65: Take Back the Power with Dr. Pedram Shojai

The devices, I just use them as additional data points to confirm or help me understand what it is that I'm feeling.

The moment you own it, the moment you take responsibility, the moment you seek it, that's almost when you take the power back.

And when you finally give up on all that crap and you realize that you got to draw water up every morning for yourself, that's when the game changes.

This is the Energetic Leader led by a team of three who have influenced people at the highest level of corporate, athletic, entrepreneur and the business world. We teach through science and data driven methods to help you lead through energy and influence. We don't just use our stories, but the stories of those who have walked the walk, been in your shoes and ultimately excelled. Whether it's leading a team of 10 or 10,000, building a business of 1 million or 100 million, winning one championship or 10, they all have one thing in common. Energetic leadership. So with that, step inside and let's help transform you into that energetic leader. Welcome back to another week of the Energetic Leader. And Pradeep, it is so great to see you as always. Elyse will be joining us next week, but I know you are up in Toronto still kind of warming up there for springtime now or what.

Yeah, it's actually sunny, man, it's a beautiful day.

I love it.

Tomorrow supposed to be 17 Celsius. So get the kids out, play around a little bit.

I love it, I love it. And speaking of kind of thawing out and getting into some real spring weather, we have one of probably the most interesting people I have ever dug deep into. If you haven't read any of his books, you've got to go to the bookstore and sit out in the spring sun and start reading a couple of these because this guy's been all over the world, studied under a series of Taoist. How do you pronounce it? Is it Taoist monks?

Taoist.

So studied under Taoist monks. And then that's where he had his breakthrough that there was something more that he wanted in his life and came back and has been living it. And I think it is just so inspiring when you found it and have been able to truly do it on a whole new level. And so with that, without further ado, I would like to introduce to you guys, Dr. Pedram Shojay. Thank you so much for spending the time and taking this next little bit to be with us.

Hey, great to be here. We're actually thawing ourselves here. I'm in Park City, Utah and the ski season's winding down, so everyone's just trying to get greedy and get a few more runs in, but I'm kind of done. I love it.

I love it. How many runs have you done this year?

I've skied 67 days.

Gotta love that.

I mean, yeah, I mean, it was. It's been great. I'm sore, but it's been great.

Keeps you young, that's for sure.

Oh, man, mountain air just, you know, it's like the first couple days of the season, you realize how out of shape you may have gotten, and by the end of the season, you're just running up the hills, right? It's good. It's good, clean living.

Well, looking at you being only the ripe age of 30 years old, how have you been able to live such a great life over with. With everything you've experienced? What was the big thing? Being with the Taoist monks. They kind of stood out to you, and you're like, wow, there's. There's something bigger for me here.

I mean, it's like once you learn to dig deep and you feel it and you sense it, it's hard to ever go back. And, you know, to me, I call it stopping time. It's going to that place where energy, peace, happiness, it's all just right there under your breath, learning how to access it inside. Instead of spending your life running around trying to find it outside, someone's going to give it to me. I'm going to go get it out of a seminar or a book or all these things that we try to do to improve ourselves. At the end of the day, I don't care what you're doing, you still got to turn your attention inward and tap into those states. At the ripe age of, I don't know, 17, 18, when I started playing with this stuff, there was no looking back. It's like, oh, or I could feel like this, right? Or I could, you know, be on this cloud and understand that this is my birthright. And it's really hard to kind of juxtapose that against the lives that, you know, everyone else is living. You know, it just made more sense.

What's that it feeling? What is that thing that stands out to you?

You know, it's really hard to put into words, right? The dao that can be spoken is not the eternal dao, right? Like these states of being are our birthright. And, you know, look, some people have had glimpses of it. You know, you had a, you know, deep day at the church, or you ate some ayahuasca or, you know, there's a lot of ways to taste that stuff, but can you live there in a sustained fashion in a way that, that begets a healthy, balanced life, or are you just banking on experiences and then going back and talking about the experiences that you had, like your Al Bundy talking about an old football game or something? Right? You want to live there all the time. You want to be able to access that as often as you can on a daily basis and not just try to have some sort of Saturday night spirituality or go to some music festival and think that that was, can't wait till the next one, right? It should be every day, right? And those experiences, when you learn the practices, that you just kind of live there.

