The Uncommons

My 22-Year Age Gap Made Me Question What Happened to Our Men | Ep 32

People have been asking us about our 22-year age gap for years. In this episode, we finally answer the question, but not in the way most people expect. Because the real answer isn’t just about us. Our age gap opened up a much bigger conversation about what has happened to men, what strong women are actually looking for when they say they want to feel safe and held, and whether we’ve swung so far in trying to protect women from dangerous men that we’ve started producing harmless ones instead. We talk about why Parisa married a man 22 years older, why so many independent women still want a man who can carry weight, and whether comfort, changing gender roles, and modern culture have made men less comfortable with pressure, responsibility, aggression, leadership, and traditional masculinity. We also get into what it means to feel contained by a man financially, emotionally, and physically, the difference between power being misused and power being guided, the old Persian view of women and masculine responsibility, and how the way we raise boys may be leaving them less able to tolerate friction, discomfort, and responsibility. This is not a conversation about putting women back in a box. It’s a conversation about what happens when we raise boys to be harmless instead of safe, and why the strongest women may be the ones who feel the absence of strong men most. If you’ve ever wondered what changed about modern masculinity, why strong women can struggle to find the kind of man they want, or what we should actually be teaching our sons, this episode is for you. Chapters 00:00:00 Our 22-Year Age Gap and the Bigger Question 00:01:21 Why I Married a Man 22 Years Older 00:02:40 What Women Are Looking for in Men Today 00:05:00 What Happened to Our Men? 00:06:18 Comfort, Hard Times and Strong Men 00:08:35 Women Got Stronger. What Changed for Men? 00:12:57 The Persian View of Strong Women and Men 00:14:43 Safe Men vs. Harmless Men 00:16:51 What It Means to Feel “Contained” by a Man 00:20:18 Are We Teaching Boys to Suppress Masculinity? 00:22:44 How We’re Raising Boys Today 00:26:02 What Our Age Gap Actually Taught Us 00:31:41 Raise Safe Boys, Not Harmless Boys The Uncommons Podcast is where we have the conversations people usually have behind closed doors about marriage, family, money, identity, faith, and what it takes to build a meaningful life. If these conversations resonate with you, follow the show and join us each week as we continue exploring who we’re becoming.

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The High Achiever’s Trap: "I’m Not There Yet” | Ep 31

You hit the goal. The goalpost moved. You hit that one too. And somehow you still feel behind. In this episode, we explore what may actually be underneath the “I’m not there yet” feeling that so many high achievers carry no matter how much they accomplish. Pej shares honestly that behind his desire to once reach a $100 million net worth was a little boy who still didn’t feel good enough. Parisa unpacks the hidden belief that has quietly held her back: that becoming too successful could mean failing as a mother. We talk about the moving goalpost, how parents can unknowingly transfer their own need for worth onto their children, generational scarcity and perfectionism, the Sufi concept of Silsila and the wisdom we inherit alongside our wounds. We also ask a bigger question: Do we actually need to want less, or do we need to pursue what we want from a different place? Because “I’m enough today, and I still want more” creates a completely different experience than “I’ll finally be enough when I get there.” This is a conversation about ambition, worth, presence, gratitude and redefining wealth while you’re still building. The destination is not the point. The drive there is. Chapters 00:00:00 The “I’m Not There Yet” Feeling 00:01:58 The $100 Million Confession 00:05:30 The Beliefs Hiding Under Success 00:09:10 Success, Motherhood and the Fear of Losing Something 00:13:06 Generational Patterns and Passing “Not Enough” to Our Kids 00:18:00 Control, Ego and Losing the Present Moment 00:20:18 Silsila: We Inherit Wisdom Too 00:24:06 Gratitude, Expansion and Feeling Enough The Uncommons is where we have the conversations people usually have behind closed doors about marriage, family, money, identity, faith, and what it takes to build a meaningful life.

