Energy Economics: Your Focus is Your Money Flow – Pedram Shojai with Dave Asprey : 758

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is Dr. Pedram Shojai, Dr. Of Oriental medicine and master herbalist, acupuncturist. You may know him as the Urban Monk. He's been on before, New York Times best selling author multiple times, I believe. And he's the founder of well.org Qigong Master Taoist abbot who has a few things to say that cross over from the east and the West. And he's focused his life now on writing and sharing knowledge versus being the man about town. And in fact, he's been on more than once when I think about it. He most recently episode 440. So this was quite a while back talking about prosperity. And he was on actually three times before that, even episode 107 about where vitality comes from. So Pedram's a friend of the show, a personal friend, and has just come out with a new book which is all about focus and how to bring time and energy and money into that state called Flow. He's going to share how he's done it and he's going to share the knowledge from his book with us today. So, Pedram, welcome back, my friend.

Great to be back. Nice to see you.

Did you know when you were writing your book that the world was going to come to an end and that 2020 would be an incredible shit show?

Or, you know what's funny is I felt it. I felt it. I. Oh, man. A couple years ago about, I'd say two and a half years ago, my wife was just like getting annoyed because I was like, man, we got to go, we got to go. We lived in Southern California. We'd moved down to Orange county from la and something just wasn't sitting right. And I just couldn't put my finger on it. And I'm not like a doom and gloom guy. I don't read all the weird, you know, conspiracy theory stuff. But I was like, man, something, something does not feel right. I feel like we do not need to be in a city right now. And I struck a deal because I was making all these films and stuff. I was gone 80, 90 days a year. And she's like, you know what? If you really want to move to the mountains, I'll oblige it, but you can't be gone all the time. It's not fair to me. And so we struck a deal where we said, look, seven nights a year is my maximum out of town. And that's how much it's worth it for me to live on a ski mountain and not be here for whatever reason. And then boom, the world blows up and I look like a genius. But it was just that feeling, right? It was a feeling. It was just like something doesn't sit well with me right now and I don't know what it is, but I can't ignore it.

Well, that's the benefit of being a monk and being a little bit more in tune with something doesn't feel right. Do you think that all of us have that intuition built in or are you unusually gifted?

Oh, man, I'm one of the least gifted people you'll meet. No, it's all just work. It's all just work. I mean, people who say, oh, I can't meditate. It's like, oh, I can't do pull ups. Well, have you tried, like, what do you do to strengthen that muscle? And you know, very specifically, if you start working on the things that develop your prefrontal cortex, you'll get better at these things called, you know, like meditation and focus and attention and all these things that happen in parts of the brain that we know how to trigger and activate and work to enhance. And so look, I just did the work. I loved it. I fell in love with the Jedi stuff and went in both feet, right? I just jumped into the work. But having been an ADD kid and just kind of like a normal guy and look, I was just a pre med guy at UCLA and a scientist, I fell in love with this stuff because I could feel it. And the more I did it, the more I can feel the results. And it's not about belief at that point. It's an experience, right? It's like, hey, wow, I have experienced this thing. I don't need to believe it. It's true to me. And so I just kept rolling with it. So to answer your question, anyone, anyone can cultivate this. It's just this work.

I believe that anyone can cultivate it. But I also think that not everyone can be Michael Jordan. Sure, sure, there's some people are more gifted when they start, they have greater potential, but that everyone can learn it. Is that what they would teach you at a, an abbot somewhere?

Yeah, I mean, look, there's a lot of things. I mean, I grew up with a dad who went to school in Germany. So I had like, you know, German work ethic on top of, you know, the, the literal translation of kung fu is hard work. So, you know, those cards kind of lined up, you know, in my Favor to be like, okay, well, you just, you know, you want anything in life, you got to work for it. A lot of people don't grow up with that kind of work ethic. And the other is, look, I grew up, you know, immigrant family, not eating Honey Nut Cheerios. I grew up being fed lots of vegetables and good food for my parents. And my parents, you know, they weren't medheads. We weren't put on a bunch of drugs, we weren't given a bunch of preservatives. I mean, does that stack in your favor when it comes to focus and attention? Sure, right. Same way we're trying to raise our children now. But, yeah, sure, I'm sure the genetics come in. And look, I was fortunate. We're just finishing a 10 part series on trauma right now. I was really fortunate to have a pretty mediocre upbringing without major traumatic events that can absolutely hijack your mind space. Right.

Trauma's a really big deal and we've had so many episodes on it. And when you talk to high performance people, quite often they're like, I didn't have any trauma. And then you ask them a few questions like, the reason you're high performance is you're still trying to adapt and be safe from whatever the heck it is that you don't even know you're afraid of because it got built into your tissues.

That's it.

But you didn't have to deal with as much of that. But you see it in the people that you've worked with so much.

Oh, oh, yeah. And look, it's no, you know, there's no rose garden for anyone, no matter what your circumstances are. But, you know, at least I wasn't, you know, raped by my dad and things like, really intense things that, you know, I see every day in this work that we do. But I mean, all the little micro traumas, sure, you know, they put a chip on your shoulder, they drive you to do the things you do. I mean, I live in Park City, Utah. Every direction I look at has a gold medal Olympian around. And man, some of these guys are just really hard to hang out with because they just can't stop competing in every little thing. And you see these micro traumas right there in their face. You're like, man, okay, so what are you running from or towards or against? Because it's right there, buddy.

It feels like there's a lot of that in mma. I never felt safe, so I'll just learn how to kick everyone's ass. But it's kind of a hard Way to live.

Oof. I mean, listen, you want to build a fortress to defend the soft inner shell that you never want poked at again. I've met a lot of these people in the martial arts over the years, and some of the nicest people I've met are in the martial arts because they have a way to express their anger and their emotions and vent and feel normal. But a lot of them came from trauma, right? Whether they were bullied or just bad experiences which led to them trying to fight their way out quite literally.

It's interesting because a lot of listeners are not doing mma. And if you are, it doesn't mean that you have more trauma or there's just patterns that you start coming, becoming aware of. And I'm in awe of someone who can, you know, handle themselves in a ring like that because it requires a certain state of awareness and calm, even when there's someone literally trying to pound you into the ground. So there is growth that comes from martial arts. No doubt about it. You talk about a crisis of consciousness in your book In Society. What does a crisis of consciousness meaning.