It's so funny that you say we seek tools or we seek hits of it every single time, whether it's, hey, I'm going to go on another trip somewhere, hey, I'm going to buy another car, hey, I'm going to go and show up at church once a week and commune with people and really kind of get that feeling of inner peace. What have you been able to find that's been able to create sustainability for that for you? And get that daily dose of it that ultimately manifests in that long term feeling of, hey, that's not what you're chasing, that's what you are.

You know, I think a lot of it is, you know, the old Zen saying of, you know, chop, chop wood, fetch water. And, you know, I think the thing that, you know, had to shift for me was thinking someone's going to, you know, hand the water over, you go to some master, you know, it's like, oh, here's the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa Lama, like, here, he's going to give me the, you know, he's going to give me all the answers. And when you finally give up on all that crap and you realize that you got to draw water up every morning for yourself, that's when the game changes, right? Just develop a practice, whether it's yoga, pranayama, you know, Taoist qigong, Buddhist qigong, I don't care what Sufism, I don't care what it is. But developing a practice that allows for you to draw that water yourself creates the relationship with the inner self and cuts out all the middleman crap and gets you on the right game finally.

It's so powerful because I personally had that same moment in my life where forever I had put it upon myself. I wanted to play in the NHL, got really close, and then became a coach, coached in the NHL. And in my transition, I was. I was there. I was sitting at the peak at which millions of other people would say, hey, I want that job. And I felt unfulfilled. And it was a blame game every day. It was my wife's fault that I wasn't fulfilled. It was the fact that we weren't winning consistently that was the fault of it. It was my family. There was always something there. And there was supposed to be some white knight riding up that was going to say, hey, here's the answer why you're not fulfilled. Here's the answer of what you should be doing on top of this to fill that void that's seeking there. And the moment that I was like, you know what? The moment I took responsibility and said, hey, this is up to me. I have to decide what it is and make a change. That was when all of a sudden the light bulb goes off and that gaping hole that was inside me forever was filled. And it's so powerful. What you said is being able to. The moment you own it, the moment you take responsibility, the moment you seek it, that's almost when you take the power back.

That's it. And it has to be you. No one can do it for you. There's no intermediary. There's no coach. There's none of that stuff that we think is going to do it. I mean, it's. You know, look, we grew up in a culture where, you know, the mob boss would whack people all week and then go to the pope for forgiveness, right? And it's just like you have all this middleman stuff that makes the, you know, it's a disintermediation of your relationship with God, your relationship with self, your relationship with any, you know, divinity or enlightenment. And that disintermediation, I think, has served to create spiritual maladies in, you know, people living in the West. And, you know, once you cut out all the middlemen and you get out of, like, the, you know, woe is me blame game, and, you know, who's going to save me game, the savior, messiah thing. And you just start doing the work, you reap the rewards, right? And not every day is going to be like, you know, fireworks and hallelujah, right? You know, it's just work, right? And, you know, you just do what you need to do and you put one foot in front of the other, and your quality of life starts to increase as your vitality increases, as your serenity increases. And eventually your fuse is long enough to pretty much have pretty Good days all the time. And if you have a really bad day, you don't burn down the fuse. So where you go, you know, you go pull postal and start killing people, right? You just, you have the resilience to withstand the bumps in the road because you fed the meter every day. And I think that's where I think a lot of people, you know, it's our healthcare system. It's like, hey, you know, come back when something's broken and we'll give you some drugs and you know, we'll take you back to, you know, the midpoint. Nothing beyond that. No vitality, no, you know, we're not going to talk about profits. We're going to just keep you, you know, piss poor, broke and, you know, one penny away from being sick again. And that's kind of the model we have with spirituality, all of it. And, you know, unless that changes, good luck being happy. You know, Pedram.

