism. You have to be able to understand why the extremes can happen. Let me open this up a bit. I mean, in any conflict, you have to understand, for example, why the Iranian government doesn’t arrest all the activists in Iran. Why don’t they round them up? What is preventing them? Or on the other side, you could ask why the Iranian people– I mean, we are claiming 80 to 90% of Iranians are unhappy with the regime. Why don’t they come out one day? Why don’t they set one day in a year and everybody come out in Tehran to take down the regime?

DUBOWITZ: A massive protest, massive labor strikes. I mean, actually some of the things that happened in 1979…

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: That led to the overthrow of the Shah.

YAHYANEJAD: So, you need to learn about the context to see why these extremes don’t happen and where is the space to function. You need to understand, Iran is not North Korea, so there are dissidents there with some room to function. And you kind need to understand what’s their limitations, what they can do, what they cannot do, and what type of actions are doable in Iran.

DUBOWITZ: Well, let me ask you, Mehdi, because I think it’s something that I’ve really puzzled over. So on the one hand, so why doesn’t the regime go and kill tens of thousands of Iranians and just make it clear, we will not counter any dissent? You go on the streets, we will kill you all. They have certainly killed thousands of Iranians, they’ve certainly thrown thousands of Iranians, and they have in prison other brutal security prisons, and they’ve raped, and they’ve tortured, and they used chemical weapons to break the back of “Woman, Life, Freedom” by going after Iranian schoolgirls. All of that is horrible and done at a scale in order to, in some respects, kill the chicken to scare the monkeys, as the Chinese would say in their phrase. But it’s been selective. It’s been selective killing, selective torture. It hasn’t been mass killing. So why haven’t they actually killed tens of thousands of Iranians?

YAHYANEJAD: That’s an important question. It’s not that they don’t have the intent. I mean if they can get away with it, but they do it–

DUBOWITZ: Intent and capabilities.

YAHYANEJAD: Exactly. A lot of these regimes, there is a mindset operating there. There’s an image that they have created. I mean, this regime wants to present itself as the savior of all the Shia Muslims in the world. It wants to present itself that it’s the good versus bad and the bad is America, Israel and so on and we are the good. So it’s functioning within certain limitations. Of course, it would crack down, it would kill people, it would make people disappear as long as they could manage the propaganda. There is a limitation to what they can do.

DUBOWITZ: So there’s a limit to how many Muslims they can kill.

YAHYANEJAD: Exactly.

DUBOWITZ: To put it really bluntly. They can kill as many Jews as they want, as many Christians as they want. Killing tens of thousands of Muslims when you’re projecting yourself as the leader of the Muslim world has some issues.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. Absolutely. And they still have a base. I know it’s a 15% of the population, 20%, 10%. We don’t know the exact numbers, but they still have a base. I think they’re protecting those bases with four key issues. For example, in politics here, you have you know– let’s not make comparison, but let’s go back to Iran. So there are four key issues there, and from my point of view, they are protecting that base. There’s one hijab, one anti-Americanism, another is anti-Israel propaganda, and one being we are the savior of Shia Muslims. The hijab, they got defeated. I mean, Iranian women, of course they are still trying to get back. That was a front they want to get back to, but the Iranian women have been so strong and so persistent. They totally defeated this regime on that front. There are videos from Iranian government supporters who are so angry about not being able to enforce hijab, and they are even attacking the Iranian regime where they’re asking, “Why don’t you enforce hijab anymore as before?”

DUBOWITZ: Do you think that pillar, that one of four pillars of the Islamic Republic, and really of the Islamist revolution, is all but been defeated by the courage and resilience of Iranian women?

YAHYANEJAD: I think the hijab has been defeated. The other three, I think we are – so anti-Americanism is to some extent defeated too, because most Iranians are kind of like, why are you not establish a relationship with–

DUBOWITZ: As they chant “the enemy is not America, the enemy is here.”

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. So they are puzzled. And even a lot of people within the Iranian regime just kind of questioned the anti-Americanism of the Iranian government. So that front, I would say–

DUBOWITZ: Because I would think, Mehdi, if they ran serious polls, I don’t believe any polls in an authoritarian society. It’s like Friday night, “I’m calling you from the Iranian polling company, I’d like to ask you some questions about Khamenei. What do you think?” “I think he’s wonderful. He’s a lovely supreme leader. I fully support him.”

YAHYANEJAD: Of course.

DUBOWITZ: Polling would be a very difficult thing to do accurately, I think, inside the Islamic Republic. But it’s fair to say that Iran is probably one of the most pro-American countries in the Middle East, right?

