Host of nightly show The Program
It’s eleven o’clock at night in Tehran when I open the phone lines for my live call-in show, The Program. Friday night is when I ask Iranians to do something that has become almost subversive: not just to talk, but to listen.
For more than forty some years, the Islamic Republic has tried not only to control power but to monopolize conversation itself, deciding who speaks, what is heard, and which "alternative truths" are permitted to exist.
Dialogue frightens it. So does ordinary patriotism, the kind that arises when people speak in their own words about their country.
On the line, a teacher from Kermanshah tells me that students are never taught the courage to ask critical questions. A Toronto caller describes a generation that has learned to survive by lying. A woman in Tehran confesses that she’s waiting for a miracle because she can no longer imagine change.
These voices are not fragments; they are coordinates on the map of a national psyche. Talking in Iran can be dangerous. Silence, in another way, is deadly too. When a society stops speaking to itself, it begins to turn against itself. Authoritarians thrive on that silence.
The live show I host is an attempt—improvised, fragile, sometimes chaotic, to reverse that damage. We bring Iranians together in real time, from Tehran to Los Angeles. We follow three simple rules: everyone gets heard, no judgment, and keep it suitable for all ages.
Our callers often contradict themselves. That’s what makes it real. Dialogue isn’t the theater of agreement; it’s the discipline of listening.
Across the static and emotion, three truths keep repeating.
First: the Islamic Republic never stops talking, but it doesn’t listen. It sermonizes, threatens, censors and congratulates itself. This isn’t strength, it’s fear.
Second: society has begun to mirror that refusal. Iranians interrupt before they understand, argue before they think and treat disagreement as contamination. The Islamic Republic feeds that instinct.
Third: the way out of this loop isn’t heroic, it’s procedural. Ask a real question. Wait for real answers. Let facts, not pride, decide who’s right. simple but challenging.
'Look in the mirror'
Iran today is divided by many wars: between people and government, truth and propaganda, hope and exhaustion. Yet, amid that division, I still hear the quiet persistence of life.
A caller from Tehran wants to talk about water: the taps shut off at midnight, and families fill bottles before the cutoff. That, too, is politics, the right to live without fear of thirst.
Another caller, from Shiraz, demands leadership. “Death with honor is better than life with humiliation,” he says. Moments later, a woman from Tehran replies, “Stop looking for a savior. Look in the mirror.”
These exchanges are the substance of what I call "national dialogue". Not a slogan or a policy, just the collective decision to speak before it’s too late.
Tunisia did it and saved itself from civil war. Nelson Mandela in South Africa did it and dismantled apartheid. Yemen pretended to do it and collapsed. For Iran, dialogue is not an ideal; it’s a means of survival.
I am not neutral about the Islamic Republic forcing people to whisper. But I am devout about the method that can outlast it. Patriotism, to me, is standing by the truth even when it’s spoken by someone you dislike.
Dialogue is resistance; listening is courage.
Some nights, when the last call ends, I sit in the quiet studio and hear only the click of the line going dead. But I know the sound that came before it—a mother’s whisper, a teacher’s question, a citizen’s confession—is proof of something still breathing inside the country.
After years of state monologue, the most subversive sound in Iran is a nation talking to itself. Something is stirring beneath the surface, and I can hear it. I hear it every night on the program. Live, raw, and authentic.
I am hopeful.
The Daroyar reform plan, launched to offset price hikes through insurance coverage, has failed to meet its target, leaving patients to shoulder the cost, news outlet Rouydad24 said.
Rising foreign exchange rates, reduced liquidity among importers, and broader inflation have deepened shortages in hospitals and pharmacies.
Analysts say the crisis is worsened by budget shortfalls in social insurance funds and the influence of monopolistic drug networks, which are accused of hoarding and speculative pricing.
Lawmakers have warned that continued price spikes could spark public anger and further strain Iran’s already fragile healthcare system.
Foreign currency squeeze
Last month, a leading pharmaceutical industry figure, Mojtaba Sarkandi, told the reformist daily Etemad that Iran faces inevitable production disruptions and severe drug shortages by March, as renewed UN sanctions under the snapback mechanism tighten access to foreign currency and strain supply chains.
“The industry operates on two realities,” Sarkandi said. “While up to 99% of medicines are locally produced, most key ingredients still come from abroad, mainly China and India.”
According to Etemad, Tehran allocated about $3.4 billion in foreign currency for medicine and medical equipment this year, but a 10–20% shortfall has already emerged. Shipping and insurance costs have climbed by as much as 50% since September, and import timelines have doubled to six months.