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Why You Feel Burned Out Even Though You're Doing Everything Right | Ep 30

You're doing everything right. You're working hard, taking care of everyone, and holding everything together. So why are you still exhausted? What if burnout isn't only about how much you're doing, but the way you've learned to carry it all? In this episode of The Uncommons, we explore burnout, chronic stress, and why the habits that once helped us succeed can eventually become the very things that exhaust us. Pej introduces his warrior vs. wizard framework, exploring the difference between living in constant high-alert mode and finding the calm that allows for greater clarity and creativity. Parisa shares a realization about her own life: everything around her had expanded, but she was still operating from the mindset she'd developed when her life was much smaller. An unexpected experience with water leaks in their home becomes a metaphor for what happens when our capacity hasn't grown to match what we're trying to hold. We also explore the connection between burnout, perfectionism, and worthiness; why slowing down can feel threatening; and how learning to surrender control can change our relationship with responsibility. This isn't about doing less just for the sake of doing less. It's about recognizing when the way you've always operated no longer serves the life you're trying to build. Maybe the answer isn't to work harder. Maybe it's to learn a different way of carrying what matters. Chapters 00:00:00 Why You Feel Burned Out Even Though You're Doing Everything Right 00:03:30 Why High Achievers Struggle With Burnout 00:07:35 Living in Survival Mode 00:11:20 Warrior vs. Wizard: Two Ways of Operating 00:16:58 The Water Leak Story and My Outdated Operating System 00:22:22 Burnout, Perfectionism, and the Need to Prove Yourself 00:28:02 Finding Calm Through Faith, Trust, and Surrender

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Why Do Good People Keep Getting Taken Advantage Of? | Ep 29

We are recording this while it still hurts. Something happened recently with someone we trusted. And instead of waiting until we'd figured it all out, we decided to have this conversation now, while we're still in the middle of it. Why do good people keep getting taken advantage of? And does getting hurt repeatedly make us wiser, or simply more closed off? In this episode, we share the painful experience we're currently navigating, the moment Parisa realized she'd ignored her intuition about someone, and Pej's story of a business partner he trusted who later tried to take his company away. We explore why generosity sometimes leads to entitlement, how appreciation can turn into expectation, and why giving without healthy boundaries can leave us vulnerable. We also talk about the difference between wisdom and emotional walls, the human needs that sometimes drive people to take advantage of others, and a question we try to ask even in the hardest moments: If there were a gift in this experience, what would it be? This isn't a conversation about becoming suspicious of everyone or learning to trust less. It's about finding the wisdom to recognize what people are showing us without losing our willingness to see the good in them. We haven't closed our hearts. And we're learning how to keep them open without ignoring what people show us. Podcast Chapters 00:00:00 When Trust Gets Broken 00:04:35 Talking About It While It Hurts 00:06:55 Pej's Business Partner Story 00:09:55 Ignoring Our Intuition 00:14:45 Wisdom or Emotional Walls? 00:20:40 Recognizing Warning Signs 00:25:35 When Generosity Creates Entitlement

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3 Doctors Told Him He Needed Spinal Fusion. He Refused | Ep 28

Three doctors told Pej he needed spinal fusion surgery. His own brother, a spinal surgeon, was one of them. Pej said no. Instead, he sought another opinion and ultimately chose regenerative medicine and stem cell therapy. Five years later, he shares what happened and what the experience taught him after 33 years working inside the medical system. We talk about spinal fusion and back surgery, regenerative medicine, stem cell therapy, second opinions, patient advocacy, and how to distinguish a legitimate regenerative medicine practice from one Pej believes patients should avoid. Pej also shares his perspective on why insurance often doesn't cover regenerative medicine and how he combines Western medicine, Ayurveda, cannabis, and regenerative medicine rather than treating them as competing philosophies. This episode isn't anti-surgery, and it isn't an argument that stem cell therapy is right for everyone. It's a conversation about becoming an informed participant in your own healthcare: asking questions, understanding your options, seeking another opinion when appropriate, and recognizing that no single medical lens has every answer. Because sometimes the most important question you can ask isn't “What should I do?” It's “What are all of my options?”