You know, the Buddha called us hungry ghosts, and we're all stumbling around trying to feed off of each other in a horizontal feeding frenzy because we forgot how to drink vertically. We forgot how to align our consciousness with that which is pure and true and meaningful. And in my tradition, we call it retroflexion, turning the light of awareness around to observe your inner state. And that's where awareness comes. That's where enhanced states of consciousness come from. Right? But we live in a world where our attention is now the currency of the information age. Literally, we monetize people's attention through eyeballs and advertising dollars. All stuff that we've kind of been hearing about more and more through films that have come out. And look, I put it to your audience that, look, if you can't pull your attention back to your life, your health, your priorities and introspect and turn around and actually command your attention, I guarantee you someone is pulling it out the back door. Someone is. You are being mined right now for your mind. And that's the challenge we face.

You have to either own that or someone else will. It's one of the reasons I am a huge fan of every piece of feedback gear you can get. You know, if you have your ring that tracks your sleep, in fact, are you wearing one and it looks like you're wearing an aura ring?

No. Back to my platinum wedding ring.

Oh, my goodness.

I don't wear it when I lift weights. At home. And so then I always have it off. And then she's like, hey, how come you don't wear your wedding ring anymore? What? You know, don't you love me? And I'm like, okay, okay, put it back on. I. I have a different relationship with wearables. Like, I wear this, like my suunto, not my suit. There you go. My Garmin watch for feedback and stuff. When I'm exercising, man, I just wearing it all the time makes. Makes me feel a little weird. It kind of. I don't like the energy on these devices. I don't like to wear electronics and.

Maybe the EMF kind of energy.

Yeah, EMF energy. It's just. It kind of messes with my field after a while. So I stopped wearing them. Like, I own probably 2 of all of them. I just. I don't know, it gives me a weird feeling.

I. I just put mine in airplane mode so there isn't the constant transmissions and all of that, which. And this is the only one that I wear now. But for people listening, if you're looking to turn that light of awareness on yourself, having a score at the end of the day said, how did I do today? Is one of the easiest and lowest hanging fruits for building awareness. Because for me, when I had fibromyalgia and all this brain fog and I'm growing my career in Silicon Valley, my practice was I would write in the margins of my engineering notebook, like, hey, I'm feeling like crap right now. Why? Or I'm feeling really good. Why? And I built the practice because it was out of necessity. And then I would play this little video game on my Palm Pilot way back in the day, and it was, you know, free sell. Or I'd play it on my computer, but I would be like, I have no working memory today. Like, I can't play this game. It takes me five minutes to solve what should take one minute. And all of a sudden I'm like, I have these external, bizarre ways of creating a mirror for awareness of my internal state. And now it's just way easier to do that. And then, of course, that led me into the field of neurofeedback and, you know, the whole really deep meditative states from that. But it ultimately comes down to that, that consciousness, like anything that helps you grow consciousness is good, whether it's meditation or wearing the watch when you work out or whatever. Like, all of it stacks in, at least in my world. And I like your view 100% agree with that. Okay. The other thing that attracted Me to having you back on the show. Pedram is that in Superhuman, I wrote about how people have it wrong. They are looking at return on investment just based on money. But that the real currency for entrepreneurs, for any human being, is just energy. Because if you don't have energy, the other two things, which are time and money, are not meaningful. And in your book, you say directly, time, energy and money are the three greatest sources of stress, lack and confusion. So, like, we're aligned on that. But you teach about it differently than I do. So talk to me about those three things and why they're causing confusion.

So if you look at your average person, they're trading their energy and their time for money all day, every day. I could trade my money for someone else's time. I could buy time in different ways. And so if you look at, it's just kind of an active exchange between those three areas. I mean, time is something I don't know how much more of each of us have. Like, that's a cosmic question. We try to, you know, enhance that number, but there's a certain amount of heartbeats and then you're not here. Right? Energy, the currency of life. I mean, we eat food, breathe oxygen, you know, obviously try to do things to enhance that. And that's the, the cellular currency that runs the whole show. Whether it's your immunity, your postural muscles, your brain needs a lot of energy. And money is something we trade the other two for all the time. And so looking at that, to me, I call that the water. And looking at life. If you look at life as a garden, what are the main plants in your garden that you say are important to you? Right? It's your health, your family, your friends, your career, your passions, all these things that we all say are important. And, you know, I learned this being a qigong guy coming down from the mountain is a certain percentage of my students, Dave. Here I am trying to teach them all this stuff to make their lives better. Here's some more energy, here's some more vitality. It's all good. Some of their lives would blow up. And I realized that they were the energy equivalents of lottery winners who had really poor finance skills with money. Right? And so if your energy economics are messed up, I could teach you how to do all these wonderful things. And you're just going to blow it because you just don't really allocate your energy to where you say is important to you. You say your family is important, you say your health is important. And I look at what you're doing every day, you're watering weeds or it's all going to career and the rest of it is lip service. And we were just talking about this before I went on. I mean, look, I'm a lifestyle guy. I'm a former monk. I've been doing this work for a long time. And I was gone 80 days a year and my kids were getting pissed off and treating me differently when I'd come home. And it just got to a point where I said, listen, talk is cheap. Work life balance is something you have to double down on. And look, I mean, you moved to the island, I moved to the mountain. I am spending a lot of quality time with my kids and I've restructured my career because talk is cheap. Are you going to be the husband and the dad that they deserve simultaneously, or are you going to race to a gajillion dollars or whatever it is and have diabetes and heart disease and an estranged spous and kids that don't care to know you anymore? Right. And these are decisions we have to make now.

It, it's funny, I'm a member of this organization called YPO or Young Presidents Organization. And there are chapters in most cities around the world. A lot of people haven't heard of it, but you have to be running a sizable company that you started to be a member. So this is a place where CEOs talk to other CEOs about weird CEO stuff that most of the world won't connect with because it's weird when you're a CEO. And I've been giving talks, I just gave a talk over Skype to Kuala Lumpur and just all these places all over the place. And it's all entrepreneurs at various stages. And a lot of them are 50 plus and they've made their success and all of them now are saying, oh my God, my health. I burned it out. How do I get it back? And I think the message you're putting in your book is that maybe if you don't burn it out in the first place, you don't have to fill it back in.