What do you think needs to change then for that to happen?

I think it's all just a personal perspective, right? Like nothing really needs to change in society or the world or, you know, politics and all those things are just kind of reflections of our own inner chaos. I think what we have to change is our mind, right? Just decide that, yo, I'm doing this, right? I, this is, this is on me. I'm going to get up and it's like, oh, well, I don't know what to do. It's like, come on. There's YouTube, there's, there's a gajillion channels that will show you yoga moves or breath techniques or, you know, better ways to pray to, you know, Mary, whatever it is, that's your channel. Just start doing the work again every day and develop the spiritual hygiene in your own life, right? With whatever that is to you. And the more you do it, the more the cobwebs start to clear and the clarity is there, the prefrontal cortex is firing. You're making better decisions. And I've seen this thousands of times. This becomes an upward spiral almost instantly.

So what drew you towards Daoism? Or did you practice other. And I'm going to get your take because I kind of dabble in little things here and there. I'd love to get your take on Confucianism, the comparison to Buddhism, for example. Why Daoism? And where do you see the differences in these different philosophies? You can say, sure.

You know, it's funny is I grew up a non religious Iranian kid because we're, you know, product of the revolution, right? My parents were like, hey, that ain't God, right? So you go find it on your own. And I had some confusion in college where I'm like, man, I don't want to go to medical school if I'm going to live that guy's life, right? And I. And I distinctly recall asking God for a clue. I'm like, yo, dude, if you're up there, now would be a really good time to, you know, give me something. And a book on Taoism falls out of a bookshelf. And that's not something I could actually, you know, explain rationally, But I had the wherewithal enough to be like, I should probably read this, right? And I didn't even heard of this stuff before then. Next thing I know, I find a Taoist kung fu master in Los Angeles, California. He was the, you know, lineage holder from a, you know, temple train tradition that came from China that, you know, the communists burned down the monastery and the last. The, you know, last master escaped to America. And, you know, fast forward a few weeks, not even a few months, I'm studying kung fu, tai chi, qigong, all sorts of things. I could barely pronounce with these guys. And, like, I'm just in. I'm in. And, you know, to answer the other question, I mean, I think Confucianism is much more cultural Chinese with kind of filial piety and some of the. Some of the issues that, you know, come with the organization of Chinese structured society. And so I never really got into Confucianism, but I definitely got into Buddhism. I studied with the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa Lama. I studied a lot of vipassana. And, you know, I've sat a lot. And I think Buddhism is beautiful, right? I just came into it through Taoism, and I thought Taoism was very, very free, right? You know, the dao that can be spoken is not the eternal dao. I mean, Buddha said the same thing. They're like, hey, what's enlightenment? Like, he's like, I can't. Here. Here's how you breathe, you know, I mean, like, you go tell me. And so I think that those two are very, very clean. You know, it's like the essence of them are very clean. And, you know, it's. It kind of sidesteps the deity worship elements of the Judeo Christian Islamic system and then the polytheism of the Hindu system. And I hang with all those guys all time, right? But I just. I end up sidestepping a lot of it by not having to mud Wrestle over the G word. Right. And the G word has gotten so much polarity from so many people that argue about something they don't even understand because they're being told what the G word is and they're fighting over what they think they should interpret the G word as. Right. It's just. It's ridiculous.

Yeah, that's very interesting.

So for.

For people out there who are wondering and they. They might just never heard of even Daoism, for example, or Confucianism. Where would you suggest that they start?

I like the Dao Te Ching. You know, Lao Tzu's famous. You know, it's kind of like the Bible of Taoism. And it's just this very deep, heavy, profound body of work that you can read and meditate on for years. You know, scholars have been trying to retranslate it for thousands of years.

It's confusing, I can tell.