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: Iranians love America.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: And we see that from the Iranians who leave the country.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: And really come to our country and become the best immigrants you could imagine.

YAHYANEJAD: Right. No, absolutely. On the other two fronts, again, they’ve lost to the majority of Iranians, but not necessarily to their supporters. So among their own core supporters, anti-Israel propaganda still works. Being the defenders of Shia Muslims still works. It got damaged last year because they didn’t support Hezbollah and so on. I mean, at the time that Hezbollah, at its toughest point, the Iranian government chickened out and they didn’t show up, so that’s kind of like their supporters now questioning, what happened to you? So I think there is, on that front, there are some cracks showing.

DUBOWITZ: That’s a fascinating insight that I don’t think I actually registered is that, if one of the key pillars of the regime and the Islamic Revolution is we are going to export the revolution, we’re going to export it through the Middle East and globally, and one of our most successful exports has been Hezbollah, is to turn Hezbollah into a Islamic Republic proxy in Lebanon and through the heart of the Middle East. And then they didn’t show up.

YAHYANEJAD: Exactly.

DUBOWITZ: As Hezbollah was getting a beating from the IDF and Mossad. How that actually played back inside Iran, certainly amongst the opponents who I’m sure were very excited–

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: – to watch Hezbollah getting beaten, but amongst the supporters, which is something that I haven’t really thought of. You guys are supposed to support Shia Muslims and you didn’t come to their rescue.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. They didn’t show up in Syria. They didn’t show up in Lebanon, and they didn’t even make an attempt to like, “We want to show up.” They didn’t. Khamenei, I think in one of his speeches he said, “Oh, we couldn’t get to Syria,” or something like Khamenei would–

DUBOWITZ: And you think there’s a difference between not showing up for the Alawites and not showing up for the Lebanese Shia?

YAHYANEJAD: I think there’s definitely difference. Among the core supporters of the regime, there’s a big distinction between Hezbollah and Assad regime and so on.

DUBOWITZ: But in both cases, they literally abandoned–

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. They didn’t show up.

DUBOWITZ: –their closest allies.

YAHYANEJAD: Yeah, absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: Interesting.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. I know we are diverging from our conversation, but I think Khamenei, we always have to understand who the opponent is. Khamenei is a leader who is a very calculated leader with the sense that he’s not a dictator like Saddam who would make crazy, invade Kuwait and gets totally, you know–

DUBOWITZ: Defeated by the Americans.

YAHYANEJAD: Defeated by Americans. Khamenei has a method. He’s very methodological. I think he gets enough input. There are think tanks in Iran. There are a lot of things you read from people who work in think tanks in Iran, a lot of them are right on Twitter and so on. They are processing the information that comes out of the West. I would say they’re fairly accurate in certain ways.

DUBOWITZ: And certainly, more sophisticated–

YAHYANEJAD: More sophisticated, yeah.

DUBOWITZ: –than the dictatorial regimes of Saddam, or Gaddafi, or Kim Jong Un in North Korea. Right? There’s more subtlety and sophistication–

DUBOWITZ: –in their analysis.

YAHYANEJAD: That’s one key to their survival and we have to understand that this is not Saddam, this is not Gaddafi. But I think last year this hurt them, because last year was a chaotic year. You needed a leader who would make quick decisions and Khamenei was not one. And Khamenei, each time there was something happening, he delayed and delayed on his decision-making, and he pretty much lost the strategic depths that they had in Middle East.

DUBOWITZ: So Mehdi, tell me, what is your view of the events that have occurred over the past year as Israel has decimated this “axis of misery,” certainly Hezbollah, and Hamas, Islamic Jihad. Is this redounded to the benefit of the Iranian opposition, or has it created, you think, some problems?

YAHYANEJAD: Sure. We are at a fight with the Islamic fundamentalism in Middle East, and Iranian government is basically a representation, a Shia Islam representation of this Islamic fundamentalism beast that has been created in Middle East. And I mean, this has basically past 40 years has consumed Middle East. Of course, defeating Hamas, defeating Hezbollah helps Iranian democratic movement hugely, because these are– I mean, there’ve been reports of Hezbollah, for example, helping Iranian government at the cracking down protesters inside Iran. I mean, they bring them as snipers and so on. I mean, Hezbollah probably does for them things that Iranian, even IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] members, might not do. So those are things that Iranian dissidents and oppositions have definitely welcomed and has helped them just because it’s kind of destroyed the image of Iranian government as this powerful Shia Islam that has built this structure in the Middle East from Yemen to Lebanon.