That's it. I mean, I'm finishing a film right now. I'm doing with Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He's an elaborate character, to say the least. Yeah, but he's a good guy and I've really enjoyed my time with him and the framework. The thing that really jolted me, that got me to really want to do the movie was this understanding. And I look, I grew up in la and you Know, as a, as a boy growing up in la, you know what's, you know, what's success? You drive a Ferrari, you have a mansion, like, all the stupid stuff that's kind of like beaten into your head. So when Robert and Kim achieved financial independence, their basic formula was this. What are our monthly expenses? At that point, it was $3,000 a month. They're living pretty small and meagerly, right? And their passive income had to simply exceed their monthly expenses. And then they were free. They bought their time back from, from this thing called money. And, you know, for me, growing up with all these guys in la, before I went off and did the monk thing, I mean, everyone's like, oh, what's your number? Is it a million? Is it 5 million? Is it 10 million? Is it a B? Right? Like, and so everyone's got this dumb number, but they don't really account for what it is that their actual, like, monthly burn is. That would keep them happy and keep them out of the rat race. And then once you're out of the rat race, yeah, sure, you want more stuff, then you create some assets and do it. You can play the money game, but free yourself from that crap so you could be the dad, the husband, the citizen, all these other things that the world needs you to be at the same time. And so it's this weird spell that money holds over a lot of us where we're constantly running after it, dumping our time and energy into it and not watering the plants that we say are important. And as we get further and further downstream there, it's harder to reconcile. We become liars. We say, we say we want something, but our actions say otherwise, right? And then that's where life starts to fall apart. Life's big problems show up, health crises show up. And all the things that, you know, you've had 400 something people on this show is what you talk about, right? Is people's lives fall apart when their health falls apart, their marriages fall apart when finances fall apart. And it all just kind of circles around this exchange of time, money and energy. And I can tell you right now that my premise here is that the glue for all of it is focus. If you can't focus on what you say you want, and your focus gets pulled out into Instagram and into the Internet, and it gets pulled out into the election crises and the next crisis that comes, you're never going to be able to map out your life in a way that's going to be meaningful and going to nourish you, because Your priorities are being supplanted by the priorities put in front of you by social media or the news.

It really appeals when you talk about having, quote, your number. One of the things I've learned to be grateful for. 26 years old, I made $6 million, right? And that should have been a big enough number. And I looked at another friend at the same company where everyone suddenly had a BMW, and I said, you know, I'll be happy when I have 10 million. Which is a super douchebag thing to say, to be perfectly honest. But at the time, I absolutely believed it. And the reality that I understand now, having had a chance to reflect on that and maybe grow up a little bit, is that the fact I lost that $6 million a couple years later was a lack of focus, which is a big. A big theme in your book, but also to learn that, you know, having that money didn't make me happy. In fact, I was really miserable. And even before that, you know, I was in Entrepreneur magazine. You know, the. The first. There's this weird fat kid, you know, selling things over this thing called the inner something, the Internet, that are very early days of E commerce. So I'm like, yeah, I was in a magazine. I'm like, wait, I'm still not happy. So I'm like, I tried fame, right? And you try money. And if I hadn't had those two experiences, I probably wouldn't be running my life the way I am now, where I care a lot about impact and money as a side effect of it, because, honestly, that makes me happier than those other things, having achieved them early in life and just still felt empty. But I also, at the time, I had a real problem with energy, like biological energy. My. My mitochondria were broken. I had fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and all that. And I ended up pouring all of my remaining assets into fixing my physical energy problem, which gave me enough l to work on the stuff that. That. That your book is focused on. One of the things that you say in the book, you say how you're living right now is a reflection of the mental, emotional, and spiritual operating system that, when you say that drives your emanation. But those aspects are the ones that are the hardest ones to deal with. But if you don't have enough energy or you don't have enough time or you don't have enough money, how are people supposed to have time to focus on spiritual operating systems?

Yeah, well, see, that's the funny part, right, is if you look at someone's Calendar, it's filled with work stuff, and it's never booking time for any of the other stuff. You know, date night with wife, play with kids, whatever it is. Like, you say your priorities are somewhere, but then you allocate your time somewhere else. Well, those are where your. That's where the, you know, follow the money, frankly. Right? And time is flowing in a direction that your focus is telling it to flow. Right? And so if you look at the way reality has assembled, you're a little baby, you learn to wiggle your toes, you start to do tummy time, you start to creep and crawl and do all these things. And then there's like a thing on the table. And you're able to move this blob of mass and stand yourself up against this table and move this material object from one place in time, space, to another. I mean, it's an absolute miracle. Right? But how much of your nervous system has to focus in on moving your muscles, moving your body, moving matter, lifting things to move something around, let alone build a shack or write a book or all the things that we do as humans here on planet Earth. Right? And so, you know, I look at this lack of focus as the central problem. Because, look, in Chinese medicine, these guys have a lot of metaphor that's kind of proven to come true over the years.

They knew a few things from thousands of years of watching. Right?

Well, and it's. Yeah. And watching what? Observing the internal state. Right. These people were the original biofeedback biohackers. They understood the internal state. And so what do we say in Chinese medicine? We say that qi follows the shen, the spirit. Spirit is the attention housed in the heart. So where your focus goes, your energy goes. And if you can sustain your focus, the energy that you're generating through the cells of your body, through the mitochondria, through this miraculous thing called life, continues to go to where your focus goes. And then the material universe starts to assemble around that. It's like the formula for manifestation. And you could say it's like hippie dippy and weird, but I literally do this every day of my life. I have a streaming service. I have a million things going on that I workshop all my monk stuff into. In the real world, if it doesn't work, I stopped doing it. Right. So how do you take your focus and assemble matter around that? You stay focused. You know, if you have a lot of energy, like later on when you got better at, like, this thing called life, it didn't take you as long to make 6 million bucks. Because now you had the power that you were able to focus, to assemble more millions of dollars and things on this plane. But if you don't have your vitality, you don't have your energy. The battery's dead. There's no juice. There's no. There's no current behind your focus. But if you could bring up your vitality, which is your whole gestalt in so many ways, is bring up the cellular health, bring up the mitochondrial function, bring up the capacity of the system to extract starlight from our sun and move it through your body to make things move in some miraculous way. You bring up the ability to generate more energy, and then you focus that energy. You get the life that you choose, then just be careful what you're asking for, right? And that's where a lot of my lottery winners were failing is. You know, I could bring it up, but then it's like, well, what are you asking for? What do you want? How do you stay focused and direct it so your life actually happens in a way that is intentional instead of tumbling around in the white water wondering why circumstances ruined everything for you? Again.