Yeah, yeah. It's like poetry, but it's also. It's like. It's like reading rumi, right? It's like, oh, wow, this. There's a lot here, right? Lao Tzu and then Chuang Tzu. The way of Chuang Tzu is very good. But, you know, I honestly think that reading is a disservice. Not to say don't read Lao Tzu and, you know, learn about Taoism. But I honestly, you know, what I gravitated towards was the experiential quality of these practices that you can talk and read till you're blue in the face. It's hard because I'm brown. Right. But, you know, you just get to the point where, like, there's only so far you can go without doing some Tai Chi or, you know, feeling the energy through your hands and meditating. And I think that's where I think the disconnect is in our culture is we could read about God and interpret, you know, what some dude said 3,000 years ago, or we can pray and fill our heart with God's love and have a very different experience of that. And the same thing with Taoism. It's like, oh, you know, I'm a philosopher versus I'm now silent because I realize there's nothing. There's nothing that I should say. Right. And that comes from a je ne sais quoi, if you will, that can only come through the work. That can only come through the practices.

Yeah, I find it very interesting because I come across a lot of people who are, you can say chasing enlightenment, and they're searching or they'll meditate for you. Know, for hours, and then they go back and their life's falling apart. I find it very interesting to see that, especially in Western society. I think Eastern is not that it's any better. They have their own challenges. But I find that a lot in Western society. And I'm glad that you're educating. What is your main mission with the work that you're doing?

I'm trying to help people, individuals at a time. I think the challenge is I've done a number of films on conscious capitalism and the environment and all sorts of things that matter to me. And I realize it's hard to have any of that matter to anyone if they're stuck in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And so if you're just not feeling well, you don't have energy, you're just deeply unhappy. These are things that keep you from being able to be a good citizen and a good human to others. And these are things that we know how to fix. Right. I'm a functional medicine doctor. I've been doing a lot of this stuff for a long time. So I've been doing just a lot of media around helping people solve their immediate problems so that they can then escalate on that. Maslow's hierarchy of self, self realization and individuation. And so, you know, I used to be the guy that was preachy, right? And now I'm just like, yo, let's help you with your headaches, right? Because that's gonna make you a nicer mom. And, you know, it'll get you to take the next step towards being, you know, the person that you're destined to be, right? People just stuck.

Yeah. I have to say, my wife's a big fan of your work. She introduced me to Justin, and I were talking. I'm like, yeah, yeah, he's pretty cool. About a year and a bit ago, I think you were with. Was it Mark Hyman, that you were on a podcast or doing a series together or something?

Sure. I do a lot with Mark. Yeah.

With Mark, Yeah. Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah, it was really cool.

Yeah, Mark's been doing some great work. And Mark's out there, man. Like, he is, you know, he's on the front line, sword drawn, trying to fix healthcare in America. And that's a daunting task, man. So, you know, like, whatever that guy does, I'm just like, hey, I got your back. Right? Because that is a noble cause.

Well, I think that's important because I think that's a big part of our health, right? We talk about our Mental health. And obviously you're in this space, you do this work. But our physical health, our gut health, for example, has a lot to do with just other aspects of our life. I'll just give you an example for my wife. She was dealing with a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, a lot of immune issues. And then she came across Marc Hyman's work, your work, and she's knee deep in it. She's a nurse practitioner and she's like literally how I am with other things. She is with functional medicine and everything. So it has changed her life. She went from a life of having very little energy to being full of energy. And she still got a little bit of ways to go. But I think that health aspect is so important because for our family, our life, like we thought we were eating healthy, we thought we were doing pretty good there. But when we really started to take a look at things, we're like, wow. Like we are just not educated as well as we thought. So if we aren't, what is the average family living like? It is pretty scary when we think about it.

