Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, here and ready to dive in. We actually picked today's topic ourselves. The production team suggested we take a look at something that has been on our minds quite a bit lately, especially given where we live and the shadow that the regime in Tehran casts over the entire region.
Yeah, it is a fascinating and honestly a pretty heavy subject. We are talking about the information vacuum inside Iran. Specifically, how do we actually know what the people living there think when they are living under a regime that considers dissent a capital offense? It is easy to look at the headlines or the state-mandated rallies and think we have a clear picture, but the reality is much more like a black box.
It is the ultimate data science challenge, Corn. You have a hyper-connected, highly educated society that is essentially living under a digital iron curtain. When we talk about public sentiment in a place like Iran, we are not just talking about approval ratings in the way we do for a politician in the United States. We are talking about survival metrics. Standard polling fails in high-risk environments because the cost of honesty is potentially lethal.
And that is what we want to untangle today. We want to look at the credible surveys that actually exist, the ways researchers bypass state surveillance, and the massive gap between the ideological posture of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the I-R-G-C—and the lived reality of the average person in Tehran or Isfahan.
And I think a good place to start, before we even get into the numbers, is a concept called preference falsification. It was coined by the economist Timur Kuran, and it is absolutely essential for understanding any authoritarian state. The idea is that people will publicly express support for a regime or a policy while privately loathing it, simply because the cost of honesty is too high. In a place like Iran, this is not just a social quirk; it is a national survival strategy.
Right, so when a pollster calls a random landline in Mashhad and asks, do you support the Supreme Leader, and the person says yes, that is not necessarily a data point of support. That is a data point of fear. It is a defensive crouch.
Precisely. In a country where the morality police can pick you up for what you wear, or where the I-R-G-C monitors your Telegram messages, an honest answer to a stranger is a massive risk. So, the question becomes, how do you break through that wall of preference falsification to find out what is actually happening in the hearts and minds of eighty-five million people? This is where we move from simple polling into what is essentially intelligence gathering under duress.
That is the challenge. And it is not just an academic one. If the West bases its policy on the idea that the regime has a silent majority of supporters, but in reality, ninety percent of the country wants them gone, that changes the entire geopolitical calculus. We saw hints of this during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that started back in twenty twenty-two, but let's look at the actual methodologies people are using now in twenty twenty-six to get the real story.
One of the most important groups doing this work is GAMAAN, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran. They are based in the Netherlands, but their reach inside Iran is incredible. Instead of traditional phone polling, which is compromised by state monitoring, they use encrypted, anonymous online surveys. They spread these through social media, through V-P-Ns, and through influencers who have the trust of the Iranian public.
I have looked at their reports, and the numbers are staggering compared to what the Iranian state media puts out. But Herman, how do they ensure that the sample is actually representative? If you are only polling people who use V-P-Ns and follow activists, aren't you just getting a self-selected group of dissidents?
That is the most common critique, and it is a fair one, but GAMAAN uses some pretty sophisticated statistical weighting. They look at the demographics of the respondents and compare them to the known census data of Iran. They adjust for age, gender, education level, and even whether or not the respondent voted in the last election. They use a technique called raking to ensure that the final data set mirrors the actual population distribution. Even after all those adjustments, their findings consistently show that a massive majority of Iranians—often upwards of eighty percent—desire a secular government and the removal of the current religious leadership.
Eighty percent. That is a landslide in any democracy, but in an autocracy, it is a powder keg. And it matches what we see in leaked internal data. Remember back in episode nine hundred thirty-one, when we were talking about the internal documents from the I-R-G-C that were hacked? Those documents showed that the regime's own internal assessments were terrified of the public's mood. They weren't seeing a loyal base; they were seeing a population that was one spark away from total revolt.
That is a crucial point, Corn. The regime knows the truth. They spend billions on domestic intelligence precisely because they know they lack a popular mandate. They are not looking for approval; they are looking for resilience indicators. They want to know exactly how much pressure they can apply before the system snaps. When we look at leaked memos from the Ministry of Intelligence, they often use much more alarmist language than the public-facing propaganda. They talk about the loss of social capital and the total alienation of the youth.