You mentioned that you were an ADD kid, and now you're talking about focus. You just wrote a book on it. And it's easy to say tell me your whole book in a sentence, but how do people go about achieving focus when there are so many distractions? But honestly, if you don't make your house payment and your cell phone payment, it's probably hard to do much else, right? How do you actually build focus in the chaos?

Great question. And this is why I kind of depart from the media in this. I'm not. I don't play that game. And the reason why I don't play that game is because I think the media has really focused around selling sugar cereal to children. Don't give me the get rich quick scheme for life. Tell me what to actually do, right? And I come from a discipline called kung fu, and the literal translation is hard work. You want something in life, you got to go get it. So if I tell someone, hey, listen, here's like, three practices to do that's going to hone your focus, increase your energy, make your life work better. All you gotta do is do them. There's two types of people in this world. One that says, giddy up, let's go. That sounds great. I got it from here. And the other one that says, oh, man, that sounds too hard. Can you put that in a pill? Is there some, like, device that can zap that into My ear. And that right there is the crisis of consciousness. That's a central premise of the book, is we have been trained to look outside of ourselves for a solution that comes in. And hacks, instead of getting back in the driver's seat and finding the nexus of control that gives us the mastery we started with, lost and need to regain in life. Now, is that easy? I didn't say it was easy. But is it the right move? Absolutely. Ask any of these masters up in the monasteries.

It's really interesting, though. It depends if people are thinking a hack is a way to not do the work, that is not what the hacks are for. But doing the work, doing the work in the most effective way is the hack and hard work. I can tell you, you go to a monastery, if your foot's in the wrong position, they're going to stop you and say in. Well, I would say. And when I translate it, I'd say the hack for the problem you're having is to turn your foot in a little bit. Dumbass. Right? And then you do it. Right. And. And over time, they have figured out the fastest path to achieve a goal. And the hack is finding the fastest path using all means available. And I actually believe that because of changes in the world of technology, there are ways to achieve things that where the old way may not be the fastest path anymore. And it's our job to figure out ways that drive lasting and meaningful results with the least possible energy. Because the driving motivation for all humans is laziness.

Yes.

We don't want to burn energy unnecessarily because it's unnatural to do that. You know, if you can hunt the lion or whatever, you're going to eat the elk. If you can do that with less energy, you want to do that because then the energy can go into something better. And so it's an interesting conversation now where I've heard a few people say, oh, hacks are bad. You can't hack that. And I'm like, yeah, hard work without precision is also. In fact, it's even worse.

It's inefficient.

Yeah, it's inefficient.

Well, think about how you and I met. When you and I met, you were biohacking guy and I was monk guy. But I had owned a brain lab for several years before we met. And so I commissioned our guys to study gamma wave coherence of the brain of meditators and try to figure out what the hell is happening so we could get better at this.

Funny enough, that's 40 years of Zen. That's one of the many brain states that isn't supposed to be trainable Gamma. Still, most neuroscientists say you can't train Gamma. Well, let me ask you, could you guys figure out how to train Gamma?

You know what's interesting is Gamma was like, like the elusive quantum cloud. And we could, we learned at this point, this is back in early 2000, how to train around Gamma. So to allow for Gamma to happen more frequently and regularly. So training Gamma itself was trying to like at that point, grasp me out of cloud. But training for bringing down high Beta and training Alpha and training deep Theta and all these things, and then getting into a state where you had popped in the clutch allowed for Gamma to happen more regularly, more frequently. And that was one of the, one of the many different phenomena we were studying at the time.

That's so cool. Well, we have definitely evolved that world. Although a lot of people still say you can't do it. The last. I'm always testing the latest stuff. The last test that I did, I was able to raise my gamma by 20% in a half hour.

That's miraculous. So it's dual 40 years.

Yeah. But this is why I think hacks are valuable, because raising Gamma is really freaking hard. And yes, I can do it by allowing it to emerge and all that stuff, but if I can show my body and my mind this is what it feels like, then I'm more likely to be able to get there without the technology. And as a training modality, that sort of stuff is important. And I almost feel like if you look at what you would have experienced at a monastery, you know, they're going to sit there and say, okay, it's a quiet room. You know, we've set everything up as best we can. And they're going to watch you and they're going to know when you finally like, they're. That you did it right. And you're like, aha, now I have a north for my compass. And I certainly had none of that crap when I was, you know, in Silicon Valley as a young man. And I just, I wish that someone had just been able to sit me down and be like, there's a state that you've never felt and that's what you're supposed to be doing because it was out of my universe. Right.

Well, that's the problem is everything is out of everyone. There's no context for any of this work. And there's all this neo spiritual gibberish out there that's Getting people to do a bunch of crap that is actually ineffective. Right. And I've done a ton of crap in my life where I've left it behind because, you know, when I went from ascetic to an urban monk, if something didn't work in my busy life in Los Angeles, it wasn't relevant, at least for, you know, that time in my life. And so if this stress management technique didn't work, I didn't have time for it, man.

Right.

That's called inefficiency 100%. And you know, then that's where the tech came in. That's where a lot. And it's a double edged sword. Right? Not all tech. You know, there's all these like brainwave apps out there. 80% of them are garbage. Right. And, and so. Right. And, and so here, here's my point though, that I want to make sure. And, and you and I are welcome to disagree on all kinds of things and that' friends, I feel like the tools take over and become a problem is when the device or the tool or the app or whatever it is starts to cross over into idolatry. When you get to the place where you have learned that this God given state of gamma or whatever it is, is an internal state that you can return to with your own consciousness. Thank you so much, tool. I'm happy to use you again. But now I have to understand that this is intrinsically a skill or a state that I can access with my consciousness. Thank you for showing it to me. But if I think I need the technology next time to get there, now I'm addicted and now I'm in a different world. And that's a very fundamental distinction that I think a lot of people get trapped in is people like, oh, I can't live without my headspace. I'm like, yo, that's dark. Right?