But I think also at the same time, just kind of like what’s happening in Gaza and all the human rights issues, the destruction, the images that are coming out, these are impacting a large portion of Iranian public. I mean, Iranian government is using it as propaganda. I mean, we are advocating for a democratic Iran that’s going to recognize Israel, it’s going to be on a friendly term with Israel, it’s going to establish scientific trade, all that with Israel. It weakening our narrative. It’s weakening our discourse because just kind of all these images that are coming out of Gaza, and it puts a lot of the Iranian activists in a spot to make a position.

And my advice, I mean, privately, to a lot of Iranian activists has been to stay away from Palestinian-Israeli issue because there are people out there who are so emotional about both side of this case, and this is going to be a distraction for us. So we are hoping, to be honest, for an end to this. I mean, just kind of that’s impacted our narrative, and it’s been an issue for, I think, a number of Iranian activists inside and outside Iran. And hopefully it’ll get resolved.

DUBOWITZ: So Mehdi, I’m going to get us back to–

YAHYANEJAD: Yeah, let’s go back.

DUBOWITZ: And it serves the purpose of my podcast, which is my selfish purpose, which is really to learn from great experts and that actually was a really interesting insight that I hadn’t really thought of, and it does actually suggest that even in the support base of the regime, there are fractures and fissures within this 20%.

YAHYANEJAD: Sure.

DUBOWITZ: And within the 1% of the elite that, if you were smart and you wanted to actually do serious offensive influence operations against the regime, the kind of influence operations that Islamic Republic and China and Russia and Hamas and Qatar are running against America, that if we actually were serious about this, we could actually intensify the fractures and fissures within the support base of the regime. But I want to get back to the opponents of the regime and what it means to organize how we can use technology.

Now, something I read really struck me. I kind of, I took it in two different ways. You said that we need to look at the Bernie Sanders campaign to understand what’s possible. Now, I have to tell you, there’s no senator in the U.S. Senate that I dislike more than Bernie Sanders, for reasons that may be obvious to listeners and viewers. But it is interesting, your insights into the fact that Sanders, this old guy from Vermont, curmudgeon, was able to actually mobilize this massive grassroots movement using technology and using really smart and adept organizing techniques in order to push a grassroots campaign that elevated this curmudgeon from Vermont into this personification of the working-class American. Tell us a little bit about that. What can we learn from the Sanders campaign?

YAHYANEJAD: Sure. Sure.

DUBOWITZ: And then I want you to also talk a little bit about how AI can be used.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. A lot of the Iranian dissidents and, of course, opposition, probably on the political spectrum, we fall on the right just because we support free trade, we support freedom of speech and a lot of other issues. We might fall more on the right side of the spectrum. But I think on a lot of organizing and mobilization, there are lessons to learn from the left and that could be applicable for Iran. I think in this case, Bernie Sanders, he was a fringe candidate of the Democratic Party back in 2016. Nobody really took him seriously because he didn’t have the resources, and so on. But he had a core support among his volunteers, and his campaign managers wrote a great book about this. It’s called “Rules for Revolutionaries.” They had a very small number of staff members, like 10 or 15, and they had 100,000 volunteers.

What they did was, they set up workflows, online workflows, to manage all these 100,000 volunteers, and they put them to work. They gave them tasks. They gave them tasks to call people. They gave them tasks to set up parties across the US to sign up more people for the campaign. They came up with all these small tasks that were doable by people who needed very little training and was measurable and doable, and it could be done, managed by this whole workflow, online workflow. I think that’s doable for Iran. Iran, people are well-connected, most of them are on internet. We have at least a few percentage of population is highly dedicated to bringing down the regime. There are a large number of people who are against the regime, but there’s a core percentage of people who are open to take risk, people who come to the streets each time there are protests. We have to come up with methods similar to what was done in the campaigns, of course in a different context, but set up workflows for civil disobedient actions, and actually use people who are in Iran to brainstorm for new ideas.

Me sitting here in the US, I don’t know all the things that are doable. For example, people could come up with, let’s say, walk on one side of the street on a certain day of the week to just show your solidarity and protest or, I know, wear certain color on a certain day, things that are doable and they show people there is a solidarity. I think one question people have to constantly ask in these scenarios, “Why don’t millions of people show up in Tehran in one day to take down the regime?” The key thing is people don’t have the solidarity. People don’t trust that everybody else would show up. If we can increase the solidarity factor over time by coming up with a small task that people can witness, people can see the impact, people can see everybody else is thinking the same and they have the discipline, they have developed the discipline to take actions, then we could get to the point that we actually would have millions on the streets.

