#64: Ancient Wisdom for a New Future: Culture, Women, and the Path to Liberation – Pardis Mahdavi
In this episode of the Love Conquers Fear podcast, host Brett interviews scholar‑activist Pardis Mahdavi. The conversation weaves personal narrative with cultural history, exploring how encounters with the divine—through meditation, ecstatic dance, and psychedelic journeys—have helped Mahdavi survive severe personal crises, including depression, suicide attempts, divorce, and professional setbacks. They discuss the role of ancient spiritual traditions, especially the historic presence of women as healers and "councils of grandmothers" in Persia, Africa, and indigenous cultures, contrasting that legacy with the currently male‑dominated Western psychedelic discourse. Mahdavi offers concrete safety advice for women considering psychedelic work, emphasizing mentorship, gender‑balanced facilitation, and community support. The dialogue also touches on the risk of spiritual ego, the importance of humility, integration practices, and the broader vision of using love‑centered consciousness to shape technology and societal transformation. Throughout, both speakers maintain a conversational, reflective tone, expressing enthusiasm, vulnerability, and a hopeful optimism about collective healing.
Chapters
It always just keeps underscoring for me the importance of culture. People say, like, in the corporate world, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I'm like, yeah, culture can also eat progress for breakfast, or it can launch it. This moment of awakening that we're in right now, these questions we're asking around consciousness, we are creating a new culture. And so it's kind of on us to decide, like, what is that culture going to be?
Welcome back everybody to the Love Conquers Fear podcast. I am back from Bali where I was at a meditation retreat for Siddha Maha Yoga, which is led by a guru named Guruji out of India. And this is a practice that was introduced to me by Neeraj Mehta. He was on episode 47. Of the podcast, an amazing, amazing soul. That was amazing episode. But wow, am I radiating a lot of gratitude right now? It was incredible to be out there. It was my first time to Bali, and just a really good group of people. Fifty of us were there, and doing multiple meditations a day, and then satsang, which is where you're. discussing, you know, any questions you have with Guruji. He is a beautiful soul. One of the highlights for me is that I took him through The Lattice, my science fiction novella, and especially the last part of that. You can, by the way, get that for free on episode 27 of the podcast. It's kind of fun to watch me read it because at the end I decode quite a bit of it for you. There's a lot of hidden gems in there that you might not pick up. But I took him through The Lattice, and the final part of it is on God's infinite plan, which is what God— it's me grappling with. I mean, I can't obviously understand the nature of God, and even by the year 2085 in The Lattice, we don't understand the nature of God. But it's me grappling with what is God trying to do through us and through other species all throughout the universe. And he actually agreed with what I wrote in there, which is pretty cool because, you know, he's someone who spent his entire life in this lineage, which dates back thousands of years in India, whereas I have not spent that much time. I've been building companies for 30 years, but on a voracious reading binge for the last 16, 17 months, as well as writing my own book, Love Conquers Fear, with the subtitle Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance for All. And this is a very special episode today because when you watch this— I'm recording it well in advance— the book will have gone live actually today on June 23rd. So wow, it's really cool. Thank you. I have the synchronicity of having this guest on today. It's been a long time in the making and we had to reschedule it because of an illness. But it's really, really cool that this is finally happening. So I want to welcome Pardis Mahdavi.
Thank you so much.
I'm so excited to be here. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here.
Oh, what an honor. I'm thrilled to be here.
The Gabby Puller Train It continues of her introducing me to amazing people.
Yes.
And tonight, um, we're going to Arena Hall, which, uh, was founded by a very good friend of mine, Evan Baer.
Okay.
It's really incredible what, what Arena Hall is becoming. I was, uh, I was at a recent event during South by Southwest where Brian Hubbard and Governor Perry and Marcus Luttrell were hosting a discussion for donors for the Americans for Ibogaine Initiative. And that lunch, I have to tell you, like, Brian Hubbard at that lunch was so animated. And this was well before President Trump's executive order to fast-track psychedelic-assisted therapy and research. But he was pounding the table, and he's a big man. Yes. And he was like pounding the table. and was so fired up. They had just finished speaking at South by Southwest. That talk now is live. I'll actually put a link to that in the show notes.
Oh, excellent. Yeah, I mean, I've heard Brian speak a number of times. I've met him, you know, and he's so fired up about this. I love the passion. I love the dedication.
He's a force of nature. And, you know, Governor Perry, like, is also just, like, absolutely determined to save these vets.
Yeah,
yeah. So Arena Hall is really becoming quite a special place. I mean, Yeah. I was just at a consciousness discussion there with the dean of the liberal arts school, which is hosting Gabby's consciousness conference, which is coming up in November.
Right.
And that was a very interesting discussion with a very good friend of mine, Patrick McKenna.
Oh, fabulous.
He was one of the co-hosts for the dinner that we had for Governor Perry and Brian Hubbard on September 11th of last year.
Oh, wow.
It was one of the first kind of fundraisers for the Americans for Ibogaine Initiative.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
That's great. Yeah, I love seeing the groundswell of support for this initiative. Yeah. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for one of the documentaries on ibogaine. I was interviewed with Rick Perry. So they interviewed me and then they interviewed Governor Perry. And so I got to sit there as he spoke and just even sitting in the room and listening to him talk about his passion for this topic, I think everybody was tearing up a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's— I definitely teared up when I woke up to that executive order. I was just like, I can't believe this is happening. It's— I would've never thought that it would happen. I know, I know. We've just been in total stagnation since the Nixon administration on these therapies, which can be transformational for people, especially like, I mean, ibogaine, I've never done an ibogaine journey, but, you know, if you're really suffering from PTSD, it's actually one of the first things I would recommend to people if they're really suffering, like someone that's suicidal or alcoholic or opioid addict, 'cause it's a very intimidating journey to contemplate.
It is, it is.
I mean, it's— It does not sound fun.
No, I try to explain to people that, you know, if mushrooms are like, high school, and, you know, ayahuasca is like college, ibogaine is like PhD-level psychedelics or psychonautics. So it's, it's kind of right there at that top.
Right, right. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, I've heard, I've heard that from PhDs, that writing the dissertation is just like a pain in the
ass. Yeah, but, you know, you're always happy on the other side of it.
You're happy on— and that's very much like ibogaine.
Exactly. That's from what I've heard as well.
Yeah. Well, that was an amazing episode with Brian Hubber. That was episode 53 of the podcast, and he, uh, It was maddening to hear how much opposition he faced and how much it just broke his heart and it broke my heart hearing it through him in terms of how much the opioid pandemic, I'll call it, has really ravaged America, especially poorer communities in America. It's just absolutely wrong. I agree. So, I mean, obviously we know what happened with the Sacklers and everything else. So, you're You're like international woman of mystery in terms of your background. And we were just talking with our oldest daughter and talking about your PhD, triple master's, triple majors in undergrad. Yeah. I mean, she's a triple major right now at Tulane. But as you look at, you know, what you're doing now, like, and we go back in the time machine to the young Pardis, like, how do you, How do you look at what you're doing now and why it makes sense in terms of the arc of your life today?
Yeah, and that's, I mean, I love that Steve Jobs quote, right? You can only connect the dots looking backwards.
That's the best commencement speech ever.
Ever.
It's funny, I went deep on the history for that. He did not wanna give it at all. As a matter of fact, he almost backed out the day before. They didn't know if he was gonna show up. Oh,
wow.
Because he was just like, why on earth did I agree to do this? It's total pain in the ass. nobody's gonna like it. Like, my, you know, my failure rate here could be very high. Like, I don't know why I put myself out there like this. But he— and he rewrote the whole speech the night before.
Wow. Well, it's definitely transformational.
Right. It's the best of all times.
Sure, he was connecting those dots as he was writing it. For sure. No, I love that. I love that. Yeah. Well, so, you know, in my case, I, as an undergraduate, you know, much like your daughter, I was insanely curious, you know, and I just had this voracious appetite for understanding and learning and all of that. And I think that actually goes back to being Iranian American. And I think, you know, so my parents came here during the revolution.
Yeah, that's amazing.
You know, my mom left Iran when she was 8 months pregnant with me.
Wow.
And, you know, had no idea what was on the other side.
Yeah.