It's bad. I mean, if you look at follow the money and you follow the subsidy, I mean, it sounds like you guys are in Canada, but like you follow subsidies in America. And what should be subsidized is broccoli and carrots and vegetables and high fiber, you know, healthy microbiome inducing foods. But instead it's high sugar foods and salt and fat and you know, just all the crap that you'll see like in, you know, on a Nabisco, you know, brand or, you know, the things that are produced at very high volume, they're high calorie, low nutrient garbage. And that's what food stamps pays for. And that's what, you know, all of the subsidies are going towards. And then you look at the, you know, the, it's a trillion dollar business on just that one side and then there's a trillion dollar business on the other side catching it and throwing drugs at it that don't resolve the problem, but just treat symptoms. It's a plantation system and the people are just being mined for their life force. It's. And so if you start to realize just how insidious it is, and I'm not, you know, I don't know if there's a bunch of, you know, fat dudes with cigars sitting in a room, you know, planning this out. It's just how the market evolved into just very easy. You know, it found its efficiencies, right? And the Efficiencies happen to not value human life and human suffering right. The way they should. The morality is missing. And, you know, we just. We just did a whole film on this a couple years ago. Adam Smith, the founder of modern capitalism, before he wrote his kind of foundational work, he wrote a book called the Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he's like, look, none of this shit I'm talking here means anything if you don't have a core morality to take care of humans and the food industry and healthcare and all. It all just went off in its own direction with no moral barometer. And you have obesity, diabetes, heart disease, all these crises that are absolutely preventable. And they have to do with food subsidies and food choices and market dynamics and just poor decisions and no education. Right. And so these are all things that we can fix. So here I am. You know what I mean? Like this. These are things. This is a fight worth fighting for.

It's very interesting that you say that, because a lot of the work that I've done has been, especially in the last five, six years, has been on. I use DNA testing to really look at within my clients where their natural deficiencies have come from. And in starting to now work with different generations of athletes and now executives, their teams, and looking back now at their. So I've done a grandfather, a father and a son, and then his son. So four generations, you've started to see that genetically what's happening is the vitamin deficiencies that they are genetically predisposed to are actually increasing simply because of the food that we're eating. But not just the food that we're eating, but the food that our food is eating. So the food our plants are eating, the food our meat, chicken, fish, are all eating, it's continually depleting our systems exponentially as our kids have kids, have kids, have kids. And it's being passed down generationally throughout it because it just continues to be deteriorating further and further every single time.

Yeah. But, you know, the good news is it can stop right here with you and your next generation.

Exactly.

And so, you know, we have some very important decisions to make. And, you know, it starts at the grocery store, it obviously, you know, starts at the ballot and things that you can do, but you can create an environment where, you know, I have air filters right there, we filter the water in our houses, and, you know, there's all sorts of things that I have to do to kind of offset the damage of society and just be careful what we feed our kids and then supplement and, you know, do all these kind of functional measures to live in an increasingly toxic world. But I think a lot of people kind of get deer in headlightsy over that, right? And they're like, oh damn it, look what they're doing. And it's just, you know, becomes shaking your fist at, you know, some, some kind of bad guy instead of being like, look, let me just put on the oxygen, Ma, let me take care of my kids and then let's figure out how to land this frickin plane, right? Like there are steps to take to triage out of it, but being toxic and unhealthy and exhausted and obese and all these aren't great options, right? So it's like you still have to make all these decisions so that you can stand against the tide of this calamity that we're watching, right?

How sad is it that everything that you just spoke about, eating whole foods, filtering your water, having air filters in your home is what a lot of us consider high performance. That's a high performing person rather than just being the norm.