So, if the support isn't there, why does the regime survive? This goes back to the difference between regime support and regime survival strategies. You don't need the people to love you if you have the guns, the money, and the ability to shut down the internet at a moment's notice. It is the difference between legitimacy and control.
Right, and the I-R-G-C is the ultimate survival machine. They have evolved from a paramilitary force into a massive economic conglomerate. They control the ports, the telecommunications, the construction industry, and the oil exports. So, for a lot of people, even if they hate the ideology, their livelihood is tied to the system. It creates this weird, forced participation where the shopkeeper in the bazaar has to pay his dues to the I-R-G-C-linked guild just to keep his lights on.
It is a protection racket on a national scale. But let's talk about the daily life side of this. We often see the images of the morality police or the protests, but what is the day-to-day grind like for a regular family in Iran right now?
It is a constant battle against gravity, mostly economic gravity. We are looking at inflation rates that have been hovering between forty-five and fifty percent for years. Imagine your grocery bill doubling every year while your salary stays the same. The Rial, the Iranian currency, has lost so much value that people are essentially using it as wallpaper. They try to put their savings into gold, or U-S dollars, or even cryptocurrency just to preserve some of their hard-earned money.
And that economic pressure hits the regime's traditional base the hardest. Historically, the rural poor and the working class were seen as the backbone of the Islamic Republic. But when the price of eggs and bread skyrockets, the ideological slogans about resisting the Great Satan start to ring pretty hollow.
There is this huge gap between the regime's ideological posture—the constant talk of the axis of resistance and the glory of the revolution—and the reality of a young person in Tehran who just wants a job and the ability to watch a movie without a V-P-N. The social restrictions are pervasive, but they are also increasingly ignored. You see it in the way women are wearing their headscarves, or rather, not wearing them, even in the face of brutal crackdowns. This is a form of everyday resistance that the data struggles to capture but the eyes can't miss.
It feels like a society that has already moved on, but the government hasn't caught up. It is like two different Irans living in the same space. You have the official Iran, which is black chadors and revolutionary chants, and then you have the real Iran, which is underground cafes, tech startups, and a deep desire for connection with the rest of the world.
And the regime's response to that desire for connection is the Digital Iron Curtain. This is something we really need to get into because it is their primary tool of control in twenty twenty-six. They have been building what they call the National Information Network, or N-I-N. The goal is to create a domestic internet that is completely isolated from the global web.
So, basically a giant intranet. If they decide to shut off the gateway to the outside world, the domestic services—like banking, state-run news, and internal messaging—keep working, but the people lose access to Instagram, X, or any international news.
And they have gotten much better at it. In twenty twenty-five, they rolled out new internet throttling protocols that can target specific neighborhoods or specific types of traffic without taking down the whole grid. It is a more surgical way to suppress dissent. If they see a protest forming in a certain square, they can kill the signal in a five-block radius instantly. This prevents the viral spread of protest videos, which was the fuel for the twenty twenty-two movement.
It is a cat-and-mouse game, though. I was reading about how the use of satellite internet, like Starlink, and decentralized mesh networks has been growing. The Iranian people are incredibly tech-savvy. They have to be.
They are. The average Iranian teenager knows more about proxy servers and encrypted tunnels than most I-T professionals in the West. But the regime is also investing heavily in A-I-driven surveillance. They use facial recognition in the subways to identify women who aren't following the dress code. They monitor social media sentiment to find the nodes in the activist networks. It is a very high-tech version of an old-school police state.
Which brings up an interesting point about the morality police. We often think of them as these religious zealots who are just obsessed with modesty, but from a control perspective, they serve a much more practical function, don't they?
The morality police are a tool of social engineering and psychological warfare. Their job is to remind the population, every single day, that the state owns your body and your public presence. By making the simple act of showing your hair or holding hands a crime, they turn every citizen into a potential criminal. And once everyone is a criminal, the state has the leverage to arrest anyone at any time. It keeps the population in a state of low-level, constant anxiety.