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Feminine Energy in Relationships: Why Strong Women Struggle to Let Go | Ep 27

What happens when the strength that helped you succeed makes it difficult to let go in your relationship? Many women have learned to be capable, independent, and in control, qualities that can help us thrive in life but can also shape the dynamics we create with our partners. In this episode, Parisa and Pej explore masculine and feminine energy, polarity, the tradwife debate, and the tension many modern women experience between wanting to surrender and being afraid of losing themselves in the process. Parisa also shares an uncomfortable realization from her first marriage: the ways she contributed to weakening her partner without realizing it, and how taking accountability for that changed the way she understood relationships. This isn't an argument for traditional roles or against them. It's a conversation about whether strength and surrender can coexist, whether a man can be powerful without controlling a woman, and whether a woman can let go without giving up who she is. Because masculine and feminine aren't necessarily opposites. They exist on a continuum. Perhaps the goal isn't choosing one over the other, but learning when each of us needs to lead, soften, hold, or let go. CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 01:14 Tradwife vs. Modern Woman 08:35 Masculine and Feminine Energy 14:00 Strength and Relationship Dynamics 21:20 Healthy vs. Wounded Masculinity 27:45 Polarity, Attraction and Surrender

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I Survived a War Zone in Afghanistan at 21 (The Story of How I Found Faith Again) | Ep 26

I came to the US with $150 in my pocket, no place to stay, and no one waiting for me. I was 21, and I had just traveled through a war zone in Afghanistan to get here. In this solo episode, I share the full story of how I arrived in America, including the moment a complete stranger handed me $2,000 in a foreign country with no guarantee he would ever see me again, and how that single act of trust changed the way I saw life. But this episode isn’t only about that journey. It’s about what happened after I made it here. How immigration, financial struggle, divorce, postpartum depression, motherhood, and years of survival mode slowly changed the girl who once moved through life with extraordinary faith. And how a pre-cancer diagnosis became a wake-up call that made me realize how tightly I had started holding on to life. For years, people have asked what advice I would give my younger self. But I’ve started asking a different question: what would my 21-year-old self tell me now? If you’ve ever had a version of yourself you deeply admired and somehow lost touch with along the way, this one is for you. The Uncommons is where we have the conversations people usually have behind closed doors about marriage, family, money, identity, faith, and what it takes to build a meaningful life.

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Your Financial Ceiling Has Nothing to Do With Money | Ep 25

What if your financial ceiling has nothing to do with how hard you work? In this episode, we talk about the beliefs underneath our relationship with money: fear of losing it, fear of not having enough, the messages we inherited from our families, the way we view wealthy people, and the deeper question of whether we actually feel worthy of having more. Pej shares the financial ups and downs of entrepreneurship, including a period when his businesses were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and how those experiences forced him to examine the fear and scarcity he had carried long before those losses ever happened. We also explore our own conflicting beliefs around wealth: the desire to have more while being taught not to need much, wanting abundance while admiring detachment, and pursuing financial success without allowing money to become our identity. Eventually the conversation becomes less about money itself and more about what money reveals: our fears, our self worth, our inherited beliefs, and our ability to move from contraction into trust. Can you pursue wealth without becoming attached to it? Can abundance and spirituality exist together? And what changes when you stop believing your worth is tied to what you have? 🔔 The Uncommons is where we have the conversations people usually have behind closed doors about marriage, family, money, identity, faith, and what it takes to build a meaningful life.

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Interfaith Marriage: Answering Your Real Questions About Making It Work | Ep 24

After our first interfaith marriage episode, thousands of comments came in: some full of hate, many full of genuine questions from people privately navigating the same situation. In this episode, we sit down and answer the real ones: how we designed a wedding ceremony that honored both faiths, why neither of us converted and the specific reason that had everything to do with what we wanted to model for our children, how we navigate holidays and family traditions across two religions, and how we created our own value system before we got married, a document we literally call our Bible. We also talk about why we chose a Christian school for our son, what Pej's experience growing up Jewish in a Muslim country taught him about religious segregation, and why we believe shared values will always matter more than shared religion. If you're in an interfaith relationship and wondering if it can work, this one is for you.

