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Posted on 04/17/2026 5:45:25 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
This is a story that documents my week-long road trip through Iran - one of my favorite countries on earth.
Please note that this video was filmed and edited months before the recent escalation…
(Excerpt) Read more at youtu.be ...
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This footage of Iran was filmed before Operation Midnight Hammer and he has since returned to spend two months in Iran and aired a new video in February just before the most recent conflict. This one has 7 million views though, so it rivals any longstanding media source for its sheer scale of influence over public perception.
Some nuggets:
- The young people are quite modern/Westernized in their comportment and speak perfect English on top of that.
- Among the older generations, there is a diversity of cultural and religious outlooks. The way a Kurdish family observes and views Islam, is different from how a more Arab-adjacent family does, which is different from how a Farsi-speaking native Persian one does.
-ALL light up when they realize they’re meeting an American, most of them for the first time. So Drew gets showered with gifts and free meals as a result, and carpooled to all kinds of cultural and ancient sites, of which the people are very proud.
- The cuisine is very intricate and unique - and prove that the Persian restaurants here in the states can only replicate so much without proximity to the more obscure and homegrown spices & crops back there.
- No McDonalds, but there is Coca-cola…
I suspect he deserves the Walter Duranty award for journalism.
The food and experience look awesome. I’ll have to watch the full thing later. I recall dating someone in the late 1990s who grew up in Iran of an Iranian father a nd an American mother. They fled to USA when they saw the 1979 revolution coming. I recall a thanksgiving dinner where the aunts were all hoisting vodka shots and toasting to ‘for our Iranian passport photos!’
It’s not the Iranians that are the problem.
It’s the islamists.
So when are you going over there since it’s so wonderful?
There are Food Vloggers that have travelled to Iran, Mark Wiens is one and Sonny of Best Food Review. Learned about people through their food brings all of us together—because frankly, all of us share similar hopes and dreams and joys, as well as disappointments. Governments not withstanding.
Seeing people through their food diminishes that “otherness” and turning other peoples into caricatures...For example, how does another group use the lowly potato, or onion—the different spices...what are the noodles? Oh—all this food talk is making me hungry. Think I am off into the kitchen to make some thai Pad Krao Pow.
I’ll look later. I’me off to eat some green curry my wife picked up at a local thai place. Friday night we are too lazy to cook tonight.
Well said!
He does - and not just for Iran. Most of his travels are leisurely, but he's been in intense situations like gang-chaos in Haiti, a coup in Guinea...and he landed in Nepal just minutes after it had its biggest earthquake in recent memory.
Upon hearing a bomb explode, the person manning the front desk at his hotel in Libya was like no worries, it's 5 miles away. Drew's like uh, FIVE MILES?
God willing, soon! Not just "in my lifetime" but in the near future. I've already spent a year in semi-hostile Russia.
Would love to visit Iran and believe God will not just open the door for me to do so, but work a miracle for the world to so, and that tourism will boom.
Amen!
I love the social-gathering and celebratory (just social and hospitable overall!) nature of Persian culture. I notice it with my neighbors and colleagues here as well. :)
I do watch videos about regular life in Iraq....our govt likes to make enemies of so many people in the world.....
Where are the championship golf courses I’ve never heard much about?
A Jew traveling alone in a Muslim country surrounded by Islamist fanatics? He is a naïve fool (very likely a democrat). Did he never learn from Nick Berg?
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