Ted Audio Collective. You're listening to Ted Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu.
Entrepreneur Farhad Mohit, like so many of us in America, is multicultural.
And that reality means something to our identities and our psyches.
He reflects on being both Iranian and American, and ultimately the many dualities that make us human in his 2024 talk after the break.
These days we're surrounded by photo editing programs.
Have you ever wondered what something or someone actually looks like under all the manipulation?
It's me, Elise, and this October I'm giving a Ted Talk in Atlanta about finding true beauty in a sea of artificial images.
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Visit go.ted.com. TedNext to get your pass today.
And now our Ted Talk of the day.
I am so honored to be on stage representing Ted's growing recognition of the importance of its immigrant diaspora community.
I am an Iranian American, a kind of free-range Iranian.
Lucky to be here with all you and free to embrace all my native cultures, positive elements, the poetry, the music, philosophy, and hospitality every day in ways that many Iranians inside Iran cannot.
But I also love having the bow of my identity stretch between two seemingly opposed poles of Iranian and American, because that gives the arrow of my life a unique perspective on things.
I want to share a couple of American ideals that explicate this multicultural dichotomy in me.
The first is independence.
In America, independence is foundational, the bedrock of our freedom that makes us all, all us Americans, feel exceptional.
Unlike my Iranian side where everyone is in everyone's business, I'm free, maybe even driven to pursue my own happiness, and that feels so liberating.
The other is continuous improvement, the idea that you can always do better.
America is a duocracy that is always reinventing herself.
We make mistakes and keep on growing and growing.
That's why it's so exciting to be an entrepreneur in America.
We're free to try to build anything our hearts desire.
For me these days, it's taking on our corrupt political duopoly and working to democratize democracy itself.
Isn't it amazing that as an American I just get to do that without fear or permission?
But I'm Iranian too, and I have the ancient wisdom of Iranian mystics, Ferdowsi, Hafiz, and Rumi running through my veins.
So each of these American traits give my Iranian psyche cause for pause and reflection.
For instance, independence is great, but if I'm truly independent, then I don't need anything or anyone.
That's kind of lonely. Iranians are congenitally hospitable and tribal.
In fact, the word Iran itself is a portmanteau of the word ear and on, where ear comes from the word yar, literally friendship or love, and on comes from Ostane or land of.
Shout out to our cultural cousins from ear, land, another land of love.
Anyway, where does this love and friendship fit into my Statue of Liberty-esque freedom-loving American psyche?
Love requires connection and interdependence, as we found out earlier.
And interdependence is well kind of an American.
After all, Americans never had a declaration of interdependence.
MUSIC And now, back to the episode.
So my Iranian side begs for me to differ here.
As my beloved Sufi uncle Bezad used to say, love is the ether the universe swims in.
So without love, we literally have nothing.
So to be independent or to be in love, that is the cross-cultural question for me.
And what about the American ideal of continuous improvement?
That seems downright productive if you ask my American side, but again, my Iranian side disagrees.
I remember a magnet on my mom's fridge.
If you're ever going to be happy, you must be happy now, hinting at a tiny existential problem it's always now.
And of course, we have the Iranian mystic poet Rumi imploring us in old after-odd to get drunk and out of our minds so we can become blissfully present in the wow of now.
So should I work to create a better future?
Or be drunk and happy now?
Another multicultural paradox?
Or is it? Maybe I've been setting up a false dichotomy all along.
There's no real Iranian or American on the stage here in me.
After all, I'm not some LLM trained in a lab on a discrete set of cultural memes.
I am that still magical, mystical fractal of universal consciousness known as human being.
I am at a point, thank you, a point at the center and circumference of the infinite sphere as my favorite author, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges once wrote.
And as a magical, mystical life, an MML, we humans are uniquely free to embody whatever useful paradoxes we find whenever it suits us.
We can choose to be culturally American or Iranian or both, no matter where we are from, and can even have a favorite author who's neither.
And as an MML, we can simultaneously be both independent and free while deeply connected by love to everyone and everything.
Always striving for a better future while also happy together here now.
Wow. That was Farhad Mohit at TED 2024.
Thank you for listening.
