330. The Iranian Revolution: 1979 vs. 2026 (Ep 1)

All eyes are on Iran, a country in turmoil, a country that seems to be on the cusp of an enormous transformative change, and yet it feels like we have been here before. So what lessons of 1979 in particular, what can they tell us about the future? Hello and welcome to Empire Pod. I'm William DeRimple. And I'm Anita Arnan.

There is at the moment in Iran something of a geopolitical earthquake going on. We're getting reports of thousands of dead on the streets shot dead by the state. Now we're recording uh possibly a week before you're hearing this and we're at the Jaipur Literary Festival and the kind of magical thing that happens at a literary festival of this size and one that is this international is that you can pull together people with relevant experience. So we have for you today a real treat. We have

One person who has forensically looked into the revolution of 1979 that feels so familiar to what's going on today, and another who has been born in Iran, has contacts with Iran, and can perhaps give us an idea of just how much we should draw from that 1979 experience to predict what is going to happen in the next few months. So our two amazing guests on uh this pod, and this is the first time in Empire, I think, that we've done two guests, and it's a measure of their extraordinary abilities that we're having them today. The first is Scott Anderson. Uh Scott, I've rave reviewed your book on uh Lawrence in Arabia ten years ago when it came out, uh, and we're very, very thrilled finally to get you here at both to the Jaipour Literature Festival and to this podcast. Scott uh spent time in Iran traveling through and has been working the last few years on this highly acclaimed book that anyone that read the the the roundups of the books of the year this year will have come across Scott's name over and over again in a whole variety of different publications.

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