CROSSING THE DESERT: The Power of Embracing Life's Difficult Journeys

At just 16, Payalm Zamanie escaped religious persecution in Iran by crossing 1500 miles of desert, with a dream of becoming an entrepreneur in the U.S. Just ten years after he arrived, he was the founder of a record-breaking, billion-dollar IPO. Payam recounts his incredible story of survival, faith, optimism and grit in his book CROSSING THE DESERT: The Power of Embracing Life's Difficult Journeys. Payam Zamani is a serial entrepreneur, internet pioneer, angel investor and the founder of One Planet Group.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina delRio, a weekly conversation about fitness,
health and happenings in our community onone oh six point seven Light FM.
Good morning and thanks for listening toGet Connected. At just sixteen, Pam
Zamani escaped religious persecution in Iran bycrossing fifteen hundred miles of desert. He

(00:24):
made the journey on just three hundredcalories over the course of five days,
with a dream to come to theUS, and just ten years after he
arrived, he was the founder ofa record breaking billion dollar IPO. Pam
recounts his incredible story of survival,faith, optimism, and grit in his
book Crossing the Desert The Power ofEmbracing Life's Difficult Journeys. Pam Zamani,

(00:46):
thank you for being on Get Connected. Thank you, Nina. I really
appreciate the invitation. So your storybegins long before you launched your business in
the US as an immigrant entrepreneur.What was life living is a high child
in Iran, a country that isgoverned by an authoritarian, theocratic schia Muslim

(01:06):
regime. You know, Iranians,they almost feel like they have lived under
occupation by regime that has caused allkinds of pain to Iranians of all walks
of life. But the fact isbeing a minority in Iran basically raised the

(01:30):
stakes that made life even so muchmore difficult, and being a Bahigh made
life extremely difficult. When the newregime, the Islamic Republic, took over,
they killed hundreds of a Highs fornothing but the fact that people lived
in a peaceful religion that was differentthan theirs. They expelled bahighst from their

(01:52):
jobs. They expelled many Bahighs fromschools even forty five years later today,
Why youth don't have the right toattend universe cities. As an eleven year
old, I was expelled from schoolin the most horrific way, which in
my book I call it the bleedingmile, that they in fact attempted to
kill me. So yeah, lifewas very difficult growing up a Baha in

(02:14):
Iran. You also talk about somany stories. The first part of the
book is so evocative. You talkabout your family constantly being under threat,
and that memory of your mother askingthe family to dress up in their best
clothes to be ready for the mob. Yeah. You know what's interesting is
that the Iranian government, of coursehas used, you know, many of

(02:38):
the downtroddens of the world as apolitical pawn, and Palestinians being an example
of that. While we don't findone Sonny mosque in Tehran because they demolished
them all, they somehow care aboutSonny's elsewhere outside of Iran, which we
know is a joke. But whatwas happening was that every time they wanted

(03:00):
to have some sort of protest againstIsrael, they would do that in front
of our home in that little town, and they would chant death to Israel,
death to America, dead to Bahais, right in front of our home.
And we were worried that they're goingto scale that wall, They're going
to come over, and they wouldbe killing us, as they had killed

(03:20):
many Bahai's during those days. Orwhen the cleansing squad that belonged to Ayato
Lahomani was going around and supposedly cleansethe country of infidels, and when that
squad made it to our town,yes, we were worried that they're going
to come to our home too.Those were really interesting days. It is

(03:44):
such a thing, i think,to get to the point to leave your
home country, even when things arevery difficult. Can you talk about that
decision to leave Iran and the journeylater. So you know, my parents
they finally came to the decision thatyou know, I was sixteen. I
needed to have to be able tolead a life that was in a sense

(04:10):
worth living, and the only wayto do that was by having me smuggle
out of the country, because theother thing the country had done, the
government had done, was that theyhad taken away the passports away from all
the highes, And so you canimagine that for a good law by the

(04:30):
family, it's not easy to finda smuggler, and so finding a smuggler
by itself was definitely an ordeal.They finally found a smuggler, and they
had to sell many things that theyowned to be able to raise enough money
to pay the smuggler to take mesafely to the other side. But then,
as you can imagine, when you'rehanding over your son to a smuggler,

(04:51):
you never really know how safe thatroute is because by their nature they're
not supposed to be trusted. UltimatelyI start that journey, it was it
took me about one week to getfrom Iran's border town to the first border
town in Pakistan, and twice inmy life I have felt that I've been
in situations that I wasn't sure I'mgoing to get out of those situations alive.