It's a low bar. I mean it's a pretty freaking low bar, right? It's like if you could just be less toxic and poisoned in life somehow you're like some sort of bougie hippie, right? And it's a ridiculous climate that we live in. But I can tell you definitively, I mean, I live in Deer Valley, right? Like we've done well, I make films and stuff and my neighbors are all, you know, he's like hedge fund guys and all this. And you know, you put a couple of drinks in these guys and they start talking. There are very specific initiatives from a lot of these hedge funds in particular that are targeted towards disinformation because there's just too much money to be made. There's so much going into media to keep people believing that chopping down trees is not a bad idea or fossil fuels or coal is still a good idea. You know what I mean? And there's just, there's a propaganda machine that has been supporting a multi billion dollar industry in every vertical and they just understand that people are lazy and people are, you know, just not going to do their research and they're going to believe what they're told and probably not the first time. So they just tell them 15 more times and then it's a belief. So there's, I mean, there's an insidious nature to the mind control media propaganda machines that we also come up against. And those guys are, they're doing it, they're doing it. There's no doubt about them. You saw it in the American election cycles and, you know, you could just buy people's opinions. And so, you know, there are a lot of, you know, there's a lot of good reason to educate yourself and to be discerning as well, because there's plenty of people who feel like it's not a problem. Right. And we know, look, if you live within a half a quarter mile of a freeway, you have 50% greater chance of developing cardiovascular disease in your life. And if it's half a mile, it's 25% greater chance of developing cardiovascular disease in your life. And then that's not even talking about the epigenetic transference downstream. And, you know, dad lived next to a coal plant and, you know, now I have asthma. Right. And it's just like, we understand this enough now. But there's just a lot of disinformation trying to be like, hey, look away. You know, it's fine.

I feel like in Canada we're, I'm not going to say much better, but a little bit better.

For sure. You're better.

Yeah. In terms of having proper conversations. And I find that in the US that there's this, this you can say camp that talks about capitalism, right? And that's what they're feeding on, is it's about capitalism. It's about, you know, being free. That's what this country is about. Freedom of speech, capitalism. But I think at some point you're absolutely right. Like, we have to figure out what information is actually correct. What information. And I'd like to get your take on this because there's the onus on people feeding the information and then the onus on people receiving the information. So what do you do with a population that has very little access to accurate information?

I mean, it's tough because there's this thing called the World Wide Web where there's all information and, you know, I can even go get some very good, clear scientific information on, you know, what's happening in the environment, or I can believe the aliens did it. And those are all websites that are accessible to me. Right. And so being discerning and having. Having people like Mark Hyman and some of the kind of people that I like to put my cameras on who are just legitimate people doing the work, saying, hey, look at this. That's where the influencer model works. The challenge with the influencer model, and this is what happens in corporate America, what happens in science in general is you have to disclose where your Affiliations are. And you have to be like, yo, I'm hocking these vitamins. And it turns out I get 50% on it, right? And so there's less incentive to be discerning from some of those folks, too. So there's. You just, you just got to make sure that the people you're following are clean, right? And that they. They don't have a dog in that race. And it's very difficult. It's very difficult. Universities are bought. You know, it's like, hey, we'll give you this grant. Just don't talk about, you know, what we're doing over here. And so, you know, there's just. It's a very challenging time. I wish I had all the answers to this. But we're really coming through this tumultuous area of fake news, misinformation, you know, government trolling and, you know, very targeted disinformation campaigns. And I think, you know, truth is under assault. And I don't think we're on the other side of that right now. I think that, you know, for the next several years, this is going to be a conversation that's going to evolve into, you know, trusted sources and, you know, clean journalism. And hopefully, if not, I mean, you know, we're in big trouble.