It breaks the social bond. If you are always looking over your shoulder to see if the Gasht-e Ershad van is around the corner, you are less likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger about how much you hate the government.
Right. It prevents the formation of horizontal trust. In a healthy society, people trust each other and can organize. In an authoritarian state, the regime wants all trust to be vertical—directed only toward the state. But what we are seeing in Iran now is that the vertical trust is completely gone, and the horizontal trust is being rebuilt through shared suffering and shared defiance.
You mentioned the economic pressures earlier, and I want to circle back to that because it seems like the biggest vulnerability. We have seen this in history before—when the merchants, the Bazari class, turn against the regime, things change quickly. Are we seeing that shift now?
We are. The Bazari were the ones who helped fund the nineteen seventy-nine revolution. They were the traditional, conservative heart of the economy. But today, their businesses are being strangled by the I-R-G-C's monopolies and the international sanctions that the regime's behavior has brought upon the country. When the people who handle the money start saying the system is broken, the end is usually in sight.
But the I-R-G-C doesn't care if the bazaar is unhappy as long as they control the oil and the shadow economy, right? They have built this parallel system to bypass sanctions, using front companies in places like Dubai or Turkey.
They have, but even that is getting harder. The transparency of the global financial system is improving, and the pressure on their middle-men is increasing. More importantly, the internal corruption is so rampant that the system is eating itself. When you have a massive budget deficit and you are still spending billions on Hezbollah or the Houthis, your own soldiers and police officers start to feel the pinch.
That is the tipping point, isn't it? When the guy with the gun hasn't been paid in three months, he is a lot less likely to fire on a crowd of protesters who are demanding the same things he wants for his own family.
That is the fear threshold. Every regime has a point where the cost of repression exceeds the benefit. If the security forces start to defect or even just hesitate, the whole house of cards can come down very fast. We discussed the potential for this kind of collapse in episode eight hundred ninety-four, looking at what happens after the current Supreme Leader passes away. There is no clear successor with the same level of authority, and the infighting within the I-R-G-C could be the opening the public needs.
It is a grim reality for the people living there right now, though. We talk about these high-level shifts, but for a family in Shiraz, it is about whether they can afford medicine or if their daughter will come home from school safely.
It is. And that is why it is so important for us to be careful about how we consume news from the region. There is a lot of state-sponsored narrative that tries to paint the opposition as small, fringe groups or agents of foreign powers. But when you look at the data from groups like GAMAAN, or when you see the sheer bravery of the people on the streets, you realize this is a deeply rooted, indigenous movement for change.
So, for our listeners who want to be more informed and not fall for the propaganda, what should they be looking for? What are the resilience indicators you mentioned?
First, look at labor strikes. When the oil workers, the truck drivers, and the factory workers go on strike simultaneously, that is a much bigger threat to the regime than a street protest. It hits the regime's pocketbook directly. Second, look at the currency exchange rate. The Rial's value is a real-time confidence meter for the regime. If it is plummeting, it means the people with money—including the regime's own elites—are trying to get out.
And third, I would say watch the internet. If the regime is throttling the web even when there aren't massive protests, it means they are scared of something we might not see yet. They are trying to prevent the coordination of the next wave.
And we should also pay attention to the diaspora. The Iranian diaspora is one of the most successful and educated in the world. They are the ones providing the technical tools, the V-P-Ns, and the platforms for the people inside to be heard. The connection between the millions of Iranians outside and the millions inside is a lifeline that the regime hasn't been able to cut.
It is a remarkable story of human endurance. You have this ancient, sophisticated culture that is basically being held hostage by a seventh-century ideology enforced with twenty-first-century technology.
That is a perfect way to put it. And it is why the data matters. Every time a survey comes out showing that Iranians want a secular democracy, it chips away at the regime's claim to legitimacy. It tells the world, and more importantly, it tells the Iranian people themselves, that they are not alone. That the person standing next to them in line probably feels the exact same way they do.
