Pardis Mahdavi: Why A Free Iran Matters To You | TTLR EP750

People, they can take everything from you. They can take your belongings, they can take your home, they can even take your country. But the one thing no one can ever take from you is your education, is your mind.

Welcome to the Thought Leader Revolution with Nikki Blue. Join the revolution. There's never been a better time in history to speak your truth, find your freedom, and Each week we interview the world's top thought leaders and learn the secrets of how they built a 6 to 7 figure practice. This episode has been brought to you by ecircleacademy.com, the proven system to add 6 to 7 figures a year to your thought leader practice.

Welcome to another amazing, exciting episode of the podcast, The Thought Leader Revolution. And today we have a phenomenal guest for you today. Today's guest is a fellow compatriot, a fellow Iranian. She's a top thought leader in the education space. She also happens to be a passionate champion for the Iranian people like myself. I'm speaking, of course, of the one and only Pardis Mahdavi. Welcome, Pardis.

Thank you so much, Nicky Jun. It's such an honor to be on the show with you.

Great to be with you too. So listen, why don't you start by telling us your own origin story of how you came to be where you are today as a powerful Iranian woman?

How far back do we go?

As far back as you think is good.

No, I mean, actually, I think in the context of what we're talking about today, when we're talking about Iran, I actually think the context of my own story, because it is the story of so many people, what we're seeing in Iran today as we sit here, 2026, January of 2026, what we're seeing today is an example of intergenerational resistance. I am the product of that. I am also the producer of that. And I'll tell you what I mean by that in a moment.

Please.

But I think this notion of intergenerational resistance is so important because usually in North America, when we hear the word intergenerational, it's usually something negative right after it. What's it called? It's like intergenerational trauma or intergenerational trauma, intergenerational poverty. And I'm like, let's talk about intergenerational resistance. So for me, I'm Iranian American. My parents came here during the revolution of 1978, '79. So people say, when did you leave Iran? I say, in utero. My mom was 8 months pregnant with me and she left Iran during the revolution. I think that's important, the year I was born, the moment I was born, because I am what people would call children of the revolution, right? I am one of those people born right at that turn, '78, '79, and then the '80s. And what you saw was a huge population boom in that period between 1978, 1992, huge population boom. And that generation, like I said, myself included, were considered children of the revolution. I came here, my parents came here, I grew up here in the United States, but my Iraniness is so formative to my own journey. In 1984, we were living in Minnesota at the time, and I came home from school one day and there was a sign posted in front of the house and it said, burn this house, terrorists live here. This was right in the middle of Iran-Contra, Iran hostage situation, excuse me. And my father is a surgeon. His practice was blacklisted. Anyway, we had to leave. We had to leave Minnesota, come to California. My parents though, my father is from Shomal. He's from a small town on the Caspian Sea, and he had no desire to move to Tehranjilis or Los Angeles. That was a bit much. And so at the time in the '80s, San Diego was a sleepy beach town. So he said, we're going to move to San Diego. But he said something to me during that move, and that really informed who I became later. He said, you know, Pardis, people, they can take everything from you. They can take your belongings, they can take your home, they can even take your country. But the one thing no one can ever take from you is your education, is your mind. And that really stayed with me, those words I heard when I was 6 years old. school became my job. And then later I went on, I did an undergrad in diplomacy because of course being Iranian and American, you're constantly code switching. You are a bridge between 2 conflicting countries growing up Great Satan and this and that.

Yeah.

