The Sunday Draft

Zolal Habibi was three days old at her first demonstration. She was seven when she learned, from a newspaper poem, that her father — a writer and human rights activist — had been executed in the summer of 1988, one of roughly 30,000 political prisoners killed by the Khomeini regime in a matter of weeks. She decided that day not to cry, and kept that promise to herself for ten years. It became, in her words, her first act of resistance.

Today Zolal is 27 years into her work with the Iranian resistance, and one of the more visible voices connecting international audiences to what’s actually happening inside Iran. In this conversation, she walks through her path from a twelve-year-old lobbying members of Congress to an eighteen-year-old who gave up a full scholarship to study medicine after watching the 1999 student uprisings unfold on live television.

We spend real time on the parts of this story that don’t get simplified anywhere else. The NCRI and MEK spent fifteen years, from 1997 to 2012, on the US and EU terrorism lists — placed there, by Zolal’s account and the court record, as a diplomatic gesture during a period of Western engagement with Tehran, and later removed after rulings in UK, European, and US courts found no basis for the designation. We talk through the NCRI’s ten-point plan for a secular, democratic Iran after the regime — gender equality, abolition of the death penalty, a free press, an independent judiciary — and why it’s drawn support from thousands of lawmakers and more than 130 former heads of state.

We also get into the present moment directly: this year’s 40-day war and the ceasefire that followed it, the new wave of executions of political prisoners and protesters that started almost immediately afterward, Iran’s collapsing currency and fuel shortages, and Zolal’s pointed critique of monarchist claimant Reza Pahlavi and the idea that restoring the Shah’s line is any kind of answer. And we close on what’s actually giving her hope — four major uprisings in the last decade alone, and a generation inside Iran she describes as done waiting.

If you want to go deeper or get involved, Zolal pointed listeners to the NCRI (ncr-iran.org), Maryam Rajavi’s platform (mariam-rajavi.com), and the Organization of Iranian American Communities, which has chapters in more than 40 US states and is holding a rally at the UN on September 22–23, during the UN General Assembly, to draw attention to the current wave of executions in Iran.

A brief editorial note: the NCRI/MEK’s history is genuinely contested — it spent years on Western terrorism lists before courts ordered its removal, and it continues to face criticism from some former members and researchers. We didn’t skip past that in this conversation, and you’ll hear it addressed directly.

Listen above, or find The Sunday Draft on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Is it possible to build generational wealth through real estate without quitting your day job?

In this episode of The Sunday Draft, Raj sits down with Andrew Postell—a veteran real estate investor with 25 years of hands-on experience and 15 years in lending. Andrew shares how he built a multi-million-dollar property portfolio while holding a full-time W2 job, doing just one to two transactions a year.

We dive deep into why challenging economic environments—like 9/11, the 2008 housing crash, and today’s high-rate market—are actually the best times for buyers to get in. Andrew breaks down the mechanics of house hacking, the BRRRR method (Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat), zero-out-of-pocket hard money strategies, finding off-market deals through local investor groups, and when it makes sense to hold vs. consolidate assets into index funds.

In this episode

• Why tough housing markets favor buyers over sellers

• House hacking and using first-time buyer programs

• Demystifying the BRRRR strategy (Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat)

• Why hard money beats conventional lending for acquiring off-market deals

• Finding reliable contractors and off-market deals in local investor groups

• How Andrew attends 40+ concerts a year through VetTix

Notable quotes

“Real estate is very boring, very slow, and very methodical—but it works. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme.” — Andrew Postell

“Real estate is forgiving. If you keep it long enough, it will forgive you.” — Andrew Postell

“When it’s easy, anybody can do it. The harder it is, the more opportunity there is for you to hone your skills.” — Andrew Postell

Resources

* Connect with Andrew Postell: Search “Andrew Postell” on Google to connect directly or reach out via cell.

* VetTix: vettix.org (Free event tickets for veterans and first responders)

* Local Networking: Meetup.com / Eventbrite / Local Facebook Real Estate Investor Groups

Watch the full video episode on YouTube.

Most people chase followers first and hope purpose shows up later. Zhara York — teacher, author, mentor, and real estate professional — thinks that’s exactly backwards.

In this episode of The Sunday Draft, we talk about why validation-driven success burns out, what it actually means to build for purpose instead, and how her own life — leaving home at 15, moving to China after losing her mother, and rebuilding from scratch more than once — shaped that philosophy.