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The Guilt Nobody Talks About When You Outgrow Your Friends | Ep 23

Nobody warns you about the guilt that can come with outgrowing your friends. Sometimes nobody did anything wrong. You still love the person, value the history, and miss who you were together. But somewhere along the way, you grew apart. And admitting that can somehow feel like a betrayal in itself. In this episode, we talk honestly about outgrowing friendships and the complicated guilt that can come with changing. When is loyalty really loyalty, and when is it guilt? What happens when your values, priorities, or life begin moving in a different direction from the people you've always loved? And at what point does loyalty to an old friendship become disloyalty to the person you're becoming? We explore Pej's warrior vs. wizard framework for thinking about relationships, why shared history doesn't always create a shared future, the Sufi idea of the people in our lives as mirrors, and whether some friendships need to end or simply change shape. Because letting go of a friendship doesn't erase what it gave you. You can love someone, miss them, and be deeply grateful for a chapter of your life while accepting that you may not be meant to keep rereading it forever. If you've ever felt yourself growing apart from someone you love and felt guilty for even admitting it, this conversation is for you.

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We Homeschooled for Two Years. Now We're Not So Sure | Ep22

Two years ago we made a decision most people in our lives didn't fully understand.. we pulled our kids out of school and committed to homeschooling completely. Two years later we're sitting with a question we didn't expect to be asking: did we get it right? In this episode we get honest about what two years of homeschooling actually gave our kids, what it cost them, and what it cost us, including the moment Parisa realized she was oscillating between pride and doubt about the same child thirty minutes apart. We talk about the tension between raising free thinkers and raising disciplined kids, why homeschooling made us the enforcers in our own home, and how the spiritual concept surrender became the only framework that made this decision feel possible. We don't resolve it cleanly. But we stay honest all the way through.

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The Prenup That Almost Broke Our Marriage: Do We Still Need It? (10 Years Later) | Ep 21

Before we got married, he asked for a prenup. I couldn't sign it. Not because I didn't trust him, but because everything I believed about love, faith, and marriage made the idea of a prenuptial agreement feel like a betrayal of what we were building together. It nearly ended our relationship before our marriage even started. Nearly ten years later, that prenup is still valid. In this episode, we sit down together to ask the question we've never asked out loud: do we still need it? We talk about why he wanted it, why I resisted, what it revealed about how differently we viewed love, money, trust, and security, and what it cost our relationship in those early months. But this conversation goes beyond whether you should get a prenup. We get into the deeper question underneath it all: can a legal contract and complete trust exist in the same marriage? Or does one always undermine the other? And after nearly a decade of marriage, building a family, and building a life together, do the reasons we had for signing that agreement still apply to the people we've become? By the end of this episode, we make a decision. Together. In real time. You'll have to listen to find out what we choose. The Uncommons is a podcast for people who are done with surface-level answers and want to explore what it really takes to build a meaningful life. Every Thursday, we have honest conversations about relationships, identity, family, purpose, and the choices that shape who we become. If these conversations resonate with you, subscribe and join us each week as we keep asking the questions that don't have simple answers.

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Fear of Rejection: Why Being Seen Feels So Dangerous | Ep 20

A few weeks ago, my aunt called to tell me the community had found the podcast. I spent the next week confronting a fear of rejection and an anxiety I hadn't felt in years... not because I had done something wrong, but because being seen by people who knew me felt far more threatening than being seen by strangers. In this episode, we explore why the fear of rejection and the fear of being seen aren't personal flaws, and how hiding yourself can be a completely rational response to growing up inside a culture where other people's opinions carry real consequences. We talk about the voice I internalized from childhood, why Parisa questions whether Brené Brown's framework on vulnerability fully accounts for what visibility costs inside collectivist cultures, and what it actually took to decide that being seen was worth whatever it cost. We close with a declaration to anyone who wants us to stay hidden; one of the most honest things we've said on this podcast.

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Your Relationship With Food Reveals Who You Are | Ep 19

We are four days into a cleanse as we record this. And by day two, what surfaced had nothing to do with hunger. In this episode, we explore what your relationship with food actually reveals about your relationship with every desire in your life, and why the way you respond to a craving tells you more about who you are than almost anything else. Pej brings his four-layer bridge connecting the gut-brain axis, neuroscience, Ayurveda, and Sufism to explain what actually happens emotionally when we cleanse, and we explore why self discipline around food has never really been about food at all. The question isn't what you're eating. The question is who is doing the choosing.