Our challenges as children of the revolution was very different from the people growing up in Iran who had way bigger challenges. But we still felt some of that tension in the diaspora. And so I went on to do my PhD at Columbia. I did several master's and a PhD and went into education, went into academia, but my focus area was Iran. So in 2000, I went to Iran for the first time, and I went there to study the Iranian women's movement. I was a journalist. I was a stringer for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. And I got there, and what I was so inspired by was not only the women's movement, But the youth movement and the young people said, "We are engaged in what they called engelabegensi sexual revolution." The reason for this is, you know, this is a regime that came to power under a fabric of morality, right? You had the ayatollah, the mullahs; they came to power in the '70s on this platform of anti-Westoxication, anti-Qarabzadegi. This they were critical of this over fascination with the West. And they came to power on this platform of returning Iran to this imagined past. What, of course, that resulted in was harsh restrictions on the body, mandatory veiling. And the children of the revolution, people my age, had grown up— they hadn't grown up under the Shah, they'd only grown up under the mullahs, and they weren't buying this rhetoric. They were like, why does greatness have to do with me covering my body, with me not being seen with a member of the opposite sex. So they realized very quickly that the way in which the regime operationalized its power was through this fabric of morality. So what they did is they said, we're going to speak back to the regime in a language they can hear by using our bodies to speak back, by pushing the hijab back 1 millimeter at a time, wearing red lipstick, all the things that could get you arrested. They were using their bodies and their sexualities to speak back to the regime. And I was fascinated by this. I was completely fascinated. I was entranced. I was enchanted by this, the bravery, the bravery of young people my age in their 20s going in the street and saying, I don't care if I could get arrested or my lips could get slashed with a razor for wearing red lipstick. I'm going to do it because I'm proving a point, because I'm resisting the regime. So this resistance is really important. And I think a lot of it came to power when the women's movements from prior generations joined my generation. Fast forward many, many years, I came back from Iran. I was there doing research for 7 years, teaching at the university. I wrote my first of 10 books. I wrote my first book and I gave birth to my daughter, who is, they call them now children of the resistance. Wow. That's our kids. The kids of the children of the revolution are children of the resistance. They were the ones who, during the Women, Life, Freedom movement, they were the ones who were standing up and ripping out pages of their textbook, ripping up pages of the Ayatollah. And they were the ones who were saying, no more, enough is enough. So when you look at Zan Zendegi Azadi, the Women, Life, Freedom movement, it was very much led by our children, by children of the resistance. That's people my daughter's age. But that's what I mean, this intergenerational resistance. I am the daughter of a generation of resistors. I'm also the mother of a generation of resistors. So I think those are all really important parts of the story.

Wow, that's spectacular and beautiful. And mother, the daughter and mother of a generation of resistance, that could be like a miniseries of podcast episodes. We could go deep into that.

We really could because each generation, it's so important. Yeah.

Maybe we should. I'll just Release a bunch of extra episodes. I'll talk if you're game. I'll do a bunch of these with you if you came because I love this topic.

I'm totally game.

Let's do it. Let's do it. You know, in 2000, in late August, September of 2000, I went back to Iran for like a two-week visit to see my father who was there at the time. Me and my brother, we both went there. I have two brothers, but one of them and I, like you know, we were. No, we were young when the revolution happened.

Yeah.

I was in Iran until, like, I'm a little older than you. I was born in 1967 and we left in 1980. So I was 13, he was 11. Yeah. And he got his PhD too in business. I considered getting a PhD, but I decided not to at that time. And It was unbelievably wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time to be in Iran at that time. I mean, to be in the country of my birth and to see so many amazing people was great, but I also saw what they had done to the country, and I saw how so many people, yeah, شکاستشده وده.

Yeah, completely heartbroken.

Completely heartbroken. Yeah, day-to-day living in Iran was like that for them. And yet I still saw the nobility, the greatness of the Iranian people. And I'm going to jump around a little bit. We'll come back to the rest of your story in a second. But when the resistance started happening again in late December of last year—

Yes.

Tehran, and these kids were going out there, and even the older folks were going out there.

Yes.

Saw how unbelievably brave they were.

Yeah.

And I'm watching these people. They're walking at soldiers who are shooting at them. They're walking at that, and they're they're basically calling them be shut off, pull fuse. I mean, you know, bad words, right? But of course, they learned bad words. These people have earned those bad words.

Absolutely.

And you know, it made me very at the same time proud to be an Iranian inspired.

Yes.

Of my Iranian-ness, but it also filled me with a level of confidence and courage. I go, look, if these guys and gals can step up for their rights in front of people with guns, I'm going to step up for the things that are important in my life. And to hell with whatever fear or BS is in my way. Yeah. I actually felt embarrassed that I would even say those things to myself. And I was embarrassed at the ideas that I'd entertained because they seemed to be so decadent and weak.