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Any of them.

No. Yeah, exactly. The idea there, though, is that you could do the same thing with a guru, right? It's one of the reasons I wrote Game Changers. What if we just study 500 gurus and figure out what they agree on and just do that without following anyone, including you or me? Because addiction to a guru, where you have to be in their presence to feel the state, you're doing it wrong. If you have to do 150 ayahuasca ceremonies, you're doing it wrong. Where you can experience it and then learn the skill. And it feels like that's kind of behind the curtains in your book Focus, where you're saying, well, if you focus on these things, you experience them, but if you require all of this crap, I mean, God knows I talk pretty openly. I've spent a million dollars hacking my biology. Really? I probably. If I'd have known what I know now, it would have been sub $100,000 because I wasted a lot of it. Or the flip side is, you know, I spend a lot of time doing heart rate variability work. Transformative. But I don't have to walk around with a clip on my ear 24 hours a day in order to have learned how to turn off my sympathetic nervous system. So there's bursts of value and then you evolve. How do you recommend that people know when they've achieved what they're going to get from their plant medicine, from their latest gadget, and then return to the state of focus that's in your book?

Yeah, great question. And so, you know, I think we can stay Facebook friends now because we're back on the same page. Man, I gotta stop punting all these trolls, right? The world of Facebook is also one of those, right? If you look, you know, social dilemma and all these kind of, you know, new bodies of work that are coming out is the algorithm is gamed at taking your attention out of your head, right? Which is the opposite energy we need. So let's just, let's talk about the good technologies that are there to help you find that state. How do you know?

Right?

So if you're doing heart rate variability and some of the new tech, it's like, okay, well here's, here's my number. Look at that. I'M better at this. If you're doing meditation and qigong, it's also very easy to know, am I in a better mood all day? Do I have more sustained attention and energy all day? Is my fuse longer? When my kids, like, barge into my office and start screaming when I'm working? Don't they know how important I am? Right? And all the things that interpersonally are supposed to be affected by this will be affected by this. Now you want to geek out and talk about NRF2 pathways. You want to talk about NF Kappa B pathways and all these things that we now know. So we know that we can suppress cytokine expression at the highest level through mind, body, practice, through these genetic pathways. If your joint pain is getting better, if your migraines are starting to improve, if you find yourself better capable of saying no to the cheesecake. Saying no. When the guys come into town for a drink and you're like, well, I was going to go to the gym and get a salad and see my kids, but you guys are here, let's go eat nachos and buffalo wings and have Advil in the morning. Right?

When's the last time you ate nachos and buffalo wings?

Probably about eight, nine years ago. I had a.

Okay, just checking that you're really walking the. Walking the talk.

No, and look, look, once in a while you gotta have nachos and buffalo wings to remember what they do to you. Right? Like, I. I had a couple buddies in town and one of them suggested Irish Car bo and it sounded like a great idea at the time.

What is an Irish Car bomb?

Oh, I think it's like Jameson with, like, Bailey's Irish Cream and Guinness.

That sounds freaking horrible.

It's delicious. It's horrible the next day. Yeah, it's horrible the next day. Right? And that's the thing. It's like, it's amazing at the time, but it's a terrible decision for tomorrow. Right? And so where's your prefrontal cortex at that time to say, yo, you know what? I don't think we need this tomorrow. And I don't think we could have the kind of week this is gonna lead to. What part of your brain steps in and stops that? If that part of your brain is working better than your practice is working for you, Right?

Let's talk about alcohol a little bit more. So, I mean, you're a daily meditator. Are you a teetotaler?

A teetotaler?

Teetotaler means someone who never drinks.

Oh, no, no, I seldom ever drink. I'm not like a oh, I need to have a beer at the end of the day kind of thing. I don't drink regularly. Nah. But I can tell you one thing for sure, is that coming down from the mountain and being around a bunch of judgy spiritual people and being around a bunch of, like, New age people that, you know, are hiding, you know, all their bad aberrant habits and all these things that, you know, they say they don't do, but they do. And, you know, being around gurus that were doinking all the, you know, girls in the ashram and see, I just. I've seen a lot is When I came down from the mountain, I stepped into the experience of being a human in a lot of ways. And I could tell you, alcohol once every few months, drinking some alcohol, dancing on the tables with your wife and having a big night and then having a headache and being like, okay, well, I don't want to do that again once in a while. No problem. No problem.

I love it that you say that in that even with your spiritual training, it's okay to choose to not be in that optimal state because it's fun as long as you don't do it all the time.

Well, that's it. And look, I don't like that. Like I said, I don't want, like, a fricking beer. It's just gonna give me, like, you know, gas and make me thirsty. But if I have friends I haven't seen in a long time or it's like a buddy's wedding, let's drink that vodka and let's celebrate your wedding, and let's make it a big, fun, exhilarating night. And I'll pay the price tomorrow. That's fine. Right? And I will drink that poison knowingly. Right. And that's okay. That's life.

That is a part of focus is choosing to do something because it was worth it, even if it had a cost.

That's it. That's it. I will allocate the water to this, knowing that it's going to take some water away from other things, but it really nourished my family and friends. Plant right.

There you go.

And we had one big night that we'll all remember and celebrate. Do I do that that often anymore? In my 40s? Nah, it hurts, Right?

All right. It also hurt in your 20s. You just didn't know it as much.

Oh, my fuse was much longer. Right.

Well put. You said something else, though, I've got to challenge you on. Okay.

Yeah.

You studied Taoism, and now you're saying these gurus, I'm going to quote you, boinking the women in their ashrams. Isn't sexual practice a core part of Taoism?