Other than hope for liberation. Yeah. You know, and so she grabbed her suitcase, my dad, I, you know, and there she is, this pregnant belly, and she's like, well, we have no idea what's going to happen in this country, but we're going to go and seek out, you know, liberation on the other side here. And so for me growing up, you know, it was always a little bit challenging to see images of Iran, you know, and the way in which Iran was talked about here in the United States, you know, Iran-Contra, Iran hostage crisis, that very, like, you know, Great Satan kind of Axis of Evil rhetoric about Iran. And then looking at Iran images or even, you know, videos, et cetera, of people burning American flags. And I'm like, okay. Mm-hmm. So if Iran and America are constantly at war, what does that mean for those of us who are Iran and America citizens? in one body. And so I think that, you know, and I know we've talked about this, growing up Iranian American and growing up, you know, Muslim in this country, you learn from a very early age to code switch, to constantly shapeshift, and to constantly be bridging things and putting things together as a way of sense-making or meaning-making. Mm-hmm. So when I went to college, yeah, I was like, okay, I'm studying diplomacy, which made sense. French literature, because I was so enamored with literature on sexuality and embodiment. You know, members of my family are Sufis, and so that kind of embodied that relationship of love and the divine and embodied practices.
I love Sufism, and I love Rumi. Actually, Rumi's in the Love Conquers Fear book.
Oh my gosh, I love that.
I can't wait to read it. The poetry is just amazing. I mean, it really hits my soul. It's amazing.
Because it comes from his soul.
Actually, I'm getting chills just saying that.
Yeah. Well, because I think Rumi understood what you're— that Rumi was love, embodied love. And so much of the poetry channels that love and is wanting to spread that.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's so beautiful is that that synchronous root, you know, Jesus was love, you know, Moses was love, like, you know, Gandhi was love, you know, Mandela was love. I mean, there's like so much to be said on the bodhisattvas throughout time that have come here to really change society.
Yes.
I think there's a lot of them alive today, and, you know, Here we are in the penultimate moment. We'll get into all that, but it's so—
Yes, we will, yeah.
But Rumi was definitely a massive part of like helping humanity awake.
I couldn't agree more. You know, I grew up on Rumi and Hafez. I grew up with Hafez. It still is on my bedside table. I still read Hafez poetry before I go to bed. I still do. There's a kind of a process that we call, you know, Hafez fortune telling. And so you basically ask the book a question and you let it fall open and the answer is in the poem.
Wow.
And I do that, you know, still when my kids have a question, when I have an existential question, I turn to either Rumi or Hafiz.
That's so cool.
And the answers are often there. So
there's your synchronicity, your daily synchronicity.
My daily, I know, which I just love. I love, you know, these synchronicities are the greatest gift. They are. It's the, you know, I call those the God winks that make you quite certain you're on the right path.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's so fun. Like sometimes it makes me laugh out loud that the divine is being playful.
Yes.
Sometimes, like, mischievous, you know?
Yes.
And sometimes just, like, hitting you in the head and saying, wake up, Pardis.
Swear words in the eyes. Yes, I've definitely had those too. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. But, yeah, so, you know, I studied French and diplomacy and then dance because, you know, that was a pathway to the divine, you know, for Sufis. And I was always very, very interested in that kind of embodied practices and the crossover then between dance and sexuality and kind of these questions about the body and how much the body knows. One of the things that always resonates with me, one of these quotes is, they say, the soul conceives, the brain receives, the mind perceives. And so the— I
love that.
The goal of dropping into your body is get rid of the mind so that the brain can receive what your soul is conceiving. And in our culture, it's taught that dance or whirling, like whirling dervishes, is the quickest way to kind of just get into that gamma state or a flow state so that your brain can receive what your soul is conceiving.
Yeah.
And so I was always trying to find words to put onto the ineffable back then. And yeah, triple major. And then I went to Columbia and did a PhD in medical anthropology, which sounds really esoteric, But really, it's about kind of the relationship between the soul, the mind, the body, and questions around consciousness.
All right, all right. Have you ever met Brian Morescu?
No.
Do you know he wrote The Immortality Key? I'm sure you know that book.
I do know the book, yes.
He was on episode, I think it was 48 of the podcast, but he and you should know each other 'cause it's like, you know, with your background and his background.
Yes.
'Cause he had a near-death experience that he disclosed on the podcast. It was the first time he actually ever publicly Wow. And it led to his life's calling, but he, like, super academic, like he had to learn fluent Greek, fluent Latin. The Bible was written in Greek because that was the language at the time.
Right.
And he's like, it reads very differently when you read it actually in Greek. was in the catacombs of the Vatican, like decoding, you know, what was in the ancient chalice and all this. And how actually how much women were demonized. Women were actually the carriers of the formula. And a lot of them were treated as witches and burned. It was horrible.
Yeah.
But he was the one that decoded that the rise of the Catholic Church really demonized that practice of communion with the divine and was like, we're gonna tell you what God is and here's the box and anything else has gotta go. And anyways, he's someone you should know.
Oh, I love the book. I would love to meet him.
He's based in DC, so you're going to DC all the time.
Really? Oh, well, connect us, yeah. I love the book. I think it's phenomenal. It's amazing. I think it's phenomenal. It definitely changed the way I saw a lot of things. And it resonated with a lot of what I had studied. I studied much more the Persian texts, And then the Vedic texts. I became very interested in those questions around sexuality. And so I looked into, when I say the word tantra, it's gonna take a certain meaning to, you know, Western audiences. But, you know, the ancient practice of tantra is that deep meditative embodied flow state, you know? And then I got very interested in the intersections of like the Indian traditions and the Persian traditions and kind of got to follow those threads as well.
I'm sure you found a ton of synchronicity.
A ton. To train them, yeah. A ton. And then, you know, just going back to what you're saying, you know, about the church, et cetera, it always just keeps underscoring for me the importance of culture and how, you know, people say like in the corporate world, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I'm like, yeah, culture can also eat progress for breakfast or it can launch it. And that's why I think this moment of awakening that we're in right now, these questions we're asking around consciousness, we are creating a new culture. And so it's kind of on us to decide, like, what is that culture going to be?
100%, yeah. I mean, the 3rd arc of Love Conquers Fear, the book, is all about how does humanity transform. And so I start out with chapter 11, which is on risk, like what are risks to our ability to do that or not? Chapter 12 is on what is our reality, where I decoded over 75 books I've read and try to grasp at that.
Yeah.
As well as discuss psychedelic journeys. And then chapter 13 is on the inner journey and how you can transform yourself to be like Neo in The Matrix, because otherwise you're just constantly whipsawed by— if you just sit back and just wait for stuff to be pushed at you, We live in a place where, you know, I don't believe in The Matrix as a movie. It's a great movie, but in terms of real life, but I believe we've created a form of The Matrix here where we're like trying to constantly, well, mainly the algorithms have been programmed into the media and social media, et cetera, trying to constantly scare us. Mm-hmm. And you could just get depressed all the time. Oh yeah. You know, and if you think about it, the majority of things happening in the world are acts of love and beauty. But you wouldn't know that if you just sat back and just waited to receive a bunch of stuff from these algorithms, which are just trying to maximize one thing.
Yep.
Engagement.
That's right.
Like, they wanna keep you clicking on the ads and they wanna keep you as a subscriber.
Right.
And there's so many amazing stories that are happening every single day. And that's, that's part of the reason I started a newsletter called the Superfecta Signal, which is all the news that I wanted to read.
Yeah.
That was being buried by the algorithms.
Yeah.
I couldn't find unless I went like deeply searching for it.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's for the same reason I started my own Substack, because I, you know, I know you and I have talked about this before, like I see our reality as, I call it the conversation. And so there's synchronicities. That's a way of being in conversation with this version of reality, right? That we're really all one, but we have these illusions of separation. The conversation is those constant reminders. I will say a word and then that word comes up 3 times throughout my day by 3 different people. Or I think about all the people that you and I both know in common from such different walks of life. Yeah. I mean, that's the conversation in action, you know? And I think that if you just kind of sit back and you're like, well, you know, everything's falling apart, You're not an active part of the conversation, meaning you're not an active creator of what this agreed-upon hunch that we call reality is.
That's right. Yeah. And, and we, you know, through quantum physics, we can shape our reality. Like, we know that that's true. The ancient mystics knew that that was true. They didn't know what to call it. They didn't call it like quantum physics or something, right? But, uh, that's why, you know, Max Planck and Einstein became more spiritual as a result of their discoveries there. They're like, how How is it possible the ancient mystics knew that this was the case? We have to focus on manifesting the reality that we want. We've got to build that.