I also want to get your take on this because talking to some of my friends in the neuroscience space, for example, in terms of they're doing these projects, but what I've heard is all of these, not, I shouldn't say all, but a vast majority of these big projects about future forward projects are funded by these big companies, like pharmaceutical companies, example, and they're based on certain drugs or whatever that is. So someone that has a deep desire to help mankind, but it has nothing to do with maybe, you know, taking pills, making money on the back end. Do you have an idea? What are your thoughts in terms of where they can go to get funding or support or partnerships?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of foundations that'll fund that kind of stuff. I like DPOs. I like, you know, Angels who Care. I like, you know, crowdfunding, some of those things. But I also like setting up, you know, I've been on all sides of the spectrum being a monk, right? And then, you know, we kind of fell into this, this lane of conscious capitalism where it's like, hey, look, here's the work, what we do, here's the work that we do. This is where we make our money. You know, we're gonna be really clear about it because we got to keep the lights on, and if you, you know, support the work that we're doing, you got to support our business. Because if I go out begging for money, it always comes with strings. Right. It's very difficult to hold the line and, you know, kiss the ring. Right? Like, it's just. There's a patronage model that has kind of, you know, made its way into all forms of capitalism where it's just, you know, like, these are the things we're willing to write checks for, and they just happen to be within a narrow gestalt of where our initiatives are. Right. And that's dangerous. That's dangerous. Doesn't lead to free thought, doesn't lead to free, you know, you know, free market dynamics. And so you got to get out there. I like small businesses getting out there and scrapping it up and making it happen. But, you know, it's like, I first decade of my life, no one was throwing checks at my brown ass. You know what I mean? It's like I had to do everything to just get up and, you know, get over, you know, the water line and to gasp some air so that our businesses can finally, you know, show themselves, you know, but if I was hooked in with my friends who went, you know, Wall street, they just write big checks for whatever, and they'll just keep them alive. And so, you know, I think that you really need to learn business in this world. I was a monk. You know what I mean? I had to learn about business because it was the only way I could scale my messaging without just being out there begging money all day. I have a lot of friends that beg money, and they don't get. They don't get nearly as many projects done as I do. And there's always, like, something they're not allowed to talk about in their films. And to me, that's egregious.

Yeah, there's a lot to be said about freedom and your passion.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, listen, I mean, it's a lot easier to just be a prostitute if, you know, you don't have to go through all these, like, machinations, you know, I can't whore out what I do. And if. If that's going to be the case, it's just not worth doing. And so you just got to find a way to maintain the integrity in your messaging. In this day and age. It's. It's. You know, there's. There's just a lot. And, you know, it's happening. The free Internet is being challenged now. You know, the bandwidth constrictions in America. They're trying to throttle the Internet and, you know, kind of like let it, you know, be less free for, you know, have patrons who put in more money, get more traffic, and, you know, it's. It's hard. But there's also a lot of jackasses out there who. I believe their opinions are dangerous. You know, free speech. What's it gonna be like? It's. It's very hard, the free speech conversations, very hard when the police. Because if you start taking away someone's free speech, then who else are you gonna censor?

And I think it all comes back to what you said in the very beginning, was taking responsibility for yourself, taking responsibility for what you put into your ears and what you take as truth and knowledge and what you're educating yourself with. Who's in your circle of influence, what type of messages are you continuing to listen to? What type of trash are you taking in? Guess what? You're going to probably be getting out as a result. And the more that you can be aware of that, the more you can be conscious of that, the more likely that you're going to start to go and seek information that you. Dr. Mark Hyman, Sean Wells, other people in the industry that are putting some very good, very. Shawn Stevenson, another one putting some really good, solid work out that's, again, challenging the status quo of what people would have battled against for so long. And it's very admirable as to how you're doing it and so how authentically you're doing it as well. So I commend you on that.

Oh, thank you. It's not. It's not an easy task. Right. You know, we started our own streaming service because I, you know, was tired of, you know, having to, you know, listen to what people said was, you know, the rules and regulations of their own deals. So it's just. You just gotta. Something's worth doing. You just gotta be scrappy and work hard and do it. Do it right. Right. And, you know, I think. I think that there's a lot that will change in these industries in the next couple years. And I think that everyone needs to just kind of stay on their toes and remember what they're in this business for is to help people.