While sanctions have limited Tehran’s ability to finance imports, industry executives also blame policy missteps, from delayed currency allocation to state-imposed price caps, for deepening the turmoil.
“Sanctions may explain 40% of the crisis,” one executive told Etemad. “The rest stems from domestic policy failures, arbitrary pricing and poor transparency.”
Kaveh Madani, Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told Fox News Digital that the crisis was the culmination of decades of environmental mismanagement and overexploitation of resources.
“The water bankruptcy situation was not created overnight,” he said. “The house was already on fire, and people like myself had warned the government for years that this situation would emerge.”
Iran is now facing one of its most severe shortages in decades, with major reservoirs and dams nearing depletion.
Of the five dams supplying Tehran, one has run dry and another is operating at below 8% capacity, according to recent reports. The energy ministry has already announced evening water cuts to refill reservoirs and urged households to reduce consumption by 20% to avoid mandatory rationing.
“The symptoms were already present, and now the flames are undeniable,” Madani said. “We are discussing Day Zero, when the taps would run dry in Tehran and other cities once immune to shortages.”
He described the situation as the product of “decades of mismanagement, worsened by prolonged drought and climate change,” warning that the ecological collapse was now threatening national security.
“When people are out of water and electricity, you face domestic and national security problems that even Iran’s enemies, not even President Trump or Prime Minister Netanyahu, could have wished for this to happen,” he said.
Ripple effect
Madani warned that the crisis could have a ripple effect on Iran’s energy and nuclear infrastructure, which depends on stable power and water supplies.
“If water and electricity shortages persist, any nuclear program would also be impacted,” he said. “Lack of rain means less hydropower generation, leading to both water and power outages.”
He added that the government’s continued defiance of Western powers and its resistance to reform had compounded the environmental strain.
“If they want to stick to their ideology and fight with the West, they must use their natural resources and burn them,” Madani said. “So if there is no water, there is less resilience and less capacity to resist.”
The crisis, he said, is being aggravated by renewed international sanctions and economic isolation.
“There were already sanctions in place, imposed by the United States, and there were also Security Council sanctions that, as you know, have been reintroduced,” he said.
“Iran is in resistance mode, and remaining in this mode means increased pressure on Iran's ecosystem, natural resources, and water, but it also means heightened concerns about food insecurity issues and dependence on food imports.”
Madani concluded that Iran’s water crisis has become a national emergency with global implications.
“This water bankruptcy weakens Iran on the world stage,” he said. “If there is no water, there is less resilience and less capacity to resist.”
"No water rationing — the scheduled and announced distribution and supply of water on a rotating basis — has so far been implemented in Tehran or any other city in the country," the Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Fars News reported citing the National Water and Wastewater Company.
Energy Minister Abbas Aliabadi on Sunday called the nightly pressure cuts a temporary management tool to stabilize the city’s aging water network and reduce leakage. Similar steps taken during the summer, he said, conserved significant volumes.
The measure, in effect from midnight until early morning, is designed to conserve supplies and reduce network losses, the spokesperson for Iran’s water industry, Issa Bozorgzadeh, said.
“We lower water pressure from midnight until around dawn to reduce urban leakage and allow reservoirs to refill,” he said.
The energy minister said on Saturday “Tehran's water pipeline system is more than 100 years old and worn-out."
"During the 12-day war (with Israel in June), the pipelines also suffered damage, which further added to the deterioration. We are sometimes forced to reduce water pressure to zero on certain nights.”
Residents report repeated disruptions
Households across eastern and northern Tehran have reported recurring water cuts and sharp pressure drops in recent nights, according to IRNA. Residents told the outlet that the disruptions have become routine. Many apartment buildings have installed small pumps and storage tanks to mitigate the problem, while others without such systems face hours-long outages.
Inflow to Tehran’s dams has dropped by 43 percent compared with the previous water year, Behzad Parsa, managing director of the Tehran Regional Water Company, told IRNA. Parsa described the situation as unprecedented in decades, attributing it to a 100-percent decrease in rainfall in Tehran province compared with long-term averages.
Expert links crisis to long-term relocation plans
President Masoud Pezeshkian’s repeated focus on Tehran’s water crisis serves two purposes, Water and environmental expert Mohsen Mousavi-Khansari wrote in a piece on Etemad daily.
“The first is to encourage conservation among citizens and to prompt coordinated planning among agencies responsible for water supply, distribution, and use. The second is to prepare public opinion in Tehran and other major cities on the central plateau for the eventual transfer of part of the population and infrastructure toward Iran’s southern coasts.”
He linked this to Pezeshkian’s proposal to relocate the capital to the Makran region.