And we also, as we do that, we can thread together and braid together different themes, right? So back to your daughter's triple major, these are 3 themes that are really all part of one story. And, you know, people ask me all the time, like, your work is so wide-ranging. You're an expert on Iran. You're an expert on AI and education, and like, that's exploding. Iran is exploding. AI and higher education is exploding. And then you're, you know, you're an expert on psychedelics. Like, what do these things have to do with each other? And I'm like, everything. It's 3 news cycles, but it's one story. And the story is revolutions start in culture. Do you wanna be a part of the creation and the creativity that goes into building this reality?
Yeah, and, you know, being a Jewish guy, It's both Iran and Israel.
Absolutely, 100%.
Like, it absolutely is because one of the most painful times in my life has been, and I know that you've faced so much pain, and I mean, I can't even imagine your parents going through, like, getting out of there during the revolution and coming here, and coming here probably with nothing. Nothing, just one bag packed. And also, like, all types of, Probably faced all types of discrimination too. Like, where'd you come from? You know, that type of thing. But man, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, like what happened, I had nightmares for months.
Yeah.
I really did. Because I just kept on, you know, I never watched the videos because I could not have that in my brain.
The images.
But I read a couple of stories. I shouldn't even have done that. And I've got, I'm sure you have a lot of Iranian friends. I have a lot of Jewish, or you probably have a lot of Persian friends. I have a lot of Jewish friends. And you probably know more Muslim women than I do, et cetera. And so a lot was pushed to me, like, can you believe they did this and that? I was like, oh my gosh, don't even tell me that.
Yeah.
So it was, so I'd have nightmares just about like, what if that happened to my family? Yeah.
Yeah, and it is frightening, you know, it is frightening. And that's— I think that's what happens when people make decisions from a suffering state. You know, my teachers in India, my gurus, they teach us, you know, there's really only 2 states, a suffering state or a beautiful state. There's no— you're either in a beautiful state or a suffering state.
This is also love or fear.
Exactly. That's exactly right. And whenever you make decisions from a suffering state, it's usually not a good decision.
Right, right.
Whether it's at the micro scale, you know, whether it's, you know, I erupt at my 13-year-old because he's done something on the way to school, that was probably not a great decision on my part, but I made the decision on a suffering state, you know, or whether it's now we're talking about a country, you know, when I think about like the regime in Iran and the brutality of the regime, and, you know, I'm just like you, I'm haunted by, you know, 88,000 people have been killed in the last 3 months. That is haunting.
I didn't even know the number was that high. I've heard very different figures all over the map. It's like literally one news story to the next are quoting different figures, but that— and it's really horrible what's happened to women there. I mean, that's like really, really horrible because I see like the old photos of pre-this regime and they're just on the beach like you and me. Like, this look like Americans or something.
No, I mean, there's this very famous quote from a French designer, Yves Saint Laurent, and he said, after the runways of Paris, it's the streets of Tehran. This was back, you know, pre-revolution in the '60s. He said, you know, the Iranian women were wearing the miniskirts, you know, they were high fashion, very rich culture. And then, you know, everything changed so quickly. And so what's been happening to women these last 47 years. I mean, it's incredibly tragic. And yet at the same time, back to that sort of you create your own reality, it's also incredibly inspiring. Mm-hmm, sure. You know, like for me, one of the books I wrote, it's called Book of Queens, and it's a story about my grandmother who was a sharpshooter on horseback. And she helped to smuggle women from Iran, women who were in domestic violence situations, from Iran to Afghanistan on horseback. By getting the horses drunk on homemade whiskey, that's another story. Those women formed an all-female army that then fought the Taliban and actually bred and trained the horses that the United States Green Berets used to fight the Taliban during the War on Terror. So that's kind of my connection to the veteran community. But the reason I mentioned that book is because for me, that's such an important story of strength and hope. And in this country, when we hear the word intergenerational, it's usually something really negative that comes after. It's like intergenerational trauma or intergenerational poverty. And I was like, what about intergenerational strength?
Yeah.
And intergenerational resistance.
I was just thinking your grandmother might be one of the most badass people I've ever heard of.
Oh, she totally was a badass. And then I, you know, when I started to then look back into the, you know, the history of the Persian Empire and these horsewomen warriors who literally built the Persian Empire on horseback. Wow. You know, there's all these stories about them. And I'm like, I have the blood of women warriors coursing through my veins. You know, I have a choice. I can sit here and be like, I'm a poor Persian woman and we're so oppressed or whatever. Or I can be like, yeah, but look at the badass lineage I come from.
Right, right.
You know? And so we see that—
I'd say what you've achieved here is pretty badass already. I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know how many people I've had. Actually, I think you have to be the first on the podcast which has achieved so much even academically and written 10 books too. Yeah. I don't think I've had anybody on that's written 10 books. Really? No. I mean, Brian Morescu was amazing.
Yes.
And his book was an all-star success and like really changed the conversation.
Yes.
But I'm pretty sure it's the only book he's written. Like, I think he's, I think he's going to write one more.
Well, yes, maybe we'll all look at it.
But it is his life's work. It is his life's work. I mean, he literally, to write that book, he had to do so much study even to get to the point to be able to even do that.
Yeah. Well, it shows. I mean, that's such a well— Oh, yeah.
So well done.
Well done book and masterful, and it's transformed so many lives. That's what I always think about when I'm writing is I want the reader to feel inspired. I want the reader to maybe change the way they look at something. The hallmark of anthropology is make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. So it's like, can you shift how you're looking at something? Can you shift how you're experiencing something? And that's really kind of the undergirding theme for my books.
What are some other books that you've written that you're really proud of? I mean, I'm sure you're proud of all of them, but like the ones that really stand out in your mind as having had the biggest impact?
Yeah, I would say probably my first one, Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution. You can probably tell from the title that that was a somewhat controversial book.
Right.
I wrote the first ethnographic study of post-revolutionary Iran. I was the first anthropologist to go in there. Wow. And I went to Iran to study the women's movement, and I got there and I was exposed to this youth movement that they called Sexual Revolution or Engelabegensi, which was young people who disagreed with the regime, like many did, and they were using their bodies to speak back to the regime. They were using their sexuality and their bodies as a communicative signal to a regime that they were not happy with. Right. Because this is a regime that came to power under a fabric of morality. They came to power saying, you know, Iran has become West-toxicated, you know, no more of these miniskirts and no more of any of that. We're gonna change Iran for Iranians, and we're going to exert our control on bodies, predominantly women's bodies. And an entire generation decided to fight back, but not with weapons or guns, but with love, right? With their bodies and saying, I'm going to love who I want. I'm going to be who I want to be. I'm going to push the envelope and be out in the world in the way that I want to be. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is the kind of resistance and revolution that I can get behind. Right. So yeah, I mean, that—
How did they do that though, like without— I mean, 'cause, you know, I don't know that much about Iran, and I know from being in Israel multiple times that the stories written over here about Israel are very different than when you're on the ground there. And they tend to be a lot more negative here than what you're actually seeing with your own eyes.
Same.
So, I mean, you know, my perception is like, Oh my gosh, if they do that, they're going to be captured and tortured and all this stuff.
Well, I mean, so yes, and they still did it anyway. So the story that I love, we called it the Summer of the Cockroaches. So in 2004, I was part of all these women's organizing, this women's organization movement, underground movement. And this is going to seem trite, but But I think this is a really helpful example. So that July, up until that point, if you went out in the street with open-toed shoes or painted toenails or painted nails, the punishment was that the morality police, and that's really what they were, the morality police, they would take you in. Right. They would dip your hands in buckets of cockroaches and set cockroaches loose on your feet. And then somebody had a brilliant idea. They're like, Well, if we all go out in open-toed shoes with red toenails and red— there aren't enough cockroaches in all of Iran.
Oh, that's funny.
So that's what we did. We all went out on the same day. Now you might be like, okay, so what? So now you can walk around in flip-flops, big deal. And it's like, it actually is a big deal because we were able to push back. The same thing with the headscarf. So the headscarf, you know, it was supposed to only show the oval part, and that's what people think that it is. And then the youth movement, which sort of I was documenting at the time, they were the youth. We called them the Children of the Revolution, which is me too. That's those of us born during the revolution. Sure. We're the Children of the Revolution. Our children, we call them Children of the Resistance. So we're Children of the Revolution, they're Children of the Resistance, and this is absolutely an intergenerational movement. So like my daughter is 15, like the 15-year-olds have taken over and they are standing up in powerful ways. But so back then when I was studying, this is, you know, 1999, 2000 to 2007, you know, going out with the headscarf pushed back was a risk. Going out in red lipstick, you could get your lips slashed with a razor. But people still did it anyway. That was how they pushed the envelope constantly. It was just 1 millimeter at a time pushing the headscarf back until, you know, then it was no headscarf at all.