So, yes. And so I learned tantra and I learned wonderful practices around sexuality in my Taoist tradition, none of which was weird. But then I was in a number of Hindu ashrams and Buddhist ashrams where there was judgment around sexual practice. And it reared its ugly face, just like it does in the Catholic Church, just like it does in all these traditions that don't allow you to be the human you were born as. And I have been very outspoken about this because I'm a tantric practitioner. I think sexuality and spirituality are cultivated in the same light. I could speak in the same way they go together. But I've, you know, but I've been in. Look, I've. I'm a hospitaller knight in the Catholic tradition. I have seen weird, judgy people in my path that repress their sexuality and get creepy, man. They get creepy.

I just had an episode where I interviewed the guy who's done the largest survey of fantasy, like, sexual fantasy ever done. And he's. He's like, this is really interesting, but you can predict people's fantasies based on their political leanings, where, you know, people are all about freedom. You know, the more liberal people are in their fantasies, it's all about control. And then people who are all about control in their conservative leanings, for them, it's all about freedom and, you know, group sex and all sorts. Sorts of stuff. So people are. Are pushing in whatever direction they don't have in the bedroom and then feeling guilty about it. And his. His whole point is, you know, this is so abundantly common. Since it looks like everyone has these, maybe we could just talk about it. But it. It was very interesting to see that those happen. And you're saying you see the same thing in spiritual traditions? Oh, man.

Yeah. But, I mean, this is America. We can't talk about anything. Right? And that's the problem. That's the problem is just like, come on. Like, seriously, the. The tie I have. There's only two paths to immortality. One is to get someone pregnant and raise some children and hope that my gene pool, you know, carries on through generations to come and hopefully, you know, make them gajillions of dollars to ensure their survival and all the things that.

Come through the Genghis Khan path.

The Genghis Khan path. Right. Which works, you know, until.

Undoubtedly.

Right, yeah, yeah. It Works until it does. Until we're all.

Well, something like 10% of people in many parts of Asia have at least some genes from Genghis Khan to some study.

I read he was prolific.

Okay, so that's one path. What's the other path?

And the other path is to find the immortality of your consciousness vertically and to understand the transient nature of this temporal thing called life. And to understand maybe that there's another element to consciousness that ties us into a stream of life that is never ending. A stream of life that's flowing through all of us that we can share in common. You know, the Yoda stuff. Stuff. And so, you know, the. The Tantric path ties those two together by helping you understand your sexuality and the base energies and bringing them up and. And appreciating and cultivating. In Chinese, you know, alchemy, we call taking the jing and refining it to chi and shen of spirit. Right. And that spirit, that shen lives in the heart, and it's called attention. And it's tied to your focus. Right? You like that? That was full circle. But that's literally. It's the same alchemical path of cultivating your essence and directing your energy in a way that's meaningful to you. I mean, look, you know, I don't tell anyone what to do with their lives. I just tell them how to think about life so that they're less frivolous and more capable of directing their energy in the areas that they say they want and reconciling their word with their actions. Because that's where integrity comes in. You start lying to yourself. That's where everything starts to break apart. Hey, I'm going to lose 40 pounds, okay? You've been saying that for eight years. What are you doing? Right?

Right?

Yeah. How do you assign an action with that? And what are you going to do every single day to get there?

Talking about doing things every single day. How many hours a day do you meditate?

Oh, man, I'd be lucky if I got an hour right now. We're homeschooling. We got kids at home. I have a million things going on. I get up and do before I pee in the morning, and I can explain why. I get up and do about 40 minutes of qigong in the morning, every morning before I urinate. And then I'll meditate for about 10 minutes, and then I'll meditate for maybe about 15 to 30 minutes in the evening before going to bed. Now, I have other practices that I do that could be called meditation. So I hack my life you know, I take phone calls in my infrared sauna. I take a wet steam. I mean, it's gonna sound bougie, but I got all these toys in my house. Right. Where I get to do all this stuff that I've worked my ass, I traded my time and energy for. Right.

Plus, you live in the middle of nowhere, so you can afford some real estate to do that. Yeah, no, it's harder to do that in la. It really is.

It really is. It really is. I mean, it's. I curated my life in a way where I could have all the things that I choose. Right.

Okay, so an hour a day and you're saying you'll be lucky if you get that? I'm guessing most listeners don't spend an hour a day meditating.

I recommend 10 minutes a day.

10 minutes, that's the minimum effective amount.

Yeah. Minimum effective dose is if you start 10 minutes a day. It's not like you're going to be some sort of, like, enlightened guru, but you're going to start establishing a relationship with the part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, that allows for you to start getting better at this thing called focus, at this thing called mindfulness. Now, do you put other things in the day to allow for you to become more aware of where you're at? Sure. But just sitting down and turning your attention inward and watching your breath for 10 minutes a day is a great start. And here's the trick. Once you start, you want more because you realize that life gets easier and easier when you're doing the work.

Right?

But I just tell people, look, you got 10 minutes a day. Spend 10 minutes a day doing Candy Crush on the toilet. Like, come on, everyone's got 10 minutes a day. I don't care who you are.

Well, you've talked about peeing in toilets, so I'm not going to ask you about any of your weird fantasies, but totally kidding. Why do you do your qigong before you pee in the morning? I have not heard of this before.

A couple reasons. One is, in the Taoist tradition, the kidneys absorb the qi that is supposed to get expelled in the morning. So you have a lot of energy that will go out in your first stream of urine. And so in the alchemical practice of qigong, you get up and you reabsorb that qi and you put it back into the meridians before letting that pee leave your body. And the kidneys are kind of the repository of a lot of the energy in the system. It's an alchemical Thing.

But don't most people wake up just having to pee a lot? Do you just not wake up that way? Or you have to pee, but shut up kidneys.

And yeah, I train myself to just get up before I absolutely wet myself and do the work and then pee after. Right?

You're a weird dude, man.

It's weird. It's weird. But here's the other thing. What is the first thing most people do? It used to be when you first thing you do upon waking is you stumble over the bathroom and pee. Now most people, you know, half of them will, you know, lean over and start checking their social media feeds or check their emails and stuff.

You can do that while you pee.

You can do that while you pee, right? And that's what the other half the people do, right? But think about it. It's a mindless activity.

It is.