DUBOWITZ: But we had Masih Alinejad on our show and she talked about a few of the campaigns that she ran, “My Camera as My Weapon,” and “White Wednesdays,” and I think that’s what you’re actually talking about. She was appealing to Iranian women that, show up on a Wednesday, wear white.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: Express your rejection of hijab. Send me that video, send me that photo. I will use my social media network to broadcast that, and therefore, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iranian women will see that. And now, there’s a sense of, “Wow, there’s actually a critical mass of Iranian women out there. I may not know it. I may not see it, but they’re out there and I see it now on social media, and that gives me the courage next Wednesday to come to the street, rip off my hijab, wave a white flag, wear white, and express my opposition to gender apartheid.”

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. So what Iranian women did, I think is a very good example of what could be done. Most people, like Masih, outside Iran that they were activists inside Iran who were part of these type of activism, and they created this opportunity. I think what we could do, first build, make this scalable, potentially use AI because I think this is a regime that’s stuck in 1,400 years ago in terms of mentality. Our advantage is technology to defeat this regime. I think a lot of people forget, for example, in major conflicts like World War II, it was a constant innovation that won the war, combined by logistics. And this is a conflict that we need both, we need technological innovation plus logistics.

DUBOWITZ: So let me ask you, Mehdi, because Masih was able to do this really on her own, on a shoestring budget. One would like that these people who are behind Bernie Sanders and his Sanders campaign, it would be great if they were, let’s say, on our side and they really wanted to use their skills and energy and experience to help mobilize Iranians against this regime. Maybe it’s worth reaching out to them, see if some of them would actually like to help. But what’s stopping this? Is this a lack of money? Is it a lack of ideas? Why can’t we, literally tomorrow night, start this and start to build these networks inside Iran? You’ve talked about really building networks, also using labor unions and guilds and professional associations, connecting those professional associations and guilds with their counterparts abroad. This is taking a page from the Cold War playbook–

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: –that Ronald Reagan was using in Poland with Solidarity and Czechoslovakia with Václav Havel. What is stopping us? Is it lack of unity amongst Iranians in the diaspora? Do you really need unity amongst Iranians in diaspora or do you just need a few tech-savvy Iranians who know how to use technology and understand the “Rules of Revolution?”

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: Was that the name of the book?

YAHYANEJAD: “The Rules of Revolutionaries.”

DUBOWITZ: “The Rules of Revolutionaries,” and start to apply that overnight.

YAHYANEJAD: I think a lot of it is the issue of resources. A lot of Iranian dissidents who work on Iran, they are actually doing a lot of this work on their free time, at night and weekends and so on. So there is not sufficient consistency. There is no– one thing we’ve discussed, we need a team of five people who are fully dedicated. They put all their time to just– and have a good network. They have contacts in Iran and so on to just make this happen. And so far, unfortunately we haven’t had the five people who would fully work on this.

DUBOWITZ: Do you know the five people that could do this?

YAHYANEJAD: I know–

DUBOWITZ: Do you know the talent that we could actually hire?

YAHYANEJAD: I absolutely know–

DUBOWITZ: Because if there are philanthropists listening to this show, I have no doubt we could raise the money in order to hire five people who have the talent to actually start to implement this tomorrow.

YAHYANEJAD: This needs to happen. This is a no-brainer. It needs to happen. For example, I’ve been to one training by Marshall Ganz from Harvard on all these how to organize, how to mobilize. These are skills that are out there. People have done this. I’m not inventing these methods. We just have to put it together for Iran context and bring together, sign up 100 activists outside Iran, get a number of activists inside Iran to join and get this going. And at the same time, of course, reach out to the people who are political figures, the well-known dissidents with the political–

DUBOWITZ: Because you know what I see in the diaspora, and I’m not Iranian, clearly, but I’ve been working on this issue for 22 years and met a lot of incredibly wonderful Iranians. I see a regime that has been actually quite effective at infiltration, at character assassination, at creating fake dissidents that they mobilize, at running influence operations in Washington and in America, at standing up, funding, supporting these so-called Iranian-American organizations that are defending Iranian-American interests, but really are defending regime interests. I see an echo chamber, an Iran echo chamber that’s been created, quite patiently, well-financed that is really supporting the regime in Washington and around the country. So, I actually see a regime that is on the counterattack. They’ve lost control inside Iran. They’ve got millions of Iranians who despise them, but they’ve launched a counterattack, not only a physical, brutal, repressive one inside Iran against Iranian opposition, but outside of Iran of infiltration, of character assassination.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: In order to divide your community–

YAHYANEJAD: Right.