Right.
So it's been a constant dance where, yes, these things are punishable, which is what makes it so much more important, you know? People used to say, like, you're writing about red lipstick, you know, this notion of a lipstick jihad or what have you. But what if it's just a fashion choice? And how I would explain it to people in the United States is, yes, but remember, like, in the 1960s, rocking an Afro was seen as a political statement. So yeah, maybe you did that 'cause you wanted to look good, but it also meant something. Right. And so because there are consequences, it becomes a political act. And every political act then is about building a new culture. Right? So that's why I keep coming back to, right, revolutions start in culture. This movement was about creating a different Iranian culture that was rooted in agency, that was rooted in kind of having ownership of your body and making your own decisions, and kind of going back to Persia and Rumi. I mean, back to all of that. Right, sure. And saying, you know, this regime doesn't get to take the divine and the mystical from us. Right, right. We want to reclaim it. Yeah, 100%. And so, you know, what we saw in 2022, Women, Life, Freedom, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, that movement, I mean, that movement, you know, was and is a curriculum, you know, for liberation.
It's a way that all acts start. I mean, you know, from the way civil rights started here in America to the rise of Gandhi and just overwhelming the British by sheer number. And it is true that if enough Iranians did that, then there would not be any power in the regime. It's just, it's getting it to tip over between people being fearful of what's gonna happen. And there's real fear there. Yeah. I mean, there's real danger. There's real danger. 88,000, right? Yeah. That's a big, big number of people that were executed.
Yeah, but they still go into the streets and protest. So there's real fear, but there's also real courage.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
And like, let's not forget to celebrate that. Like, in the face of that, people are still out there protesting right now.
Yeah, no, I love that. And, you know, I very much I am at a place where just even scientifically, like we're 99.9% genetically identical. We're all part of the divine. I know that you and I agree on that just as we were talking in the past. And, you know, there's this illusion of separation. And so it's, you know, we all want the same thing. We all want like freedom, love, like, you know what I mean?
Liberation.
Yeah, it's the cultural constructs and, you know, There's extreme versions of those constructs, like authoritarian regimes, et cetera. And then there's the minor versions of those constructs. I mean, America has, like, quote unquote, a lot of freedoms, but the reality is there's a lot of things here that aren't great. There's like punching down on trans, for example. There's punching down broadly on different types of minority groups. Which is not helpful because we're an immigrant nation. Unless you're a Native American, which is like 1.5 million of our 350 million-plus population, you know, we're all immigrants.
Yeah.
I mean, we're all immigrants here. Like, this country, and, you know, the most successful immigrant population in America right now on this metric of financially successful, there's many ways to measure success, Is Indian Americans, actually. Indian Americans, yeah. It's actually not Jewish Americans. Like, we're up there, but it's Indian Americans that are the most financially successful. And, you know, we— and I mean, like, look at who the CEOs are of, like, just in my sector of tech.
Yeah, absolutely.
Almost all immigrants, right?
Yes.
In terms of, like, recent immigrants. Yes. Not just, like, you know, they've been here a long time immigrants.
Not, like, second, third. Yeah, absolutely. Right.
So there's just so many cultural constructs that we need to transcend. And that's a big part of my life calling with Love Conquers Fear is that what I've seen, you know, both through journeys as well as just intellectually and having been programming since I was 7 years old and being— I'm not good at a lot of things, but I am good at predicting where technology is going to go. I've always been able to see that very clearly.
Awesome.
And I see what's happening right now with AI, quantum computing, robotics, brain-computer interfaces, as, you know, what I call a super effect in the book, as basically breaking these constructs through technology and having us accelerate to the point where we will be able to glimpse and then see in sharper and sharper focus so much abundance that the old constructs cannot survive. Like, they cannot survive with abundance. Mm-hmm. I mean, part of the reason that our brains are wired for so much fear and scarcity and our amygdala is so highly developed is that we've only had electricity for 0.1% of our evolutionary time. As Homo sapiens. And it's even less than that if you say, well, we're derivative from hominids, which hominids have been around for 4 million years on an Earth that is 4.54 billion years old. So, you know, think about evolutionary time here. We're pretty recent.
It's like a drop in the bucket.
It's a drop in the bucket.
Yeah.
And so we, You know, we have a very highly developed fear center because we've dealt with scarcity, which you and I can't really imagine. There are people in Iran today that can imagine that.
Yes.
And there's countries that are much poorer than Iran, like Chad, you know, which I cover in the book, which has a GDP of $660 a person. And so they don't really have things like clean water, electricity, stable electricity, things like the internet, things like food, you know, things like healthcare.
Yes.
And so our ability to manifest abundance is never going to be more possible than it's going to be in the next 10 to 15 years. But again, it's a choice. Like, do we want that for each other? And it starts with an act of love and realizing that we all are the same.
Yes.
Like, we're all part of one.
The oneness.
Yeah, the oneness. And so when you start to actually have that perspective, and, you know, I got that perspective through psychedelic catalysts, but I would say I was always wired more to be a humanitarian.
Yeah.
And always wired more towards love. And that came from my mom, who just unconditionally loved me from the time— well, from the time I was born, but it really showed up in terms of her helping me discover my passion at age 7 and actually learning how to program with me.
Wow.
And then defending me unconditionally from a lot of people in Texas saying, including family members saying, you're ruining him. All he knows how to do is work on a computer. It wasn't obviously—
All he loves though.
Yeah, exactly. But she was like, he's found his passion, leave him alone.
Exactly.
And so, you know, we're gonna have these cultural constructs, I think, break down as we ride up this exponential curve. And we're gonna do it by necessity because the risk as we ride up that exponential curve is that if we don't do that, we face a great peril in terms of how powerful these technologies are. And how if we continue to play zero-sum games— and so it's this question of like, can we just manifest that reality through the light? Or do we have to go through great darkness to awaken? And I choose that I think we can get there through the light. Like, we're not doomed to repeat the past.
Right.
But that's really what's at hand in the next 10 to 15 years.
Yeah.
So that's why I'm doing what I'm doing.
I love it. I love it. I mean, that's, you know, you know your passion, you know your purpose. I think that's such a gift, you know? It is a gift. I think for me, I was also very lucky through journeys and deep meditation and all the deep work that I've done, both studying consciousness and tapping into my own consciousness and, you know, recognizing when I was living in a suffering state and then choosing to live in a beautiful state. I've been also very fortunate to discover my purpose, which is my power is in my pen. And the power of the pen is, first of all, to help people imagine a different world because imagination is going to be more and more key. When I was starting my company, Myuni, which is the education company, I went down all these rabbit holes of AI classes and what's it going to be and what are the skills you need to survive the AI, whatever. And I was like, pretty much it's just creativity.
Right.
Pretty much you could distill it to creativity. That's right. And I'm like, well, that's great because I've always been a closeted artist, which I'm now out. Because now I can write the kind— I've always been writing. I've always been a writer. And now I'm finally writing fiction, which is weird because I can be more truthful in fiction than I could in nonfiction. But for me, It's how through story, going back to my ancestors' times, how through story can you invite people into maybe even a bodily feeling that helps them imagine a different way forward? Yeah. And therefore, when they imagine it, they can then co-create a new culture of change, a culture of transformation, which ultimately is that path to liberation, is that path to freedom. And so, you know, for me, I've always been, somebody who looks at systemic breakdowns and figures out, okay, well, why did this happen? Why was there, you know, this disconnect between policy and lived reality? Whether it's policy in Iran, 3 of my books were on human trafficking, like the disconnect between policy and lived experience in that darkest realm of humanity. Then to the education system, you know, I've been a university dean, I've been a university provost, president, and I've seen firsthand that like the education system is so broken. Mm-hmm. You know? I think education has to acknowledge that we're no longer in an information or knowledge economy. Now we're in a thinking economy.
Yep.
Right? So we used to think that knowledge was power, and it's like, actually, no, it's creativity. That's the ultimate power. And so I feel like my purpose is really writing the stories that help you expand your imagination, rethinking how we learn, Like, what does it mean to learn and what is learning? Right. You know, and then what are the systemic scaffolding or architecture that we need to build? Is that policy? Like, do we need to rewrite policy? You know, we talked about the executive order. Do we need to rewrite policies so that they are actually crafted for the era that we're moving into as opposed to the era that we were in?