Yeah. Well, it was, what am I thinking? Yeah, exactly.

What am I thinking? They're going in the guts. I can have this car. So today I'm talking to this guy who really should be my client, and he's not quite there yet. But man, I went in hard with this guy today. You know what I mean? I was like, Dude, you need to do this. This is why. There was no, oh, what's he going to think of me? None of that crap. It was all in, man. And I left that going, okay, if I got one thing from the people of Iran and their magnificent nobility and beauty—

Courage. Yeah, that courage. There's this word in Farsi. In fact, I wrote an op-ed about this in The Globe, and the word is korsu, and it means hope in the darkness. And they say often in Persian poetry, korsu-i omid, and that's this glimmer of hope. And it's typically referred to that moment when darkness parts and the lights become so bright that it's hard to ignore them. And I think that's what we're seeing with the Iranian people today. The whole world can't ignore them. I mean, you talked about 2000, and I was there that summer, and you saw pockets of resistance. You saw, again, people using their bodies, the red lipstick, holding hands as a subversive act. You saw a campaign that came a few years later called My Stealthy Freedom, which featured women taking photographs of themselves in public places throughout Iran without the hijab. So you saw these moments. And then of course you saw the Green Movement, 2009. The Meda. Very, very important. Yeah, exactly. And the very tragic death of Meda. And you see women, young women, so brave, so brave leading these movements. But the movements have been getting larger and larger and larger. And these lights, these candles, they're coming together, getting brighter and brighter and brighter. To a point where you can't ignore anymore. The world is watching. And my hope is just like their courage inspired you, Nikki June inspires me, inspires my 15-year-old daughter. She's watching, and she's saying the same thing as you. Mom, we can't. We have to be brave. We always have to do the right thing. I think that these candles, they come together and create this roaring flame that says, you can't ignore us and we will light up the darkness.

It's a beautiful thing you just said. It's a beautiful thing you just said. I love it. I mean, you have that Persian poetess in you.

It's in our blood, really. It is.

So listen, I'll tell you a funny side story. About poetry. So I'm dating a Canadian girl, and I call her an honorary Iranian after she wrote that song for us. I said, yes, I know.

I feel like she gets to be Iranian.

She gets it right. So she's a lovely girl. It's very, very beautiful, very wonderful in all those ways. So when I first started dating her, and this was like 15 years ago, the way that I did it is I wrote poetry for her. So I wrote her. I wrote her a poem a day for 30 days, and she's like, oh my God, no one's ever written poetry for me before. What's going on? And then, anyways, I won her heart and all that. It was good. I wrote her a—

Love it. Of course. The Persian man through poetry.

Oh, just here. So this is the little booklet, right? That's an old picture of her and me, right? So 30 poems in the booklet. I gave it to her after. And anyway, so these friends of mine, You know, they look at some of the poems and they go, dude, you write poetry? How do you know how to write poetry? How is it that your poetry got this girl, this beautiful girl to go out with you? I said, dude, I'm Persian. Come on.

It's in our blood.

What are you thinking, man? Like, you want help with a poem? I'll help you out. You know, you want to write a poem for your lady? Bring it over. We'll help you out.

That's right. But I think that's so good what you just said. Like Persian Poetry, love. Like, our culture has such a rich history and heritage of poetry, of love, of like these. And yet, I mean, I think, I don't know how it was growing up in Canada, but for me growing up in the United States, it was so hard to square these 2 sides where I, what I knew of our culture was this richness, this heritage, poetry, beauty, right? Love, this reverence for love. With the images of Iran or the narratives of Iran as the Axis of Evil, George W. Bush, or Iran as this place of burning American flags, all these things that narrated Iran a certain way as opposed to the lived experience of that old heritage. It was always so difficult if my two home countries are constantly at war with each other, what does that mean for those of us who are Iran and America in one body? I think that's a whole other kind of resistance. How do you move that forward?

I'll tell you, I've struggled with that all my life. And I finally resolved the struggle in the last few weeks because the truth of the matter is, Marco Rubio is the guy who actually said what had the struggle resolve in my head. I don't know if you saw this, but he was delivering an answer to a question from a reporter about—

Oh, I got to look it up.