You start your day with mindlessness, looking at the world's demands of your attention before you even start your day. So for me to establish my operating system in a self referential, and I mean that in the positive way, not in a narcissistic way, in a self referential way that allows my attention to come back towards me, is I need to gather my attention and start my day with my consciousness focused on my life, my breath, my priorities, before Facebook comes knocking, before the emails come knocking. And so the most mindless thing we do in the morning is we stumble in and start doing this thing that we automatically have built as a habit, which is obviously a biological need, right? But I want to hack habits. I used your word, hack. I want to hack habits at the very start of my day. And then I want to start supplanting positive behavior over every little thing that has become automatic and mindless throughout my day as I build and assemble my day to bring my focus back home.

That's a beautiful use of the word hack, where it's a practice that was more effective than doing it another way. And so definitely I'm the same way. I do not turn my social. Well, not the same way in that I meditate before I pee, but I do keep my phone in airplane mode for at least an hour after I wake up. Even it used to be until I dropped my kids off at school. My kids are in school now, so I still do that, but for a lot of the time when they weren't in school, the same thing, you just don't turn it on because it's not worth it. And my, my team all knows you're just not going to be able to reach me. You might. If. If I even know the house phone number, you might be able to do that. But you're probably gonna have to drive to my house to get my attention, and that's fine. Yeah. So most people, though, even after hearing this so many times on the show, are still not. Still not necessarily plugged in on. On that really important thing. So I'm. I'm glad you brought it up.

It's. It's. One of the most important things in the world is who. Who gets to drive your brain before you do, because if it ain't you, you're tumbling down the whitewater the rest of the day. And, yeah, I want. I want my attention focused here, here. And then I could feed my lifeguard, and I could take care of my kids. I could do what I need to do from here. But let me choose. I don't want the world to choose for me.

It's a powerful place to be. And part of that is something else that's in your book, Focus. And you talk about saying no and setting boundaries, and I had. Especially earlier on in my career. But even when I was starting Bulletproof, saying no was a lot harder for me than it is now, because I see a lot of cool stuff, and I want to say yes to it, right? Whether it's building a new company or building a new product or going and doing some kind of cool thing I haven't done before. So I've become a little bit better at saying no or at least saying yes to the right things. What's your advice for learning how to say no? Because you say no a lot in your life now. I only travel seven nights a year. That's a big amount of saying no for you. That only came on in the last three years. What was your trick? How did you do it? And how do you suggest people learn how to say no more? Often?

I think the first and most important step on that is to really reconcile with yourself what you've already said yes to. Because if I say yes to my kids, my wife, my health, my time in nature, my dogs, and all these types of things, I need to then back out. How many hours a day are left after all of those yeses, right? It's just. It's like. It's like doing a budget. If you're in credit card debt, you cut up the cards, right? If you are in time debt, if you're saying yes to a bunch of things and all the things in your life that you already say you value are not getting watered your Kids are pissed and your dogs look at you like, dude, come on, you need to walk me more often. Then those yeses are being neglected and so your new yeses are turning your old yeses into no's. Right? And that's just a hard reconciliation of what you say you want versus what you're doing. And what I, you know, and I think mindfulness has been taught very erroneously in the West. I mean, everyone's. You have all the, like, the weird guru trippers that are like, oh, it's all about this enlightened state. And, you know, what you really need to do is just take ayahuasca because it approximates it and then you don't have to do the work, you know. You know, there's all these like weird misreads of what mindfulness is. And, you know, I said this back in like the urban monk days, is if you think of it as like an app on your desktop and you have all these windows opening and you're like starting to get stressed out because you, you know, there's too much stuff going on. You double click meditation and you're like, you know, you do some stuff and then you go back to 27 open windows. That's bullshit. Like, that's not how it's supposed to work. It should be like this virus scanning operating system that's constantly going, hey, Dave, you said yes to that new company over there. Do you realize that that's, you know, 16 hours a month that you're committing to and you know, your kid is playing the guitar now. And you said you go to the concerts and your wife says, you know, we should go spend some time in Italy and not work so hard and using that as a filter for future yeses. So what? And this, you know, I used to be like everyone else, Dave, not everyone else, but a lot of people who kind of got into this world is. I became a meditation apologist where I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm going to say you should meditate, but I know you're not going to do it. So let's, let's talk about the other stuff that you might be willing to do and we start playing let's Make a Deal. I'm done with that. If I told you that there's a practice out there that literally helps enhance the part of your brain that's responsible for the negation of impulses, higher moral reasoning and rational thinking, and will help you to better say no to the cheesecake or the new event in light of all the things that you've already said yes to. It's called meditation. Right. And you do that to enhance the part of your brain that allows you to get better at saying no. So now I have to stop. And if it's something I'm super excited about, I'm allowed to say yes. But then I have to figure out where I'm going to get the time, money and energy away from my other yeses. I look at my life garden and I go, okay, well what do I have to pull water away from to say yes to this thing? And it could be, yeah, yeah, maybe later. Yes, in quarter three of 2022. That's an absolute yes. Let me finish a couple of these things, let me hatch a couple of these eggs I'm sitting on and that is absolutely something I'm interested in. I'll be back. Or I'm so sorry, I can't do that. But in the given timeline right now, a hell yes is often an instinct that you have to weigh against all your previous yeses on.

That was a big hack for me. The not know but not now, just.

But later. Yeah, sure, yeah.

You're saying, you know, this is on my list of things that, you know, I'd like to do at some point. I'm not saying I'm not going to do it, I'm just saying I'm not going to do it right now. And that creates a bigger sense of freedom from what I can tell.

Yeah, yeah. And that's the part in time that is also, I think, amygdala driven. The part in time that's time compressed, where it's like, I'm going to lose this opportunity. I can't. Like your, your, your basic survival instinct is like, I gotta grab this right now because I don't know when I'm gonna eat something cool like this again. And that's like, in terms of like, you know, life, candy, not even food. And we tend to reach for these things in this time compressed way, panicking that they're not going to be there tomorrow and anything worth waiting for is there. And like, yeah, sure, there's opportunities and spec and stocks and all that crap, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something that Dave has to put his precious heartbeats, time, energy and effort into. And right now, if you got a lot of stuff going on, it's, yeah, maybe later. Right, that's fine. And maybe it'll pass that my kids are more valuable to me right now. I can't disappear on them. It's not fair.