Right.
So I've always known my power's in my pen. And so, you know, how do you co-create and invite people to come co-create with you and have policy and culture not be lagging so far behind, you know, things like this interconnection of science and spirituality?
Right, right. Yeah, and as your work has evolved, I mean, I love that. And the process of writing for me is you're both a driver and a passenger, which is really fun. It really is. You know, you start down this path and then all these muses and everything else come come in, and now you're like, oh my gosh, I never thought of this and this being linked. And yeah, it's so much fun. Um, what, what are you most passionate about writing today?
So I'm writing a young adult series, and that has just been so much fun because I get to write about an enlightened Earth. I get to write, I get to write the world that I wish I was living in when I was 16, and I get to give agency to you know, 4 16-year-old protagonists who are saving humanity, right? So the premise is they're at this elitist boarding school where they're kind of— there's this evil hive mind that's trying to numb their brains. And then they discover a mystery school in Sedona. They're taken by a herd of horses to a mystery school in Sedona, and that's where they learn to tap into their powers through consciousness. Mm-hmm. They're able to kind find each of them has these inner superpowers of healing or different forms of consciousness tied to the elements, right? Earth, wind, air, and fire. And then they're able to use their gifts to come back and save their classmates, only to find out that there's kind of a larger societal existential question at play through technology. Mm-hmm. And now the 4 protagonists get to ask, like, the very question you posed. Are we going to awaken and actually be more expansive and create abundance, or are we going to shrink in fear and then everybody destroys themselves? And that's the premise of the series, which is called The Awakeners.
Yeah.
Book 1 is called Horsepower, which I've finished, and book 2 is Falcon's Flight, which I'm finishing at the moment. So that's really fun. And then I'm also working on a, kind of a sexy psychological psychedelic spy thriller, which is set in the Middle East. It's actually set in Iran and Afghanistan during the war, which is where I was. And it kind of tackles this question of memory, like who's on which side, and this question of past, present, future. We always have this idea that our past determines our present. We play with time in really interesting ways.
Right.
we have this notion that, and then our present's gonna determine our future. And as you know, in the quantum world, everything is reversed. So our present determines how we think about our past. And if we manifest our future self and then we make decisions from that future self, we impact our present self. And so the protagonist in this book is grappling with all of that in the Middle East.
Yeah, there's so much that resonates in that. I mean, a big part about, entrepreneurship, you know, because I've been an entrepreneur now for 30 years, it's like imagining the future you want.
Yeah.
And then motivating an entire team to say, let's create that future.
Yes. And
then actually creating that future. Like when I started Bazaarvoice, there were only 3 retailers in the entire United States who had customer reviews.
Yeah.
And it was a— for me and my co-founder, Brandt, it was a real power to the people movement. We're like, Look, people should have the ability, just like in the ancient bazaars, to talk to each other about the products.
Yeah.
And now there's, you know, tens of thousands of customers all over the world that use Bazaarvoice. It's in 60 international languages. Love it. And it's like just like a given that you, you know, whether you're shopping on Sephora or the Home Depot or any retailer, that you should have the ability to understand what people think about the products. And it seems like A pithy example, but it's really powerful because we would go into these prospects at the beginning of the company, and they were under the illusion that they tell the customer what to think about the product.
Oh, interesting.
And they were like, no, we market to this type of woman. And we, you know, there was one which was really offensive to me because I grew up in small town Austin. It's not that small anymore, but there was one where she, uh, I won't name the retailer, but basically said like, I do not want a woman in New York City reading a product review from a woman in Oklahoma because we market to the woman in New York City. And I said very politely, I said, I said, well, I said, do you actually think customers think that way, first of all? And I was like, second of all, you do have stores in Oklahoma. And anyways, the sales meeting didn't go that well. No, but— And they did not buy our product. But afterwards, I told the salesperson that was with me, I said, you realize that she has lost a part of her humanity in being in this kind of metaphorical kind of ivory tower to forget about the fact that like, we're all connected. Like, you know, that woman in Oklahoma matters every bit as much as the woman in New York City, but she has so locked herself into the brand identity of what they show in the catalogs and everything else that she's lost the humanity. And one of the beautiful things is like, I covered this actually in episode 59 with Mitch Joel, that one of the beautiful things is like, If you look at the old photos of like Estée Lauder, like the actual woman, she's like holding women's hands and like looking at them in the eyes, like really caring. And it started that way, right? It started with this act of love and they built an empire. And we can never lose that humanity.
Right.
And there is a part of society today where we've lost that, you know, and we need to reclaim it. And one of the things that I get a lot of pushback on with my thesis is people be like, well, Brett, okay, we reached this age of abundance, what will we do? Like, are you just saying we're gonna like meditate like the Bhutanese? And I'm like, well, first of all, you're assuming that's a bad thing.
Right, I was gonna say, I meditate every single day. It has made me a 10x better version of myself. Ask my children, ask my parents.
Totally, right? And so you're getting that daily communion Daily. And, uh, because, because it's— it is true, you do not have to be on psychedelics to get a communion with the divine. You can get it through meditation. It's just a more gentle form, you know. I had totally transcendent meditations in Bali, yeah, you know, this past week. And, um, it's just a different form. And it's not, um, you know, psychedelics is a way to get like a tremendous amount of downloads in a short period of time. Yeah. And help you awaken.
Yes.
And makes your meditations better. I mean, there's all types of things, but But there's, you know, there's all types of downsides with psychedelics too, like where you go, who you're with.
Integration is so key.
Integration, do you focus on?
Yes.
Like, you know, I personally never do it at parties. No, I mean— Like, I actually will— I'm very awkward because like I'll sneak out and leave the party.
Well, I mean, I—
If it goes that way.
Same. I mean—
Because it's like a sacred communion for me.
I tell people, I'm like, this is This is spiritual hygiene, people. Exactly. Like, we need to have some spiritual hygiene. I'm the same way, that there needs to be a reverence, you know, and in ceremony, you know, to do something in ceremony. And ceremony is our birthright. You know, I can say that as an anthropologist. Ritual, ceremony is how, for as long as, you know, humans have been around, ceremony has been a part of what we do. So, you know, to your point about like at a party, Yeah, I can't quite get my head around that either.
Yeah, yeah. I just, I just, for me, it's, it's a very sacred thing. And, you know, meditating is a very sacred thing.
Yes.
I mean, I had an amazing meditation today. It was just like I was radiating a tremendous amount of gratitude and love. And, um, it's really beautiful when that happens. And I, you know, I got, got a really interesting message too, which, uh, which was relating to a recent conversation I had with a friend.
That's— yeah, I, I meditate every day. I'm also, um, very blessed to be in a community. Um, there's about 50 of us who every morning at 6 AM we get on Zoom and we meditate together.
Yeah.
And it's almost like we enter this field together, and the whole— we've been doing it now for 22 months. Don't miss a single day. In fact, I plan my flights around it so that I don't miss morning meditation.
That's awesome.
Because I'm just a way better person.
And it is more powerful if you do it together.
It really— I mean, I—
Even if you're separated by space.
Exactly, because you're, you're in a field of oneness, you know, you're, you're, you're together in that field. And, you know, then you feel the collective, everybody kind of— everyone's, for lack of a better word, vibrational frequency kind of elevates together. And it's It's fantastic. But I wanna go back to something you said about, you know, being an entrepreneur and kind of that, like, you know, my friend Joe Polish says, like, agitated oysters make the best pearls. Mm-hmm. 'Cause I had a very similar, you know, why I started my uni, which is a workforce creden— an accredited workforce credentialing platform. Mm-hmm. We reverse engineered education. Mm-hmm. Same thing. I was like, wait a second, it doesn't make sense that, you know, education is locked up, that it's not, meeting the needs of the emerging workforce and the emerging market. I had this experience where I was dean at a very elite institution. I remember the president got up there and said, we had 7,000 applications and we accepted less than 7%. I'm like, and you're proud of that? Right. Where did we get to a point where we bifurcated excellence and access? You know, why do we measure ourselves by who we exclude rather than who we include? And it just was crazy. It was like I couldn't understand that. And if we have something great, why wouldn't we want everyone to have access to it? Totally. And that's why I started Myuni, because I'm like, people need to be able to get credentials the way that they want to. I mean, look at your daughter. She's— and I did this too— having to major in 3 different things to get to what she wants. The way in which our economy and our markets are moving today, I've created a system where it's the Lego block model of education, where you just stack your certificates, credentials that stack towards a degree. You don't have to do a whole degree in, you know, a whole— like today I wouldn't have to go a full degree in French and a full degree in diploma. I could do a certificate, a certificate, a certificate, and it stacks towards what I want.