You got to. It's really good because he said, there's no country on the planet where the divide between the government and the people is wider. And when he said that, it resolved it for me. I'm like, we're not those bastards. We're the real Iran. No more problem. Like, I didn't have the problem in my heart, in my soul, that, oh, I'm embarrassed and I'm proud at the same time. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And then I just was purely proud and I just sat there. I rewatched that little clip 100 times because it was that impactful for me. He said, and every Iranian should You know who feels this way should have a listen to this. There's no country on earth where there's a bigger divide between the government and the people. The government is awful, and the people are magnificent. And and and Reza Pahlavi, you know his imperial you know highness, his royal highness has said that these guys are not even the legitimate government of Iran; they're an occupying force. And when we can look at it from that point of view and really internalize it.

Yeah.

Be proud of everything beautiful about Iran, the culture, the poetry, the soccer players. Do you remember the 2022 World Cup when they wouldn't sing the anthem? I mean, I cried so hard and I just thought to myself, I'm like, okay. And I went to myself and I said, LeBron James, man, you need to go look at these guys. This is real courage, not what that pretend crap you do while you get a billion a year. Right? Yeah. These are the guys that are doing something beautiful. And then they called them all up and said, if you don't sing it next time, we're coming after your family members. I don't know if you remember that, but they said that to them. So the next game, they look like a bunch of hostages. They're singing it, but they're pissed. Right?

Yeah.

And one of them, Sardar Osmoon, he still wouldn't sing it. And I just was watching him. The camera was on him. He's stone-faced. You can threaten me all you want. I'm still not singing it.

The courage. Yeah.

The courage. The courage.

Yeah. Yeah.

I've been thinking to myself, this government has to fall. This regime has to fall before the World Cup starts. I know.

I know. Well, we've only got, what, 5 months left?

Yeah, we do. It has to. Because when we go to the stadium, I want to see the Sheed al-Khorshid flag on their chests and not that awful flag that they have. And I want to, I want these boys when they come on the field, I want them to like have a roar of Iranians that are in the, in the stadium cheering them on. And I'd like to see, you know, Shah Reza in the stadium shaking their hands when they walk in there, because that, that would be the most beautiful thing for all of Iran, in my opinion.

Let's hope. Let's keep the hope alive. And I think one of the things we have to do, one of our jobs outside of Iran, is to continue to highlight Iran, to not let the issue die down, to not let people forget, to continue to keep the pressure. Even I think about even in the last 3, 4 days, you see a lot less in the news, you see a lot less in the WhatsApp chats, a lot less in social media. And I keep telling people, our job— people are still protesting. Our job is to continue to put that out to the public, to remind people around the world that they're not backing down, that they are continuing to go out there with incredible bravery day after day. Even though they're fatigued, they're hungry, they can't get water. For so long, the internet was blocked. I mean, just this morning, we finally got through to some of our family there with Starlink.

Oh my God.

But people are going through extraordinarily tough times. And yet with all of that, they're continuing to protest. Our job outside the country is to keep highlighting their bravery, to keep highlighting exactly what you just said. There is this divide. There's the people and the government. When I wrote my first book, which was called Passionate Uprising: Iran's Sexual Revolution, it was really because I was teaching young people in the States and I'm like, listen, you guys have the same concerns. You have the same issues. Young people in LA, New York were very similar to young people in Tehran in terms of what their day-to-day life was. Yes. But the people in Iran were like, we just want to have the freedom to be able to listen to the music we want to listen to, go out, date, and do all these things. You're so similar. And so for me it was like, listen, this is some generational stuff that we have to connect up. And I think it was really important for me when I was a professor, it was really showing my students in the States and everywhere I would go to give talks, showing the rest of the country, hey, exactly what you just said, the people of Iran. And at the time, 70% of Iran's population was under the age of 25 because of that population boom I told you. Yes. So many kids born between 1978 and 1992 that the government in the late '90s and early 2000s, they changed their slogans. Their slogans used to be, دندگی بہتر ہاتھی بچے بہتر. So the more kids you have, the better life you have. And they would give subsidies to any family that had more than 3 kids got tax breaks, and any family that had 5 kids or more got a free plot of land. This was in the '80s. But then in the '90s and 2000s, they were like, oh my God, we have this explosive young adult population, explosive youth population who are highly literate, highly educated, highly dissatisfied with the regime. So Iran did a complete 180 and they implemented mandatory family planning courses before marriage. They started saying— their slogans were reversed. They were like, The less kids you have, the better. So much that Iran won the award from the United Nations Family Planning Association for best— they reduced their fertility rate up from like 3.8 per woman to 1.7, like in a span of just 3 years. But that's because the mullahs were scared. They were afraid because the youth, children of the revolution, right? People my age were like, we're not buying this regime.