That realization is the death knell for preference falsification. Once you realize everyone else is faking it too, the fear starts to lose its power.
It is the Emperor's New Clothes, but with much higher stakes. The regime is banking on the idea that everyone is too afraid to point out that they have no popular support. But once that first person shouts it, and then the next, the illusion vanishes.
We have covered a lot of ground here, from the technical side of encrypted surveys to the economic pressures of forty-five percent inflation. It really paints a picture of a regime that is surviving on borrowed time and brute force, not on any kind of genuine support.
It really does. And I think it is important to remember that Iran is not a monolith. There are still people who benefit from the system, but that circle is getting smaller and smaller. It is becoming a regime of the few, by the few, and for the few.
Which is why our perspective here in Jerusalem is so focused on this. A stable, democratic, and free Iran would be the single greatest shift for peace in the Middle East. It would pull the rug out from under almost every major conflict in the region today.
Without a doubt. The I-R-G-C is the octopus, as we called it in episode nine hundred thirty-one. Their tentacles are everywhere, but the head of the octopus is in Tehran, and it is under immense internal pressure.
Well, I think that is a good place to start wrapping this up. This has been a deep dive into a very complex and often misunderstood situation. We hope this helps you look past the headlines and understand the actual mechanics of control and resistance inside Iran.
Definitely. It is about more than just politics; it is about the fundamental human desire for dignity and truth. If you want to dive deeper into some of the history we mentioned, definitely check out our archive at myweirdprompts dot com. We have covered the I-R-G-C's structure, the history of the nineteen seventy-nine revolution, and even the digital recruitment tactics they use.
And hey, if you are finding these deep dives valuable, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps the show reach more people who are looking for this kind of analysis.
It really does. We see every one of them and it means a lot to us.
Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. We will be back soon with another one.
Until next time.
You know, Herman, one thing we didn't touch on as much is the role of the younger generation. I mean, more than sixty percent of the Iranian population is under the age of thirty. They don't even remember the revolution. To them, the Islamic Republic isn't some glorious achievement; it is just the reason they can't have a normal life.
That is the demographic time bomb. You have a Gen Z population in Iran that is just as connected, just as savvy, and just as globalized in their outlook as kids in New York or London. They are watching the rest of the world on their screens through their V-P-Ns, and then they look at the grey, repressive reality around them. That cognitive dissonance is unbearable.
And they are the ones who were at the forefront of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It wasn't just about the hijab; it was about the right to exist as a modern human being. I think that is why the regime was so brutal in its response. They weren't just fighting a protest; they were fighting a future they don't fit into.
When you are an eighty-year-old cleric and your entire worldview is based on a rigid, medieval interpretation of law, a teenage girl with a smartphone is the ultimate existential threat. She represents a world you cannot control and a future you will not be part of.
It is a struggle that is playing out every single day in the streets, in the schools, and online. And while the regime has the tools to suppress it for now, you can't suppress an entire generation forever. The data shows the trend line, and it only points in one direction.
It really does. The question isn't if things will change, but when and how. And as we have seen, the people of Iran are doing the hard work of making sure that when the moment comes, they are ready.
It is a heavy topic, but there is a lot of hope in that resilience. Anyway, we should probably let everyone get on with their day.
Right. Thanks again for joining us.
This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find all our episodes and the R-S-S feed at myweirdprompts dot com.
See you in the next one.
One last thing, Herman. I was thinking about the comparison to the nineteen seventy-nine revolution. People often forget that back then, the Shah's regime also looked invincible from the outside. They had the best military in the region, a massive secret police, and the backing of the United States. And yet, it collapsed in a matter of months once the momentum shifted.
That is the nature of authoritarian collapse. It looks impossible until the very second it becomes inevitable. These systems are brittle. They don't bend; they break. And because they suppress all feedback, they never see the break coming. They are flying blind because they have silenced everyone who could tell them the truth.