Yeah.
And I think that with the rate at which, like you talk about AI and the rate at which the economy is changing, for those of us who wanna be part of abundance-making, we're gonna have to like think differently and learn differently. And so for me, it was like, I'm gonna reverse engineer education, but I'm gonna do it in an accredited, rigorous way.
That's awesome. So same thing. Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, I have a chapter in this book on education. And how, first of all, it starts with a level set on here's actually the state of education. Because part of the fear of changing education is like, isn't this working? And it's not. Like around the world, it's not. Oh, no. Honestly, like you even go into countries where like for sure it's working there, it's not. And it's certainly really falling behind in this AI moment. I mean, it's falling tremendously behind. You know, our youngest was the first to bring ChatGPT to their school and they immediately banned it.
Which is so— I mean, it's so shortsighted. You know, it's sort of like the math teachers who are like, oh, well, I'm not going to teach with a calculator.
How are you—
you know, like, well, you can't do math with a calculator. Are you kidding? You know, that's so short-sighted.
That lasted for a decade at universities. And the reason why is that people thought it was going to ruin people's ability to do math. And actually what ended up happening is the assignments got much more ambitious and our ability to do complex math went up dramatically. And one of the things you said earlier about creativity, which I just want to emphasize, is that AI allows us to shatter the barrier to creativity. And that's super exciting.
I agree.
I mean, because everybody has some innate creative potential. Like, it's kind of like, yeah, I hear this word popped around a lot, like, I'm a creative. And, you know, that's just a label. And there are some people that are naturally more creative than others, for sure. Like, that have that gift. But that shouldn't— someone shouldn't say, well, that person's a creative. I could never do anything like that. Actually, maybe you can. I saw a woman at TED a few weeks ago for their 2026 annual gathering who is coming out with her own record album in her 50s.
Love it.
She might be in her early 60s. I actually don't know how old she is, but But she's like, I would've never ever predicted that I would have the ability to do this. And it is leveraging AI too. 100%. And then her artwork preceded that. And her artwork is absolutely gorgeous. This year's TED was really interesting where TED has been pretty dystopian since the launch of ChatGPT. Since that happened November 30th, 2022, It's really tended to be more of like, oh my gosh, this is a horrible moment. All this job loss is gonna happen. Mm-hmm. You know, there's gonna be this Terminator or Matrix scenario, like the machines are gonna take over and destroy us. And so that's— it's been kind of shaded by that. And this year felt different where it was more balanced, where it's like, you know, we're creating something that we couldn't have created before. Like, this artwork we could not have created. I mean, what she was showing, we all agreed looking at it, was so novel that you could not compare it to any previous artist. It just was not possible.
Which is incredible. And good for her. Good for her, yeah. Back to our conversation about education, it's now incumbent on us as educators to open people's minds. So back to, like, when I say my purpose is opening people's minds. and getting that, almost getting the mind out of the way so that the brain can receive. I think as educators, it's about saying, it's not like all the jobs are gonna be gone. It's that things are going to be different, and now we can help educate you as to ways in which you can be creative with the technology. I mean, I had, on a much smaller scale, a similar experience to this woman you're talking about. I've created a, along with 2 friends, I've created a 4-minute trailer to accompany my book with AI. That's awesome. My characters who I saw in the world that I built in my head and actually first saw it in a journey on probably a very similar journey that you and I share.
The first part of The Lattice was a psychedelic journey.
They gave me that insight. So Horsepower, my characters, the world that I built, the same thing. And I was able to see it, that world, In that journey. And then now I've actually brought it to life on screen.
Yeah.
Through AI. I mean, my characters walk and talk in this world that I only thought I could build in my head in a journey.
Yep.
It's now actually on a screen.
That's cool.
And
let's put a link to that in the show notes.
We totally can. We totally— I mean, it was, it was like, can you believe we can do this now?
Yeah.
So for me, I'm like, the AI revolution And like I said, again, it's what's the culture we're gonna build around it? Are we gonna build a culture of fear, or are we gonna build a culture of curiosity and love? Yeah, yeah. And are we gonna be expansive? And it's the same thing when you— the same question you ask about psychedelics is like, what are we— what's gonna be the culture that we build around psychedelics? Is it gonna be a culture of appropriation, of, you know, sanitization, or, you know, doing it at parties or just in clinics, or is it gonna be a culture Where we weave together, you know, ancient wisdom, that science and spirituality, and that where policy supports science and spirituality rather than quashes it.
Yep, yep, yeah. That— gosh, you said that so well. And that has so much synchronicity actually with the Brian Maresca episode.
Oh my gosh, so we're having a conversation with him.
Totally. Yeah, one of the things he said is that his big concern about psychedelics is Where is the wisdom school? You know, that's how it started. It started with this wisdom school. The mystery school.
The mystery school. Yeah, so, you know, and that's, again, the premise of my young adults. They find a mystery school, and the name of the mystery school is AWAKEN, which stands for Ancient Wisdom and Knowledge Embraced Now. That's what the school is. I love that. But it's based on the mystery schools in Persia and Greece. I mean, I'm sure that, you know, in the Immortals, he talks about, you know, Greece.
Oh yeah, for sure.
And I do think that the mystery schools, you know, they had a huge role to play. They had a huge role to play. And so in many ways, it's like, can we create the mystery school that's needed for today?
Yeah, that's it. I mean, you, you nailed it. And it's— and AI is another catalyst for that, and it's a massive accelerant. And one of the things that makes me super excited about this AI moment is that I think it's going to help us decode more and more of our reality. We, you know, we have never branched back together quantum science and classical science.
Yeah.
It's just like irreparably broken right now. I know.
I know.
And, you know, it's because it's a hard problem. You know, you've got the hard problem of consciousness, but you've got the hard problem overall quantum physics, which breaks someone's brain. I mean, it's kind of crazy to even think about. Like, as you and I are sitting here, you know, as I think you would agree, we're souls in a physical body.
Correct.
But we know that our physicality, because we're made of atoms, is that we're 99.12 nines of empty space.
Right.
Like, everything people are seeing here, us, this chair, everything.
I know. It's like a hologram in some ways. Right.
And so we don't know why quantum entanglement is real, but quantum computing doesn't work without it.
Right.
So it kind of takes me into wanting to ask you, because you're very smart and you've spent a lot of time trying to decode reality, what do you think our reality actually is?
I mean, I think in many ways, the way I explain it to to my kids is it's like, I'm like, it's kind of like a video game in some ways, right? Where we're, you know, we're souls, but this is, in many ways, this is like a human meat suit, or like a diving suit. You know, like if you wanna explore the ocean, you gotta wear a diving suit. If you wanna explore Earth school, like this is our diving suit right here. This is our meat suit so that I can be sitting here and talking to you, but our souls are already having a different conversation. That's right. And so in a way, like, if we think about the oneness, like, really, I'm having a conversation with myself or another version of myself. And you're having, you know, this is Brett having a conversation with Brett, and this is Pardis having a, you know, in some ways. And so, you know, I, I, the way I explain it to my kids is it's like, yeah, this is like a human meat suit or a diving suit that we get to use, and we got to take care of it,
right?
That's how we get to move around in this reality.
Yeah.
But our souls are like, make no mistake, the soul is conceiving and, and then the brain is receiving. So the question now is the mind, right? And how do you get that perceived part? How do you, how do you tackle that?
Yeah.
Um, and, you know, I think this moment, in this moment, so many people are awakening. I think that you're starting to see, like, to your point, like, we're 99, it's like, yeah, we're starting to And we're starting to kind of like, maybe it's like the veil is thinning. I'm not sure.
The veil is thinning.
Yeah.
I'm confident that it is, 'cause the consciousness awakening seems to be accelerating to me.
Agreed.
I mean, it's happening all over the place. And, you know, if you weren't a spiritual person, you could make an assumption that it's happening because there's something about natural selection evolution that's like awakening us so we don't extinct ourselves. But I think that that would be a— that doesn't resonate with me because, A, you know, there's— it's just an assumption, like we don't understand it. And B, it's just— it doesn't resonate with what I've seen, like either through meditation journeys, like what I see actually happening around me.
Yeah.
And I think that the divine is I
do too.