* Why “purpose vs. validation” gets confused, and what the difference actually looks like day to day

* Leaving home and emancipating herself at 15

* Moving to China after her mother’s death and starting over with nothing

* Why followers and money are a byproduct of purpose, not a strategy for finding it

* What she’d tell someone chasing likes instead of building something real

Tune in for a raw, honest conversation about success, identity, and what happens when you stop performing for an audience and start building for yourself.

Watch the conversation in full color on YouTube.

Peter Moore spent 30 years in magazines — 10 years as articles editor at Playboy, then two decades running Men’s Health, where he landed a rare 20-minute interview with President Obama in the Oval Office and traveled to rural India with Matt Damon for Water.org. When the magazine industry collapsed, he didn’t retire — he started drawing.

On this episode of The Sunday Draft, Raj talks with Peter about turning a lifelong journaling habit (one entry every night since October 12, 1978 — over 7 million words) into a Substack that’s grown from 200 subscribers to over 20,000, built almost entirely on hand-drawn cartoons and travel sketches. They dig into how a wildly speculative post about who really killed Van Gogh became his breakout piece, why he cut back to posting once a week to protect his reach, the discipline behind daily creative practice, and where AI fits (or doesn’t) into work that depends on being unmistakably human.

Also covered: growing up with a father obsessed with National Geographic, sketching as a way of remembering a place, the pressure of “creator niche,” and why community matters more than subscriber count.

Find Peter’s work at Peter Moore on Substack.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

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Linda King has spent years traveling the world and helping others do it smarter — and this week she’s sharing the real tips most people never hear.

* How to actually score an exit row for a few hundred dollars

* Why you should save your points for long-haul instead of short trips, the exact window to book redemptions

* Why you should never trust AI blindly when planning a trip

We also get into the wilder side of travel — a China incident that nearly went very wrong — and Linda’s philosophy on what actually makes travel meaningful, instead of just checking places off a list.

If you’ve ever felt travel-anxious or unsure where to even start planning, this is the episode to send yourself.

🎧 Listen above, or find The Sunday Draft on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

🎬 Watch the full episode on YouTube.

This week on The Sunday Draft, श्रीraj sat down with Ross Thorpe — founder of Rooverse, a social media platform built on one radical rule: no AI, ever. Every post is human-verified. Every image, video, and piece of text is checked and blocked if it’s AI-generated.

We get into why he built it, whether a platform that refuses to use AI can actually survive as a business, and the bigger picture: research on how LLMs are quietly reshaping our ability to think, why dating apps are getting dystopian, and why Rooverse backs its data up in space (yes, literally).

Episode synopsis:71% of images uploaded online are now AI-generated. Over half of all internet traffic isn’t human anymore. And the average 18-year-old will spend 25 years of their life scrolling. Ross Thorpe isn’t just worried about it — he built something to fight it. In this conversation, we dig into the research behind AI’s effect on how we think, what “authentic” even means anymore, and whether a human-only corner of the internet is a real business or a beautiful idea that can’t scale. It’s a conversation about trust, attention, and what we’re actually giving up every time we open an app.

If you’ve ever felt like the internet stopped feeling human — this one’s for you.

🎧 Listen above, or find The Sunday Draft on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

🎬 Watch the full episode on YouTube.

For 33 years, Amjad Tadros was the man CBS News and 60 Minutes relied on to get the story — the fixer who arranged access, built trust, and quietly made the impossible interviews happen across Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Yemen, and beyond. He covered every Iraq war from 1990 to 2003, worked alongside legends like Ed Bradley, Bob Simon, and Mike Wallace, and even became an accidental, unwitting favorite of Saddam Hussein after a chance encounter as a young engineer turned translator.

In this conversation, Amjad Tadros — now a date farmer in Jordan’s Jordan Valley — talks about his book The Fixer, his front-row seat to three decades of Middle East history, and why he believes today’s conflicts (including the current war with Iran) are eerie repeats of 2003. We get into the real cost of war beyond the headlines, the misunderstandings between the West and the Arab world, the death of legacy journalism, and what it’s actually like to live a few miles from a falling missile.

A rare, honest look at the region from someone who was actually there.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube @TheSundayDraft— subscribe for new episodes every week.