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The Identity Crisis Nobody Talks About (When You Lose What Defines You) | EP18

Who are you without your career? Without your success... Your relationships... Your reputation... Or the roles you've spent your life building? At some point, many of us realize we've confused what we do with who we are. And when life changes—as it inevitably does—it can leave us questioning our identity in ways we never expected. In this episode, we explore the hidden identity crisis that often follows success, major life transitions, and personal loss. Through personal stories, including an experience in a monastery, we discuss why attachment creates suffering, what Sufism and Buddhism teach about the ego, and how letting go of the identities we've built may be the beginning of discovering who we truly are. If you've ever felt like you've built the life you always wanted yet still found yourself searching for something deeper, this conversation is for you.

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I left Medicine After 20 Years To Search For Meaning | EP17

Twenty years of practicing medicine in the US. A company built and sold. One of the highest paid employed physician positions in the country on the table. And he said no to all of it, because success had answered every question except the one that actually mattered. In this episode, Pej shares the story he hasn't told publicly before: what drove him to walk away from everything he built, what pulled him to India when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, and what happened when he admitted himself as a patient at an Ayurvedic hospital and experienced healing from the inside for the first time. He left feeling cleaner and more connected than he had in two decades of practicing medicine, and this conversation is about what that experience changed in him permanently, and what he now believes medicine in its current form is missing. If you've ever achieved something significant and still found yourself asking what it was all for, this one will stay with you.

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Why People Pleasers Struggle to Set Boundaries | EP16

If you're a people pleaser, saying no doesn't just feel uncomfortable — it feels like you're risking love, connection, and acceptance all at once. In this episode, we get honest about a pattern we both still live with, where it came from, and what it has quietly cost us over time. We talk about why the nervous system learns early that saying no means losing love, why the "good girl" identity becomes a prison, and why guilt after a boundary is a reflex and not a verdict. And we offer the reframe that most people pleasing content misses entirely — the capacity to genuinely give without calculating what you get back is rare and worth keeping. The problem was never the giving. It's that the giving had no floor.

Raising Daughters: Are We Protecting Her or Limiting Her? | Ep15

This episode started as a conversation about overprotective fathers and ended somewhere much more honest. We got into the specific fear each of us is carrying into raising our daughter — he wants to protect her from men, and I want to protect her from the fear of them. I share the story of growing up in Iran where my femininity was never fully mine, the thirty years it took to start reclaiming it, and why I refuse to pass that weight to her. And somewhere in the middle of it all, we asked the question that changed the whole conversation: is this our wounds talking — or our wisdom?

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Abundance Without Entitlement: Our Honest Parenting Conversation | EP14

Are we accidentally raising entitled kids? In this episode, we get honest about one of the hardest questions in parenting: where is the line between raising children who feel abundant and raising children who think the world owes them everything? We both grew up with scarcity and rebuilt our relationship with money as adults. Now we're trying to give our kids something neither of us had without overcorrecting into entitlement. We talk about what actually creates entitled children, why over-giving disables rather than protects, and where we genuinely disagree on whether kids should earn money or simply feel provided for. This is just a real conversation from two parents still figuring it out.

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What We Actually Need in a Long-Term Partner | Ep13

Most people have a list. The problem is that the list is usually made of what we think we want—not what we actually need. In this episode, we reflect on how our views of relationships evolved over time and the qualities we've come to value most in a long-term partner. We share the lessons that came from past relationships, the assumptions we got wrong, and the characteristics that ultimately mattered most when building a life together. We discuss: What we thought we wanted at twenty How past relationships shaped our understanding of partnership The qualities we value most in a man and a woman Accountability, emotional awareness, and resilience What actually creates compatibility between two people Why love alone isn't enough to sustain a relationship At its core, this episode is about the difference between attraction and partnership... and the qualities that become increasingly important once real life begins. Welcome to The Uncommons; where we explore the dualities of modern life and what it really takes to build something meaningful.

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