DUBOWITZ: –and in order to ensure that is a divided community that’s turned against itself will not be united enough to mobilize against the regime. Is that fair?

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely. If you go on Persian social media, there is constant basically character assassinations of dissidents happening by other people who are pretending to be dissidents. And a lot of them, unfortunately, a number of them come from really questionable backgrounds. And this is a method – Soviets have used this, and other totalitarian governments have utilized it to go after the opposition and create friction between them, and so on. I have advocated and I continuously advocate for all the dissident groups and opposition groups, maybe behind the scene, to come up with an agreement, not necessarily unite, but not attack one another, not to use government’s propaganda against one another, and at least align their activities. They don’t have to necessarily come together like a unified platform, unified message, because they have different– There are disagreements and different visions, and so on. But they can at least agree not to attack each other. They can work behind the scene together to even create a, I would say, mediation group to lower some of the frictions and the fights that are going on.

DUBOWITZ: So, if I may say with great humility, not being part of your diaspora, but being part of another fractious diaspora called the Jewish community, I think the notion that Iranians who are a wonderful, incredible and very successful diaspora are going to unify around anything given the inter-factional disputes between the royalists and the leftists and the secular Democrats, not to mention all the other shades of opposition and dissent, is fanciful. I don’t think it’ll ever happen. I think the regime knows that. The regime sees the fractures and fissures and is running influence operations in order to intensify those fractures and fissures and has done so quite successfully.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: But what I, again, learned from this conversation– in fact, Mehdi, thank you, because I’ve been learning a lot, is it really actually does take just a small team of people who really understand the “Rules of the Revolutionaries,” who understand technology and actually need to focus these efforts inside Iran rather than on the Iranian diaspora. And that with the right technology, with the right understanding, with the right ways to organize, could make a real difference inside Iran and put the regime on defense, which is where the regime needs to be. And then, again, with your technology talent and the talent of many Iranians, I mean, the talent exists.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: So it’s a question of finding the talent, assembling them, raising the resources, and then also getting into Iran the things that Iranians need in opposition. I mean, they need VPNs, you mentioned it, VPNs. They need things like Starlink terminals because the regime is shutting down the internet, internet blackouts. If you can’t communicate, you can’t mobilize. If you can’t mobilize, you cannot ultimately form a opposition against the regime. They need money for labor strike funds. They need help from governments. I’m not optimistic that the U.S. government is really going to provide the kind of help. I think there are other governments, including the Israeli government, that may be more forward-leaning on this, that there’s a lot that could be done in the private sector.

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: From really smart technologists and people who understand. And maybe you could reach out to Bernie Sanders’ former campaign managers.

YAHYANEJAD: I should, yeah.

DUBOWITZ: They’re surely not going to talk to me, but they may talk to you and see. If you guys actually want to really do something meaningful to help humanity, then help us with the skills you have to help mobilize Iranians inside the regime in order to fight against gender apartheid, brutal repression, human rights abuses, torture, rape, all the things that you, as self-declared left-wing activists, should be mobilizing against.

YAHYANEJAD: Right. Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: Do you agree with that?

YAHYANEJAD: No, I totally agree with that. I think one topic, I mean, I want to also just, because you brought America and Israel mentioned, and I make sure I want to mention this before our time runs out, I’m a bit worried about the, you know, there’s negotiations going on between America and Iran. I don’t want to comment on the negotiations, because I often say that’s not our game. I mean, we want change happen in Iran. The Iranian and U.S. negotiation is not our priority. It’s not the game that we want to be part of. But we are worried about the impact of it. I mean, if there is an agreement between Iran and the US, okay, fine. I mean, but we are worried about if that’s framed as if the Iranians’ regime problems have gone away, as if, I mean, the way it was treated after JCPOA, as if like, I mean, Iranian government and all the–

DUBOWITZ: Yeah, we solved the nuclear problem. So guess what? We know how longer have a problem with the Islamic Republic.

YAHYANEJAD: Exactly. And that’s something that’s going to hugely impact us and worries us. So even if that agreement happens, which we have a zero influence whether it happens or not, but we are worried about the impact of it and the way it’s framed, because you are just agreeing on a very specific problems the Iranian government caused. That’s the nuclear issue. But they are causing all sorts of other problems in the Middle East.