(05:15):
One was when I was expelled fromschool in Iran. The second was
a situation that happened during that escape. That escape led you to Pakistan and
eventually to America. It seems likeyour sites were always set on America.
You were into the music, yousold, the tapes, you had,
the sponges, all these these things, and being an entrepreneur right and in
fact, your IPO, the businessyou and your brother built, went public

(05:40):
pretty quickly. You were twenty eight, just ten years after you arrived in
the US, barely being able tospeak English. You had your first job
at a pizza palace. I'm summingup a lot of stuff. It's quite
an epic journey. But in hindsight, now that you've had some time to
look at it and of course rightabout it, how would you describe that
period, going from you know,from zero to where you ended up.
Yeah, I mean you brought upAmerica. That the fact that yes,

(06:05):
I you know, I talk aboutthis quite often that if you're a teenager
today in Iran, frankly, anywherein the world, and you need hope,
and you need to think about anothercountry that can potentially represent that hope,
a country that can potentially save you. It is not Saudi Arabia,

(06:26):
it is not China, it isnot Russia. It is the US.
Now, it doesn't mean that USdoesn't have problems. Of course it does.
But there's something about the US isvery unique. Number one, look
at you and I. We werefrom two completely different places. I spent
half my time in New York.You're in New Yorker. The point is

(06:46):
that the US is made up ofhumanity and the concept of this country gives
hope to the world, and I, for one, hope that this light
will never dim because the world doesn'tneed that. Yes, so as a
teenager, I did think that Iwould love to go to America. I
wanted that, and when I cameto the US, you know, I
feel like I was on a fastpath to become an American. And the

(07:11):
fact that I ended up living ina small town, a small farm town
in California helped me with that.Because there were no other Iranians around me,
I had to really learn the languagefast and when you fast forward and
you look at some of the experiencesthat I had, particularly building a business
in this country. It is oneof those things that you cannot but consider

(07:36):
it the thing that can only happenin America. I don't know in how
many other places on the planet youcan go through that process so quickly and
be able to reach such a climax. Our guest is Pmsmni. He is
a serial entrepreneur, Internet pioneer,angel investor, and founder of One Planet

(07:59):
Group. Else a story of escapingreligious persecution in Iran as a boy in
crossing the Desert The Power of Embracinglife's difficult journeys now available. You're listening
to get connected on one oh sixpoint seven light FM. I'm Mina del
Rio. So again we're going tofast forward a bit. The book is
epic, Your story is epic.Your IPO was for autoweb dot com.

(08:20):
That was the business you and yourbrother built, and all of a sudden
you had money and access. AndI think in a larger scale, given
your story, any immigrant has tochoose or finds themself choosing. I think
along the way, things to adoptand things to let go from your prior
life. When you think about thattime and how things have evolved, what

(08:43):
have you chosen do you think toembrace from your earlier life your new life,
and what have you perhaps let go? You know, it's interesting as
I set out to write this book. First of all, there was a
healing process for me, because thereis no question that the experiences that I
had had definitely left scars on me, There's no question. But then also

(09:07):
it reminded me of the book TheAlchemists that you know, you know how
it ends that you know, basicallywhat he was looking for was back at
home. And I feel that eventhough I've had many different experiences that three
different major chapters in my life growingup behind in Iran, being stateless,
and becoming a refugee, and entrepreneurship, the constant thing has always been the

(09:31):
same and that has been my spiritualbeliefs. I suffered because of my spiritual
beliefs as a child in Iran,and I escaped Iran because of them.
And then today I have come tothe point that I'm realizing that capitalism as
we are practicing it today is dangerous. It is that for soul, it

(09:52):
is making humanity wars off and Weneed to get those spiritual beliefs, those
spiritual values their time, that partof all religions. We need to incorporate
them back into business. Otherwise weare really leading businesses that are Milton Freedman's
version of businesses that they stand fornot much more than greed, and that

(10:15):
has really brought humanity to a pointthat we are seeing the the extremes of
wealth and poverty. We're seeing thateven being worth billions of dollars is no
longer enough. Nothing is enough becausewe are taught that there is only one
way to measure the worth of ahuman and that is by how much you
can accumulate to maximize the amount ofresources of the planet can consume. Archaic

(10:41):
is that way of thinking. Soyour company now one planet group. A,
what do you do and B?How do you incorporate that philosophy,
that spiritual capitalism. Yeah, so, you know, for lack of a
better term, I call it privateequity. But basically what we do is
that we own a few businesses,technology companies, and we also invest in

(11:03):
startups. Everything that we do needsto basically meet our requirements when it comes
to the values are important to usand the values that we talked about are
the same values that we have beenraised as kids our families. Our parents
try to raise us truthfulness, kindliness, and so on and so forth.

(11:24):
That were those spiritual, virtuous valuesthat they wanted us to exude as we
grow up. But then when webecame professionals, they told us businesses,
just business, leave those at home. So then you hear somebody like you
know, the city of a fortunefive company, getting in front of Congress
as saying that unethical is not illegal, make illegal so I won't do it.