Two months ago, a satirical jab at India’s Chief Justice — who called Gen Z’s unemployed youth “cockroaches” — sparked an online joke. That joke became the Cockroach Janata Party, and the joke became a movement: peaceful protests across India’s major cities, weeks of hunger strikes at Jantar Mantar, and a single demand — the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over years of leaked national exam papers and the students who paid the price for it.

This week, the story took a turn. Environmentalist and educator Sonam Wangchuk, twenty days into a hunger strike in solidarity with the protesters, was removed from the site before dawn — quietly, and disguised as a medical procedure. He’s continuing his fast in hospital. It’s the first real reaction from the Modi government after weeks of silence.

Raj is joined by returning co-host Kanti Kumar to unpack what’s actually happening on the ground: the significance of Jantar Mantar as one of the only sanctioned protest sites in Delhi, the long and complicated history of hunger strikes as a tool of Indian protest — from Gandhi to Anna Hazare to the farmers’ movement — and what happens when that tool meets a government unwilling to bend. They talk about the risk of the movement turning violent, why it hasn’t, and why empathy — or the absence of it — might be the real story here.

It’s part news update, part reflection on what democracy owes its citizens between elections. And with a march to Parliament reportedly on the horizon, this might just be the beginning of the next phase.

🎥 Watch on YouTube:

Cover photo by Monojit Dutta on Unsplash.

Democratic socialism is on the rise in America — and it all traces back to one election. Zohran Mamdani becoming Mayor of New York City kicked off a wave of politicians breaking from traditional Democratic politics toward democratic socialism. But what actually IS democratic socialism, and how does it differ from capitalism, traditional socialism, and fascism?

On this episode of The Sunday Draft, I sit down with Dr. Doug Cardell — economist, educator, U.S. veteran, former congressional aide, corporate CEO, and author of the bestseller “Why Socialism Struggles: Exposing the Economic Errors That Undermine Utopian Ideals” — to unpack it all.

We cover:

* Why Dr. Cardell believes no economy can be centrally planned (the “complex systems” argument) — 3:34

* A real-time report card on Mamdani’s first 100 days — rent freezes, city-run grocery stores, and whether they’ll actually work — 21:01

* The U-Haul Growth Index debate: is New York really seeing a mass exodus? — 27:30

* Why Dr. Cardell argues fascism and socialism are closer to each other than people think — and why capitalism isn’t the same thing as government — 30:59

* Five concrete reforms Dr. Cardell proposes to fix American politics regardless of your ideology: bill expiration dates, supermajority requirements, single-issue bills, restricting lobbying dollars, and fair redistricting — 34:46

* Kerala, India (my home state) as a real-world 70-year experiment in democratic socialism — and why voters just ended it — 39:52

* Why he wrote his book, and what he thinks is really at stake for the U.S. — 41:48

This is a respectful, substantive debate between two people who don’t fully agree — and that’s the point. Whatever side of this you’re on, I think you’ll walk away understanding the argument better.

Get Dr. Cardell’s book “Why Socialism Struggles” on Amazon.

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Everyone’s spending big on AI coding tools — but is anyone actually measuring if it’s working?

In this episode, we’re joined by Brenn Hill, a Berlin-based engineering leader and author of “The Delivery Gap,” to break down the AI ROI myth: why token-based pricing is nearly useless for real business planning, why companies like Uber and Microsoft have pulled back on major AI investments, and the three-part framework (cost, verification, intent clarity) Brenn uses to actually measure whether AI is paying off.

We also talk about:

* Why AI gets you “80% of the way there” — and why that’s not the same as production-ready

* Machine catch rate vs. change failure rate, and why they matter more than token counts

* Why tokens can’t be compared across AI providers or even across tasks

* What it’s like navigating Berlin’s housing crisis as an American expat

* Entrepreneurial culture differences between the US, Vietnam, and Australia

Brenn’s book, “The Delivery Gap,” lays out the research behind what’s actually working (and mostly not) in AI-assisted software delivery — plus practical roadmaps for engineering leaders and individual contributors navigating this shift.

📖 Get the book: “The Delivery Gap” — available on Amazon

🔗 Connect with Brenn Hill on LinkedIn

🎥 Watch on YouTube:

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Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro & catching up with Brenn in Berlin

08:00 – The AI ROI myth

12:00 – Why tokens are a useless cost metric

17:00 – The cost/verification/intent-clarity framework

24:00 – Machine catch rate & change failure rate

52:00 – About “The Delivery Gap” and where to find it