DUBOWITZ: Let me agree with you on that and let me disagree with you on one thing you said, which is that you have no ability to influence that. You’re an American, and a lot of our listeners are American-Iranians or Iranian-Americans, however you want to hyphenate. And the fact is, you live in the greatest democracy in the world, maybe the greatest democracy in history, and you have an influence on the negotiations between the United States and Iran. You have the influence on what a deal should look like. You have an influence on what a good deal is and what a bad deal is. You also have the influence on what a deal should cover, and a narrow nuclear deal that gives the regime hundreds of billions of dollars that will not go to the Iranian people, but that will only enrich the regime, it’ll give it money to rebuild its axis of misery, the “Axis of so-called Resistance,” which is really an “Axis of Misery,” which will make the regime more aggressive in the region, more oppressive at home.

I mean, Iranian-Americans need to express that view. They need to express that view to members of Congress, who 52 out of 53 Republican senators have signed a letter saying a deal needs to look like this, zero enrichment, full dismantlement. 177 GOP House members signed a similar letter. But that letter also needs to say, or members of Congress needs to say, that no matter what the nuclear deal is, that the United States should not release hundreds of billions of dollars to this regime that it’ll use for repression and aggression. So that’s the only area where I would say I disagree in the sense that you really can make a difference. I think Iranian-Americans are getting much more involved in the political process, but they need to reach out to members of Congress, to your House members, to your Senate members and say, “We voted for you. We won’t vote for you again if you throw us under the bus.”

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: So Mehdi, I want to end with a final question to you, which is really, you’ve got a career, really a life commitment to not only to technology, but to resistance against the Islamic Republic and the establishment of a secular democracy. Maybe end with just some thoughts on how technology really can enable the collapse of the Islamic Republic and a free Iran.

YAHYANEJAD: Iran is a unique place. It has a very highly educated population, people who are online, and there’s been a proven track for technology helping the situation in Iran. I mean, between 2000 to 2010, I would say blogosphere helped Iranians get enlightened and you had the Green Movement and the protests back in 2009. I would say the 2022 protests were really helped by what happened with Instagram and all the people who were being on it. And they have the shift that happened in Iran because a lot of people became more open and anti-hijab laws and so on. So they came out against the regime on that topic.

But I still think there is even much bigger things could be done. AI is a huge revolution in the world, and it’s going to impact a lot of things. And a lot of people still don’t realize what potentials this can unlock. And as I mentioned, we need to be able to organize large number of Iranians at the same time with limited resources. I think the technology is there, and this could be the first place that AI can assist a large movement for change, for creating a democratic Iran and getting this ideology that’s been basically, I mean, the Islamic radicalism, Islamic fundamentalism, we can get rid of it. We could replace it by a democratic system. AI can help us. And I think everything opportunity is there. I mean, we just have to focus on it and make it happen.

DUBOWITZ: I think it would be a great irony. I mean, just thinking about what you’re saying, it’d be great irony that if AI brought down the Islamic Republic. Because it was interesting, it was another technology that brought to life the Islamic Republic. It was Khomeini–

YAHYANEJAD: Absolutely.

DUBOWITZ: –in the suburbs of Paris, sending in cassette tapes into Iran that got spread by word of mouth. They were handed out through thousands of Iranians who listened to his sermons, who were inspired by his message, and came to the streets, many of them expecting, like your father, that would lead to a free and democratic and open Iran. And yet those cassette tapes led to the Islamic Revolution and all this misery and darkness. It would be a great irony if it was AI and technology that brought down Khomeini’s regime and established a free and secular Iran.

Mehdi, thank you. Thank you for your insights. Thank you for your great work. And certainly the people listening to this podcast and you want to help support this work, please get in touch with me and we can help turn your ideas into real action and real results.

YAHYANEJAD: Thank you for inviting me. It was a great conversation. I enjoyed it. Thank you.

DUBOWITZ: Thanks, Mehdi. Okay.

Mehdi Yahyanejad is a fighter, not with weapons, but with code, platforms, with ideas. If you want to support the cause of Iranian freedom, support people like him. Build secure infrastructure, find real opposition, stop listening to people who say the regime can be reasoned with. The regime may still have guns, it still may have prisons, but its ideology is dead and the vast majority of Iranians want to see its demise. Thanks for listening. Subscribe, share, and stay tuned for more on “The Iran Breakdown.”