Yeah.

We're not buying it at all. And they were the ultimate threat, which, so I wanted to write that book, that first book of mine that, you know, was very costly for me. I still felt that I had to write that book because I was so adamant that people outside of Iran see that there's this growing, growing resistance movement, that it's not monolithic, that you have the government over here and then the people over here.

No, beautifully put. Beautifully put. These concepts and these ideas are important for us to keep talking about, as you said. And in Toronto this past weekend, the demonstrations were larger than the previous weekend. There were over 50% more people. It was 110,000 people in the streets in Toronto. Montreal, Vancouver, same. Ottawa, same. Germany, like the The diaspora is coming out hard.

Yeah.

And the interesting thing to me is that there are so many people, Pardis, that are acting as, I don't know, kind of propagandists and psyops for the regime. Most of the comments that I get on social media are Supportive, but there have been some that say stupid stuff. And I look at the, the, the account names, and they're either bots or they're someone who's hiding behind some sort of non-name, fake name, no photo, some sort of meme out there. And they're coming out there and they're saying, oh, this is all CIA. This is all Mossad.

Oh, yeah.

Crap like that. And here's the truth. Like, My master's degree is in international politics. I studied Cold War politics in particular, and I have a particular interest in anti-terrorism and CIA. So I studied at Georgetown. That's where I got my master's. And I'm telling you, the CIA ain't that competent, guys. They're just not. They're not. The Mossad, okay, they're competent, but 35 million people? No way.

Yeah.

No intelligence agency can get 35 million people to turn out. That's an organic thing.

I agree.

You can get 35,000 people to turn out if you're a really good intelligence agency, but 35 million? No way.

And over and over and over again while the death toll rises, 12,000, 13,000. So it's not just that they're coming out, but it's every day over and over again, even though the death toll is rising, even though hospitals are even though dead bodies— I mean, that is significant for us to think about. But to your point, you were talking about the protests in Canada, and we are of course having some here as well, bigger in Los Angeles. I live in Arizona. But one of the things I think that— one of the questions that I think has come up, and this is my question to you, of course, I know this is your podcast, but I have a question for you.

Sure.

How do we— one of the things I think that's always been hard for Iranians in the diaspora in particular, more so in the diaspora than in Iran, but in the diaspora both, we suffer from not having as much social capital as other ethnic groups. So I meet other ethnic groups and they support each other 1,000%. I remember I had a colleague When I was a junior faculty member at Pomona, I had finished my PhD and I was over at Pomona College teaching. And I wrote the book on Iran and it was about what was going on there. It was ethnography. I spent 7 years documenting. And then I had a Korean friend and she wrote a similar book. And I saw the way that the Korean American community embraced her really as opposed to Many Iranian American scholars—I'm not just saying me—but many of us feeling like the community was like, you know, stop talking about this, or they're very critical. Oftentimes, Iranians are not like, "Hey, I want to up." We don't always uplift each other. It's like we we take this competitive stance as opposed to this collaborative stance. And so my fear has been: What if that gets to this place where we fracture in the diaspora? So I was going to ask you, what are you seeing in Canada? Are you seeing? people putting aside that, like, I want to be the leader and I want to be, and really let's just come together to support the people of Iran? Or are you seeing this kind of fracturing up in Canada?