(11:48):
Well, we need to get toa point that unethical is worse than
illegal, because it damages my soul. That's why I don't want to do
it. So how do we tryto come to the shed those qualities,
those virtues have to be like milkand honey incorporated in our business. We

(12:09):
choose to look at humans as noblecreations, that they have a spiritual existence,
and the moment we elevate the humanexistence to that level, the way
I'm going to treat you is fundamentallydifferent. I no longer look at you
only as a token of economic value, but you're elevated to something much greater

(12:30):
than that. And because of that, I want to treat you differently.
And this manifests itself in how weoperate. And I can list the way
you know, how we operate differentlyand have have you do that? Well?
What I would say is my firstthought is it's one thing, perhaps
inside a company's culture to have thispractice. But in a capitalist world,

(12:54):
how competitive would you be when peopleare still going for the jugular. That's
a good question, you know,think about what are some of these qualities.
So one of them is truthfulness underall circumstances. Without truthfulness, we
cannot we cannot acquire other virtues andvalues. So it means that even to

(13:15):
our competitors, even to our vendors, even if I'm gonna lose a lawsuit,
I'm going to be truthful. Itis looking like humanity. So half
of humanity are our women. Halfour employees will be women. Compensation,
We're gonna we're going to pay attentionto how we're paying our people and there
is no disparity. We're going tolook at the intention behind us, behind

(13:39):
all of our financial decisions, theconsequence of our financial decisions. We want
to make sure profits come without aloss to humanity. The point is when
you look at all of the actionsthat we take to operate our business differently,
at the end of the day,what employee does want to work with
us? Our longevity of our employeesare three times of that that Apple,

(14:00):
Google and Meta are experiencing. Whatvendor doesn't want to work with us.
Our client attrition is almost close tozero because they want to work with us.
The point is, at the end, you actually build a better business,
but you just cannot do it theway Wall Street wants you to,
which is measure my success every threemonths, and measure my success only based

(14:22):
on how much I've been able torule my shareholder value. That is not
the only way we should be measuring, but rather much more folks, on
long term success. But what's evenmore important on that is Okay, now,
let's say I've gained that financial success. Now what am I in the
business accumulating capital because that's how myworth is measured? Or am I going

(14:46):
to treat my capital my wealth asa fountain that constantly empties itself and if
it's me, my family and humanity, but it's not accumulated because of so
called financial power. I want tomake sure I work more than the next
building there, and so on.And I think these should be incorporated not
just in business life, but individuallife, because we individuals can be as

(15:09):
greedy as businesses do. This makesme think about actually a bit about your
parents' story, and I think thebehigh faith if I understand this correctly.
They practice their values by putting themselvesin the most difficult places. On purpose,
you are putting these values in placein the most difficult of circumstances,

(15:31):
perhaps capitalism, where it's so competitive. Have you thought about that that it's
sort of it's based on that obviously, but as that message do you think
being received by others that you arecompeting against, that you're working with,
that you're partnering with. I mean, there is no question that there is
a sense of pioneering that comes tomind. That you know, sometimes when

(15:56):
I talk to other CEOs, theyhave a bit of a smirk on their
faces they as they hear what I'mtrying to do. But you know what
that is, okay when you thinkabout it. The same business men,
When I say men, the samebusinessmen are the ones that when they run
the venture capital firms in the country, only two percent of their money goes

(16:18):
to women entrepreneurs. Even though everydata proves that women are better CEOs,
that women are better entrepreneurs, they'restill not willing to do even what's good
for them because they've gotten used todoing the same thing over and over and
over again, even if that makesthem feel empty and not fully joyful and
complete at the end of it.And I tell them this often, forget

(16:44):
humanity for the sake of yourself andyour joy. Try to incorporate these things
because at the end you will behappier. Why because we as humans are
in our happiest form when we areserving others, when we think less about
me and more and we think abit more about you and humanity as a
whole. Just to go back towrap up, I want to go back

(17:07):
to the beginning of the book fora moment. The launch of the book
was right around World Refugee Day,which is to celebrate the strength and courage
if people forced to flee their homes. The concept of refugees, as you
know, I think is often misunderstoodin America, where most people are not
challenged in the same way. Ever, thankfully, would you say about how
people receive refugees or that idea andof course, what might drive people in

(17:33):
the first place. So you know, it's interesting we have these days,
there's a lot of conversation about migrationto the US, and we have two
types of refugees. We have economicrefugees and those who are escaping danger.
I mean, those are escaping danger. You cannot ask them to go through
due process. They are escaping somebodyis running after them. So they need

(17:55):
to arrive and then we need toprocess them, and we need to differentiate
between these two. But I havea message for America, for Americans,
and that is this country has stoodfor something good, has stood for hope,
for humanity. There's something spiritual aboutthat. There's something that represents privilege,

(18:18):
and that's good that that privilege thatwe have to represent hope to the
world. I feel like, notonly we should not run away from it,
we should embrace it. That's somethingamazing, That's something that can feed
our souls. And I hope thatas Americans, we joyfully want to be
that country forever. The book isCrossing the Desert The Power of Embracing Life's

(18:45):
Difficult Journeys by Pamzamani. Thank youfor being on Get Connected. Thank you
so much. And I really appreciateit. This has been get connected with
Nina del Rio on one IO sixpoint seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarilythe views of the station. If you
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