Love that. Now we're coming up on the end of the interview and you've done something interesting and something that I'm doing for my new book on fasting that includes the spiritual fasting where you've created a 21 day course where you're saying, all right, you can read a book, but maybe you could just teach them the stuff and you're giving it away when people buy the book. And I actually think this is the future of writing these books where it's not enough to spend thousands of hours writing a book. You also have to do. You have to finish the work as a teacher and say, I'm going to make it so that you can digest what's in the book fully. And I appreciate that you did that. And what you're doing is the same thing I am, which is, hey, buy the book. Send me a receipt so I know you bought it. And I'm going to give you what would be a hundred dollar course or something like that, which is cool. I'm guessing that the link for that is theurbanmonk.com actually didn't even write it down.

Just go toThe Urban Monk.com. it'll be on the homepage. I did this in 2016 with the Urban Monk book where I did like this seven day free course called the Reboot. And it really taught me something in 2016 when I was just starting to write. This is my second book at the time. And I was just like, wow, you lazy bum, go read the book. And I realized that I'm the same guy. I was judging, right? Where it's just like, man, someone like Dave's like, oh, hey, I read this book, it's great. I just go on Amazon and like buy it and it shows up. And then you get these stacks of books that just start showing up at your house. And then you start looking at them going, damn, that's like seven months of my life right there. Yeah, I'm stressed out looking at that and I don't even know where to start or which book to start with. And I realized that we live in a world in the information age, which is so overwhelming that the author does need to show up. The author needs to show up and be like, hey, look folks, I get it, it's hard. I'm here. We could do a read along. I will help you through this. And it's important to understand in the age of overwhelm that I'm not here to try to overwhelm you. I'm here to Help you. And so that's why for me, just taking 21 days of my life and sitting with my students and my readers to really make sure that I'm leading them to water and encouraging them to drink. I can't drink for them, but getting them as far as I can, I found, has been very effective in getting people to do the work and reap the benefits of the work.

Very, very well said. One more question for you, Padram, and you're going to love this. Top three recommendations. If people want to improve their focus, you only get three. The three that either matter most or the people are most likely to do. You get to pick.

Okay, well, the first one is an absolute number one, which is meditate. Again, I'm not a meditation apologist. Meditate your entire life gets better. When you get better at making decisions in life, you start to make better and better decisions. It turns out life works out. It turns out life works out. Number two, stop poisoning yourself. If you're like, oh, you know, dairy bothers me a little, I just get gassy. But it's okay. You keep taking it's death by a thousand cuts. Find out what your body doesn't like, it's telling you it doesn't like, and just stop doing it. You want to add to the Life Force bank account you don't want to take away. And if you're doing things every day that are diminishing your vitality, much like kale.

Is that what you're talking about?

Like kale? Yeah, you know, like all the oxyl. Well, you know what's funny? I was talking to Chris. So, you know, Chris Kresser moved up here, too, so we stayed all the time. Yeah, he had to get away from.

All that mold in his house. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, right. He's now here in Deer Valley. We ski all the time. And one of the things he's been doing is, like, he stopped recommending kale because what happened finally, all of. Yeah, but it's not the reasons you don't recommend, I don't know, like, you've recommended not doing it because of the oxylic acids and all this.

And the thallium.

Yeah, the thallium. Yeah. So he's like, holy crap, I've been telling people to drink thallium in these kale plants. They just suck up all the thallium.

They're bad in many different ways. But, yeah, I started with oxalates and thallium three years ago. Became really obvious. I actually measured an increase in thallium, probably from Broccoli, not even kale that I had. I'm like, this is ridiculous.

So, yeah, well, yeah, for the same reason the cruciferous guys are good is right. They're now sucking up all these poisons from planet Earth, thank you very much. But if we eat them, then, you know, shame on us, right? So don't poison yourself.

Okay? That's number two. Number three.

Number three is still water breeds poison. If you are not moving your body, if you are not building lean, lean muscle mass and increasing the density and the volume of mitochondria in your body and you're complaining about not having enough energy to see your life through, the equation is very clear. You need to have throughput. You need to have your food be pulled into these mitochondria that are robust and pulling energy, creating energy for your life. Don't be afraid of more energy. Just have good energy economics and move your body in a way that allows for you to have more throughput. I don't worry about food. If people are moving and people are active and people's mitochondria are cranking, you know what they're asking you for? More food and it's burning it. I've worked with all these ultra marathon guys that are eating and this is not the best kind of food, but double extra large pizzas while running and they could probably eat the cardboard box while they're at it because their body has such metabolic needs that it's just pulling it through and they're muscular and they're healthy and they're happy. So, you know, I think that, you know, once you get your life aligned and you figure out where you want your energy to go, it's like cash in the pocket. It doesn't hurt to have more once your economics are fixed. And that's where I think a lot of people lose it is they, their focus is everywhere, so their life is everywhere. And they don't get the life that they say they want because they're just not focusing on their priorities. They're not focusing on their life.

Very, very well put. Pedram. Thank you for being a guest again on the show and for doing the work of both writing the book and making it teachable. I've realized just in my own books that I have not done a good enough job of being the teacher, which is funny. I spent five years teaching at the University of California, but I maybe had taken the, taken my foot off the gas on that front in favor of writing where now I'm like, okay, if you write the textbook, you still have to teach the class. So this is the future of being someone who's creating content that's worth reading. So I think you're ahead of the curve on that and I appreciate that you're taking the time to do it. Have a beautiful day, Pedro.

Thank you my friend. Great to see you as always.

If you liked today's episode, there's something that you have to do to avoid being a bad person. And that is when you decide you're going to read a book, you have to leave a review. So read Pedram's book. In fact, you want to do both of us a favor. Buy Focus his new book and at the same time order fast. This way you can pre order it now and then they'll show up together. These are books that are entirely compatible where it's around building awareness, building practice, and doing what works so that you can you have Focus. You probably wouldn't know this, but I found the study that's in the book. Up to 30% of the thoughts you have are probably about what's for lunch or dinner. You can do better. Have an awesome day.

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