When it comes to the public-facing activity, there's a united front. Behind the scenes, there's a little bit of fracturing. Candidly, there's some people who don't like each other. Unfortunately, it's an Iranian thing. Yeah.

Which is not going to serve us.

No, it's not. But the only way to overcome that is to lead by example. Exactly. That's why I reached out to you. I wanted to have a conversation with an actual Iranian. I've been on a show with an American Jew. I've been on a show with other Americans. I haven't been on too many Iranian shows. That's

exactly my

point. I've reached out to a few and I've said, hey, there's a guy in the UK, there's a guy out of Miami, Florida. They're both Iranians. I've said, look, can I interview you? Could you interview me? Whatever. And they're like, you know, they're more concerned with, hey, how big is your social media following? And I'm like, dude, my social media following is not as big as yours. I said to one guy, however, I got the ear of one of President Trump's best friends. Which one do you think is more important to our cause right now?

Right. And also, like, why are these, these artificial litmus tests? You have something important to say about Iran. I have something— one of the things that's interesting for me, I was on NPR. I was on national NPR this week. That was amazing. I saw that.

That was great.

Thank you. I appreciate that. But one of the things that I'm like, well, look, other people see me as an authority, but like you, I haven't been on any Iranian shows or podcasts. And yet I wrote one of the first books that was ethnographically based since the revolution. And since then, I've written 4 books on Iran. And so I'm like, well, it's just fascinating that American outlets and even European outlets have reached out to me and said, hey, we want you to speak, but Iranian haven't. So just like you, it's baffling to me.

Well, listen, I know a couple of guys who are not Iranians who probably would be interested in So we'll make that happen. Yeah. But yes, there is a little bit of that. But listen, the way we win is we do the right thing. We model the right behavior. That's right.

That's right.

Don't go into too much negativity right now. Stay in positive.

That's right.

I watched the Crown Prince's press conference. That was amazing. I thought he was awesome. He was great.

And did you hear that they hacked into Iran?

Yeah, I saw that too.

Yes. Hacked. I mean, we have to celebrate these things. They hacked into the satellite of Iran and he was able to speak directly to people in Iran.

That was so great. That was so great. That was so great.

It was crazy. That's just crazy. Like, how did they do that? You know, I mean, and that's,

well,

that's the ingenuity, right?

We know a lot of Silicon Valley types that are Iranians.

Yeah. But also, I think we have to celebrate the creativity of the Iranian people. We celebrate their courage, but we also have to celebrate their creativity. One of the things that Abbas Kiarostami, who's of course one of the most celebrated Iranian filmmakers, he's often said, and he has won so many, he won the Cannes Palme d'Or, he's won so many accolades for his cinema. He was, he of course passed away a few years ago, but he was best friends with Martin Scorsese, and he said one of the reasons Iranian cinema is as wonderful as it is, is because of censorship. And I think he's absolutely right about that. It's just brilliant.

He's right. I went and I watched a bunch of Iranian movies in the '90s and 2000s. My Iranian friends, my mom goes, yeah, let's go see this movie. And I'm like, come on, Mom. And she says, no, no, I think it's an Iranian movie. I want to go. All right, fine, fine, fine. We'll go. And I'm watching the story. I'm going, this is a damn good story.

What the hell?

How'd they get so good at this? Because Hollywood today kind of sucks. Let's be honest.

Yeah. Just like, there's very few good movies. Yeah. That's right.

They're either making political statements over the top, heavy-handed, beat you over the head with it. No subtlety whatsoever. Like zero. Which nobody wants to go to a movie to get a political lecture. You want to go to a movie to have a good time, right? Exactly. And any message should kind of be subtle. They completely lost track of that. Or they rely on boom, bam, crash, boom. And these guys rely on story, like actual story and good actors and actresses that are coming in there and just acting their hearts out. And I'm like, damn, these are good. These guys are good.