And I think it's because God loves us unconditionally and, you know, wants us to make it to this other side and just like realize, like wake up and realize like you're the same.
Yeah.
You're a part of me. And, you know, I don't look at God as— I mean, I don't know what God is, but I, you know, it's not like an old white man with a beard. Top hat. It's definitely, Like, whatever is the force that created the universe, you know, whatever led to the Big Bang. And, you know, you know that when you're in a state, whether it's meditation or in a journey, or people have had a near-death experience like Brian Marescaux, or people that have had a spontaneous awakening. I had another Persian woman on who's amazing. She is like, Incredible. I don't know if you've ever met her before. Her name's Pariah Beam, and she is like one of the best biotech, health tech entrepreneurs. She was on episode 31, and she had a spontaneous spiritual awakening in the shower. She's— and she told that story on that episode, and she's never done psychedelics. Like, she was at Burning Man and never did psychedelics, even at Burning Man. Like, you know, she was only one— What's she in? She's like, I felt like I was the only one there that was not doing psychedelics. But she's got— she has very transcendent meditations. And she felt the same thing I felt in a journey where it's like this deep presence of God surrounded by light and just in this place of just completely unconditional love. And when you experience that, you can never unforget
that. I totally agree. I mean, I've had the same— I've had it both. I've had it through journeys and I've had it through meditation. I mean, I'm so inspired to hear of, you know, one of my fellow Persians who got to that place, you know, without any— and I think that's great. Yeah. I think as a young person through dance and ecstatic dance, I saw glimpses of it, but then I kind of got in my life stuck and trapped in sort of the trappings of the matrix, if you will. And, you know, I got into that kind of achievement addiction and just constantly Gotta be dean, the next book, and then dean, provost, president.
Yep.
And throughout my career, I finally got to this place where I couldn't outrun my own suffering, and I was surrounded by it. I awarded so many posthumous degrees to kids who had died by suicide. I myself became incredibly depressed and suicidal. And then at one point, I remember I actually had to come to the end of myself. My marriage fell apart. like within a 3-month period, you know, I got divorced. I was like fired from being the dean. Now, I became provost 3 weeks later, so it bounced back like that, but it was like a— Turnback, yeah. And I was surrounded by a lot of death. So it was like death, divorce, and, you know, dismissals, all the things. Wow, wow. And I fell into a deep depression. And my shower story was quite sad. I actually I wanted to kill myself.
Wow.
And, and, you know, I was so lucky, my father just accidentally walked in right before. And so I dropped, um, dropped the razor, and I was like, what am I doing? All right, you know, this is 5 years ago.
Yeah.
And I realized that I had gotten trapped in the Matrix. And I realized, wait a minute, I studied this stuff. I studied consciousness. I've lived in 7 countries. You know, multiple continents. I studied in Africa with shamans. I studied in India with meditation teachers. Right. I could go back to it. And so I went back to it, but no longer as an academic, but as someone looking to find healing and liberation. Wow. And I'm so fortunate that I did. So for me, it was the journeying that actually first, like, you know, took me to that just unmistakable place. Right, right. Where you're At the foot of God and the divine. And it's like, and you will, and I, you know, got there with 2 months after, after that, you know, after my, you know, failed attempt. And—
It can happen pretty fast. Yeah.
It was like, I have never, like, I just say the floor has come up. I have never been that low ever since, ever since I kind of got to do that work 5 years ago.
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I saw, like I've always believed in God. Yeah. And I've always had a spiritual practice of sorts. I didn't grow up overly religious, but I did pray a lot and not, you know, not going to a religious institution, just spontaneously praying, especially during hard times. And there's no doubt there was a connection to my success as an entrepreneur in that. Yeah. And, you know, people watching this that aren't spiritual will be like, well, you were just giving yourself mental fortitude. Okay, fine. That's not really the way I experienced it.
Yeah.
Like, I experienced it as, you know, glimpses of divine light, glimpses of unconditional love. But for me, definitely the catalyst was— the bigger catalyst was psychedelic journeys.
Yeah.
And once you see that, once the veil's lifted, oh, you can't unsee it.
You can't, nor would you ever want to.
Exactly.
So it was the same for me. Like, what happened for me is I had— As a child, up until I was in my 20s, I was so, like you, connected to God. Like, I would just spontaneously pray, or at night, you know, before I'd go to sleep, not like kneeling or anything, but I'd be laying there and I'd like have conversations with God. You know, I'm just always doing it. And I would have those glimmers, especially if I was doing a dance performance or whirling or any of that. And then I kind of, I got into the ivory tower and I kind of lost my way a little bit. Mm-hmm. So coming back and being like, that's right, God's love, like, that's right. It was like, oh, and it was like you, through psychedelic journey, you know, that I was able to come back.
Yeah.
And I was able to feel that love. And then I was able to radiate that love through every cell of my body to my children, to my parents. Like, I felt so much love for my children that I hadn't felt, you know, I had been pinched off from it for like a decade. And, you know, I was a single mom, a lot of challenges, you know, and even in my career on the outside, it was like, look at you, success, success, success. But I was hurting.
Yeah.
And so I think that right now I am a much more successful person because I am a more successful human.
Yeah.
You know, and I make decisions from a beautiful state, not a suffering state. And so, you know, but it was that reconnection to the divine. But I'm so glad that I had that because once I got there, I was like, oh, that's right. That's what this is all about.
Yeah, I feel very blessed that I've— I mean, it was really a very good friend of mine. I tell the story in chapter 13 on the inner journey in the book who really wanted that for me. I resisted for a couple of years, and then finally I did it, and I'm so glad I did it. And, you know, at this point, I don't have any taboo feelings about it at all. Yeah. But I do have— I do make sure if someone's asking me about it, I do make sure to tell them like a few different things. So one thing I tell them is I say it truly is like taking the red pill in The Matrix. 100%. Once you go through that door— You can't unsee it. You can't unsee it.
You can't.
And once you go through that door, you're now on— your soul, getting back to our physicality, is going to animate you more. And for me, you know, it manifested in lots and lots of reading, lots and lots of like, okay, wow, I really need to understand what I'm doing in this lifetime, like why I'm here, you know, etc., etc. And the good news about that is that the dots all did connect. Like, I know why I'm here. I'm here to create a better world through technology. And now I'm at the penultimate point in this lifetime where the next 10 to 15 years are the most determinative of our ability to do that.
Yes.
And create abundance for everyone on the planet. Yes. And I'm certainly not alone in that. You know, if you listen to what Mustafa Suleyman or Demos Hassibis or Dr. Fifi Lee or Mira Murati or Reid Hoffman.
Oh yeah.
Or Eric Schmidt and all these people are saying is they all have this deep prayer for humanity too. And they're approaching it in different ways. You know, Eric Schmidt worked with Henry Kissinger and Craig Mundie on Henry Kissinger's last book. You know what the title is?
What was it?
Genesis.
Yeah.
And the last chapter was Henry Kissinger's dying words to humanity, is a deep prayer for humanity that we make it during this fateful moment. And he put that in his own words and own language, but it's essentially the same type of message I have with Love Conquers Fear. I think what's unique about the way that I approached it is I'm not shying away from discussing any of the quote unquote taboo things. Right. Like, you know, as a successful capitalist, there is the dogma of separation for that too, where it's like, I was speaking at a conference recently. I talked with Sol Rashidi about this. She comes from a Muslim background as well at this conference called Culturati. And at the end of our speech, it was like a live recording of that episode. Quite a few people came up to us and said, oh my gosh, I'm so happy to be at a business conference talking about love. And I was like, we're full-bodied humans. Like, we shouldn't like go into business and say, well, let's check love at the door. Like, that's like everything, you know? That's right. And so I'm like not afraid to, you know, Ghostbusters said, don't cross the streams. Like, I've crossed all the streams with this book.
But don't you think that's what we need to be doing? I mean, I'm glad. Absolutely. I mean, I'm in the same boat, you know, like I'm writing a fiction, but it's really a social commentary that's kind of futurism, but kind of now about like, what is education supposed to be? And how is creativity and consciousness the answer to a broken education system?
Yeah. No, we should be. I mean, you know, the conversation we're having now, Like, for people, for example, who've never tried psychedelics, it could be like, wow, this is getting really taboo. But the reality is these have been around for thousands of years used by humanity.
Absolutely.
One thing I'd love to ask you about, 'cause I think it's an important thing to ask you. As a man, I do not have as much risk as you do with psychedelics because of the places you could go. Like, women have to be more cautious.
