Host Liz Sweigart first met Parsa on a winding Jeep ride to DWeb Camp. What started as small talk from the back seat turned into an enduring friendship grounded in vulnerability, candid conversations about identity, and a shared love of Persian food.
This episode of Past the Profile is intentionally raw—no edits, no polished silence—because the story deserves to breathe. Parsa traces his journey from queer teen poet in Shiraz to U.S. boarding-school student, college humanities major, and now budding human-centered tech entrepreneur. Along the way he unpacks the grief of family separation, the gift of metamorphosis, and why embracing agency is an everyday act when the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy are still in flux.
Highlights
- Sixteen and solo – leaving Iran for an arts high school on a California mountaintop and learning English from Friends reruns.
- Culture as experiment – how each relocation (Idyllwild, Baltimore, DWeb Camp) revealed new facets of America—and of himself.
- Resilience costs – the hidden toll of “making it” when basic safety nets (family, money, legal certainty) are missing.
- Entrepreneurial moon-shot – why Parsa sees start-up culture as his best path to agency and impact, and what guidance he’s seeking now.
- Home defined – a promise to be buried in Shiraz and a dream of sharing tea there with Liz someday.
Support Parsa’s next steps GoFundMe → https://gofund.me/2f0c511a
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