Which brings us back to the importance of the work groups like GAMAAN are doing. They are providing the feedback that the regime refuses to hear. They are the early warning system.
They are documenting the cracks in the foundation while the regime is busy repainting the walls.
It is a fascinating and critical time for the region. We will definitely be keeping a close eye on this as it develops.
For sure. Alright, let's actually sign off this time.
Sounds good. Thanks for being with us, everyone.
Take care.
I actually wanted to add one more point about the Abraham Accords and how they fit into this. Our listeners know we are big supporters of that framework. It has created this new alignment in the Middle East—Israel and several Arab nations standing together against the Iranian regime's aggression.
That is a huge factor. For the first time, the regime in Tehran isn't just facing pressure from the West; they are facing a united front right in their own backyard. It makes their efforts to export the revolution much harder when their neighbors are cooperating on security and intelligence.
Right, and it gives the Iranian people another example of what a different kind of Middle East could look like. A region focused on prosperity, technology, and cooperation instead of proxy wars and ideology.
It changes the narrative from the West versus the Middle East to the people who want progress versus the people who want chaos. And that is a much more powerful story for the people inside Iran to hear.
It reinforces that they aren't the ones who are out of step; it is their government.
Well said. Okay, now we really are done.
This is the real sign-off.
Herman Poppleberry, signing off.
And I am Corn. We will see you next time on My Weird Prompts.
Don't forget to check out the website.
Myweirdprompts dot com. We will see you there.
Bye everyone.
One more quick thought, Herman. We talked about the economic pressures, but I think it is worth mentioning the brain drain. I read a report recently that said Iran is losing its top students and professionals at an alarming rate.
It is one of the highest rates in the world. If you are a talented engineer or a doctor in Iran, your goal is to get out. Canada, Germany, the U-S—they are all full of brilliant Iranians who felt they had no future in their own country.
That is the ultimate loss for a nation. You can replace infrastructure, but you can't easily replace your best and brightest minds. The regime is literally hollowing out the future of the country to stay in power today.
It is a tragedy. A country with that much history and talent deserves so much better.
It really does. Okay, we are definitely over time now. Thanks for sticking with us if you are still listening!
We appreciate the dedication!
Catch you later.
Bye.
Seriously, Herman, the word count on this one is going to be massive.
Well, it is a big topic. It deserves the time.
Fair enough. Alright, see you at home.
See ya.
And thanks again to the team for picking this one. It was a good call.
Definitely.
This has been episode nine hundred forty-six of My Weird Prompts.
Looking forward to the next one.
Me too. Alright, that is it.
Done.
Actually, before we go, I just remembered that piece about the water crisis in Iran. That is another huge source of public anger that we didn't even get to.
Oh man, the environmental mismanagement is a whole other episode. The drying up of Lake Urmia and the protests in Khuzestan over water rights—that is where the rural areas really start to turn.
It shows that the regime can't even provide the most basic necessities. It is not just about freedom; it is about survival.
We should definitely circle back to that in a future episode. The intersection of climate and authoritarianism is a huge topic.
Let's do it. For now, we are out.
Goodbye for real.
Bye.
See you soon.
Okay, I am stopping the recording now.
Good. I need some coffee.
Me too. Jerusalem has some great spots for that, at least.
True. Let's go.
Wait, is the mic still on?
I think so.
Okay, now it is off.
Wait, no, it is still on.
Okay, now.
Now.
Bye.
Bye.
One last thing... just kidding.
You got me.
Alright, let's go.
See ya.
My Weird Prompts, signing off.
Herman Poppleberry, signing off.
And Corn too.
We already said that.
Just making sure.
Okay, bye.
Bye.
See you.
See you.
Okay.
Okay.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Done.
Done.
Seriously.
Seriously.
Okay.
Okay.
Bye.
Bye.
See you at the house.
See you at the house.
Tell Daniel we are coming.
I will.
Okay.
Okay.
Bye.
Bye.
