The story of our journey to Collapse Life

Here's why the faces and names behind the content here at Collapse Life haven't always been obvious. Until now.

It’s funny how one’s identity can become wrapped up in what we do for a living — sometimes without even noticing.

A few weeks ago, I was invited as a guest on a YouTube show called ‘A few minutes with Peter Grandich’ — yes, the good ol’ Whiz Kid of Wall Street! Only after he published the interview did I realize that my Zoom name was listed as FLCCC_Zahra.

That on-screen moniker included FLCCC because, up until very recently (yesterday, actually) I was the Senior Director of Communications for the FLCCC Alliance, a medical organization started by Drs. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory to fight for things like informed consent and repurposed drugs during the craziness of the pandemic. The organization they founded, FLCCC, is in the midst of a transition right now and henceforth, I am no longer affiliated with it. 

What that means is that I’m free to devote my full attention to building this channel and growing the community around Collapse Life. And as we grow, I recognize that many of our readers and viewers want us to do a better job of telling our own story.

Here’s why that’s been hard — until now.

My husband, Stephen, and I are the core team at Collapse Life (for the moment, until we can grow). We both have Masters degrees in journalism, and had the great fortune of being taught by old school (think heavy drinking, heavy smoking, burning-the-midnight-oil to hit deadline) journalists who told us over and over again: “you are not the story.” We learned from these stalwarts of the biz that a reporter’s job is to gather information objectively and record and report the facts. Full stop. We try never to betray that credo, though we have increasingly found that in order to be relevant in a very different media landscape today, this can no longer be a hard-and-fast rule; suffice it to say, we have a viewpoint. The two of us currently co-author all the stories you read.

Even though Collapse Life is more blog than old-school journalism, we still find it hard to talk about ourselves unless absolutely necessary. But we also realize that a bit of background can be helpful in contextualizing the articles we write and the content we create.

So today I’m here, writing under my own byline, to share that recent conversation with Peter Grandich mentioned above. I was honored to be invited on his podcast and briefly told the story of how Stephen and I came to start this Substack. We hope you enjoy and we’re so grateful to all of you for taking the time to read our posts! Your support means everything to us and we look forward to interacting more and stepping up content and outreach in the coming weeks and months ahead.

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