That's true.
And so I'm just curious, like, what advice would you give to a woman who's considering it to make sure they're in a place where they can be safe?
Well, thank you for asking that question, Brett. I mean, and when you think about— you mentioned thousands of years, and when you look at, you know, a lot of the texts that I've studied, you know, about, you know, ancient Persia, or, you know, actually even in Africa and, and, and, you know, even in indigenous cultures. Yeah. There actually was women, uh, you know, in Iran, in Persia, it was, you know, Council of Grandmothers. They were the ones, the medicine women, they were the ones serving the medicine because it was, you know, thought that they could, you know, bring this sort of— it was part of the, the divine feminine, right? That was that you had the divine masculine, the divine feminine, and part of our role was serving the medicine. And it's interesting because one of the things that people have said to me is that the culture around psychedelics in the West today is very masculine. It's a lot of men speaking about it. It's a lot, the public voices are men, which is interesting given that for thousands of years, it was always women in councils of grandmothers.
That's very true, including in the Immortality Key, it was women too.
Exactly, yeah, it's a long history.
It's ancient wisdom schools.
So I don't know how we ended up in this moment right now that it's so many men, and yet there's so many women now starting to speak more about it, right? Yeah, yeah, sure. I'm speaking tomorrow at the Psychedelic Medicine Coalition, which was started by another Iranian American woman, Melissa Lavassani, who's in DC, and she's amazing. And Gabby connected me with her, the world of Gabby, we come back to that. But I guess in terms of, it's a great question because, I know, including the woman
speaking tonight at Arena
Hall. Yes, myself and Danica Patrick.
And Danica Patrick.
Yes, we'll be speaking tonight on women and psychedelics and women and consciousness. But yeah, the advice I would give to women is, first of all, know that there's a lot of women out, you know, well, call me, call me, call any of us. We love to, you know, help mentor women, help help women find the different places that they can plug into. But, you know, I've met many women who have had, you know, challenging experiences. I've also met men who've had challenging experiences. Oh, totally.
But I'm actually talking about something worse. I'm talking about women that I've heard— I've never personally seen this, or that I've heard women being preyed on by men while they're in a journey.
Yes, correct. Yes, I've heard that. I actually know Yeah, and that's horrible.
Like, I can't even imagine the karmic damage of the man that would do that. Yeah, because you're dealing with very sacred space.
Very, very sacred space. I mean, you're really playing with, you know, and you meet and, you know, you know, you get— you hear about so many men who have gotten this, um, they've— they're sort of spiritual bypass, right? They've gotten this— the ego has gotten larger rather than disappear, and
sometimes that can I can see how that would happen because one of the things that you need to continue to go back to is humility and love. Always. Always. I'm involved in this group called the Leading Edge. Actually, it's really cool because Sol Rashidi recently joined that group. I recommended it to her.
Oh, wow.
And in that group, there was a thread recently where if you become more and more spiritual, you can actually start to assume a spiritual form of arrogance.
Without a doubt.
Where people aren't necessarily at that spiritual level of knowledge yet.
Yeah.
And, you know, you should look at that as like, an opportunity with humility to maybe help them in a very, like, non-pushy way. And if they're not ready, they're not ready. And if they're not ready, it's totally fine. 'Cause it's like, you know, people listening to this, if they're, like, totally repelled by having any curiosity about psychedelics, I get it.
I get it
too. I was there at one point too.
And sort of back to that point about the ego, I think that one of the things we have to remember is that as we get smarter and more evolved, our shadow also gets smarter and more evolved. That's right. Right? So we have to work even harder to kind of work through the shadow.
That's true.
So we have to continue to do our own work. Yeah. I think that's— so, you know, if you—
I have a theory on that. We'll discuss it next time.
Oh, I want to hear that. Yeah, yeah. Well, but, and to your point though, like, if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm not ready to go there, I don't blame you at all. When you are ready, like, let us know. We're here. We're here. Because it can also be really scary. Like, I feel very fortunate that I had been studying this for 2 decades. And so I knew exactly who to call, how to get safe, et cetera. But even me, I was like, am I gonna go and sit, like, in an ayahuasca ceremony, totally, like, a country I don't know?
Right, right.
But I knew the shaman. I knew that, you know, That being said, one of the great things about this moment and the taboo starting to go away is it's like, hey, you don't have to live in the shadows anymore. There's so many of us who are here to help you.
Yep,
yep.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, just finishing the thought for women, definitely check references like crazy.
Always.
It's much better if a woman's sitting on you than a man.
I was gonna say, you know, well, and try to find a place where people, Serve in pairs.
Yeah.
So if you're, if you have somebody who's facilitating, that it's not just one man, that it's a man and a woman, or to your point, a woman.
Yeah. And my quick theory on the spiritual path is that your soul, however it works, I mean, I do not know how it works, but your soul is gonna test you more because The point of— like, I don't believe we're living in a simulation, etc., but the point of the soul and the physical body is to grow.
Right.
And so you're gonna face some more spiritual tests along the way if you walk the spiritual path.
Yeah.
But there's also a lot of joy and fun in that if you look at it that way. But, but it is sometimes challenging. Yeah. And, and, and it's sometimes challenging to see if you can go through the quote unquote suffering differently than you went through it before.
Right.
Like, you know, I mean, it's shocking to hear in some ways, you know, how low it got for you, but then it's very familiar in others. I mean, during the financial recession of 2008, 2009, there was a German billionaire who was worth $3 billion. He ran out in front of a train and killed himself because he had lost $1 billion. He was only worth $2 billion. And so there's just no end to external accumulation of degrees or whatever it is that people think, well, that's gonna be my path to happiness. And it's not. Never. If they haven't had that inner security, communion. And you can get there through Stoicism too.
You can, yeah.
You can get there even if you don't believe in God or even if you never do psychedelics. There's different ways to get there. Yeah. Get there one way or another.
Yeah, I mean, I always say like there's many ways up the mountain, right? I mean, psychedelics is like a chairlift. Meditation is like you're gonna hike it, which can be great because you learn the mountain.
Yeah, yeah.
But I would say, you know, as long as you're trying to get there. And also, I think just as important is learning how to come down.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Coming down, and that's where that integration is so key from any kind of— even if you go to a Tony Robbins event and you're like, up here and you're peak and you're like, oh my gosh, then you gotta go home.
Yeah.
And learning how to come down that mountain.
Yeah, yeah.
Is so important because you can only harvest in the valley.
100%.
You've gotta come down.
Yeah, yeah.
You've gotta let yourself come into these places.
Yeah.
Where your soul is testing you, 'cause that's where the greatest fruits are, right? Yeah, yeah. That's the Rumi quote, the greatest gifts lie closest to the biggest wounds.
Yeah, yeah.
You like allow yourself. And like I said, for me now, the floor is just much higher, but coming down can be really important.
Yeah.
One of the things that can happen when we're on these spiritual seeker paths is people are like, well, why are you in a bad mood? Aren't you a seeker? You're never supposed to be in a bad mood. And you're like, that, that's not really what this path is about, you know? Like, you are gonna have bumps. Yeah, you are gonna have bumps. The question is first of all, who is your community? Who are the people that you've collected in your life who are going to hold you when you're harvesting in the valley? And how can you continue to just keep raising that floor so that you can just keep going up?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of going up, we need to get going because, because we're— I don't want you to be late for— oh my gosh, this onstage event tonight with Donica Patrick. And so So that's going to be super fun. I think there's going to be like 100 people or something. That's what I heard. We better get there.
We better get there, yes.
But this was awesome. Oh my gosh, awesome. I would love to do this again. This was so much fun.
I would love to too.
This was so great. I mean, we just like could complete each other's sentences.
100%.
This is a real blessing. Yeah, thank you so much for all the light you put in the world.
Thank you. Thank you so much. It's been an honor to be here to meet you. It's just been— It's so great. Well, just the beginning for us. Yes, yes.
New friend.
Yeah, exactly. So happy to know you.
Awesome. Likewise. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in to another episode of Love Conquers Fear. Very special episode. The book is out. You can go to loveconquersfear.org, or it's available everywhere you buy books at this point. Really appreciate all the love and support I get so many amazing messages every day about the podcast, and I look forward to those flowing in for the book. Enjoy, and thank you again.
More from Pardis
Author Pardis Mahdavi on Education, Human Rights, Leadership & the Future of Learning
Pardis Mahdavi: The Future of Learning, AI, and Why Higher Education Is Broken