They're really good. I know. I mean, Iranian cinema. I mean, Jafar Panahi has released a statement about— He's amazing. wanting to come back. And he wrote, speaking of soccer, he did that film called Offside about women not being able to get into the soccer stadiums to cheer on the teams. And so you think about things like the art scene in Iran. I have this painting, I was a very Iranian artist behind me. Beautiful. I mean, the art scene in Iran, what they have done, they've channeled a lot of that. frustration and rage into really magnificent, beautiful art. And they've used their art as a way to send messages and smoke signals across the airwaves. I think some of Iranian cinema was a very clever way. So many of these films, I think about that movie Offside or that movie The Circle, it was a way for the world to see what's happening here, what was happening in Iran, so that, again, so that the world sees, look, people are having this difficult time, but they're resisting. Human rights are being violated, but they're resisting. They're pushing back. And so I've always applauded that creativity too.

It's a beautiful thing. It really is. And that's a beautiful painting behind you. My father, when he came back here before he passed away, he brought a bunch of paintings from Iran with him. And I got to go to my mom and say, okay, Mom, give me one of them.

You should. I mean, and you just think about all of the incredible talent that comes out of Iran. And again, when I tell people it's one of the most educated countries, it's highest literacy rates, but has suffered from brain drain. Just think about how many brilliant Iranians left there. To your point, there's a lot in Silicon Valley. There's All over the world, but it's an enormously talented culture. Has been for a long time and is today as well.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. Once Iran is free again, I'm telling you, Reza Shah, if he ends up staying, will do what his father wanted to do for Iran, which is to make it one of the five most powerful countries in the world because. We were well on our way there before these evil backward theologians, so-called theologians, came and destroyed temporarily at least our faith and confidence and belief in ourselves and in our greatness as a nation. But Iran is rising again. Iran's going to be back. And we're fighting to get our country back. Fighting hard. We will. Let's keep this up, as you said. I'll connect you with some people that you can get on their platforms, and let's move onward, upward, and forward.

That's right. And continue to support the bravery of the people of Iran.

Amen. I just want to say, Pardis, Joan, you are amazing.

Likewise. Thank you.

You've taught me a lot in this short conversation that we've had. And it's a beautiful thing. I ask our, our people who are our guest experts like you first to tell people how to find out more about you, get in touch with you, find out about the work that you do. So please

start with that.

Yes.

Thank you. Thanks for that invitation and thanks for, for doing that. That's actually really, really great and supportive. Yeah, you can find out more about me at my website. It's just www.pardismahdavi.com. You can order any of my books, Amazon, Barnes& Noble, they're everywhere. The books are very easy to find, and you can contact me easily through my website or through LinkedIn and Instagram. All ways kind of lead to me. So I really appreciate that invitation.

Yeah, you bet. We'll make sure all that's put in the show notes and that people can get ahold of you. So at the end of every show, we also ask you as our guest expert to share what we call your 3 top expert action steps. These are your best pieces of advice. And for today, let's have it in the context of supporting a free Iran. Next time we'll have it in the context of business. But today—

Education. Yeah,

education and business and all that good stuff.

Yeah.

What are the top 3 things that you want to exhort people to do?

First of all, keep learning about what's going on in Iran. Keep learning. Ask people, listen to, you know, get the context and the You know, I think a lot of people don't even know about the Reza Shah Pahlavi. They don't know about Mossadegh, the 1953 coup, all these things, oil nationalization. So number one, keep learning. Number two, keep speaking about Iran. Post on your social media. We saw there was, earlier in the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, people were posting, but by Thursday, Friday, and the last couple of days, it had really dropped off. I'm glad the protests have continued. But keep posting on social media. That's really, really, really important. And keep talking about it with your friends. Keep talking about Iran. Keep it top of mind with people and keep celebrating. Don't allow the fracturing to happen. Divide and conquer is the oldest strategy in the fascism playbook. Yes. I implore you, if you are Iranian and you are in the diaspora, Resist the temptation to go into competition mode and just try to open your heart. Act from a place of open-heartedness, not just open-mindedness. Stay in your heart so that we can all come together and say, we all want a free Iran. We all want the same thing. So keep learning, keep posting, and keep talking, and keep that heart open.

Pardis, It was an honor to have you here. Thank you so much for coming.

Thank you, Nicky. I really, I really appreciate you continuing to keep raising these issues and keeping this top of mind. Thank you for doing that, truly.

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