I watched your. Your show that you put out. It's called Prosperity. And the other one I think I watched was interconnected. And for anybody listening out there, you got to go check out the platform in which Pedram's working. It's called Hole tv. Hole tv. And it's covered with a slew of different shows in which you can stream and really look into a lot of this stuffing and know that you're getting quality information, know that you're getting information that's been vetted that it hasn't been. It's not blood money, it's not blood diamonds that you're getting sold and that you're looking into. It's something that's true, something that's organic, something that is pushing a message that you may have heard in other places, but it's being done so in a very tangible, very digestible and very action oriented way. So again, I commend you on that work and I'm excited to continue to see where it goes and support you along the way in any way that, that I can.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we're just taking that out of beta. It's crushing it. It's doing really well. And you know, one of the things that we realize is people just need deeper dives. And so what I've done starts I think in a couple weeks now is we're doing office hours. So it's like Mark Hyman, Dave Perlmutter, like all of our experts, it's like, hey, listen, you guys can't afford to get in front of these guys. So I'm just going to hold office hours for 90 minutes a week with different experts and just let people have access to some of these, you know, top level brains, right? And so we're doing our, you know, we're making our films in our series and all these other things and we're doing, you know, hours a week. I think we're doing like 15 hours a week of yoga, spin, fitness, all sorts of stuff that's coming, that's live every week. But you know, when do you get a chance to speak to a doctor that isn't just some sort of pharmaceutical hawk, right? And so like you, if you need access to the information so that then you have actionable intel to then run with and change your life, right? I think a lot, lot of people will go to their doctor and say, hey, I've been thinking about eating right? And they're like, it's not helpful, right? If you go to a person who isn't enlightened about functional medicine, isn't enlightened about like what to do next and they're just the entire education of, especially in America, the education of medical school got usurped 50, 60, 100 years ago by this pharmaceutical model. So all these bright eyed and bushy tailed kids, many of which I went to school with, are algorithms that resolve signs and symptoms with chemicals that are patented and are sold as pharmaceuticals. And so it's an amazing business model to run a slave class of bodies that you get to mine for the rest of their lives and get them on polypharmia and just suck all the money out of their life. It's a wonderful business model. It's just not ethical. Right? It's just, it's just, it's not, it's not cool.

No, you're exactly right. And the crazy thing about it is that I'll end with a little story here is was on with four clients over the last, the last two weeks, all of whom have been, they own billion dollar companies. All four of them are type two diabetics. They all have some form of continuous glucose monitor. And over the last little bit they go, yeah, Justin, whenever I change my, my sensor, I feel terrible for a couple days. Well, lo and behold, because again, everything I do is data oriented, data driven. We started to see correlated drops in HRV over the course of their sensor changes. And do you think anybody, any doctor, anybody prescribing these things would tell them that the first 24 to 36 hours that you change out a sensor, the accuracy is diminished to 50%. So all of a sudden you start to see their blood glucose readings completely inaccurate, overdosing in terms of the insulin they're giving themselves overdosing in terms of how much they're eating, because it says they're low, but really they're high. And all of a sudden we start to create this blueprint for them and all the sensors go away, all the issues of that sensor change go away because they don't even use it for 24 to 36 hours because they know the blueprint that they have to hold because the sensor is not going to give them data. But never before had any single one of them been told that you don't think that's going to be something that would be pertinent or something that would be important to understand going in that they could then apply in a unique way. It's absolutely unfathomable what's going on in, in terms of the medical sector also.

To come full circle. I mean, to me, you know, I know a lot of people are so excited about all these wearable devices and data and all this. I'm a grain of salt kind of guy. And not to say I don't like the devices and I've got them, you know, but you got to be careful not to mistake the map for the terrain. And I think that a lot of people end up practicing idolatry and handing over their God given ability to feel how they feel or just sense where they're at. Or am I hungry or am I not hungry? Oh, I'm just waiting for this thing to beep at me. And I think that it takes away the agency of the human. And so the missing ingredient. And this is, you know, like I was, yeah, I did all the monk stuff, right. But then I became an author and a filmmaker and, you know, physician and doing all the things that I was doing. And I ended up coming full circle back to the monk stuff. Not because I, you know, I'm trying to like develop a sexy brand or get laid or, you know, some of the reasons some of these idiots get into this stuff is that people trying to be gurus because it's cool. I got in because I realized, wait a minute, it's. The consciousness is a missing ingredient in all of it. And without that degree of consciousness, the dumb sensor is off. And you're like, I don't know why I'm feeling well. And you're too unconscious to stop and say, hold on a second, how do I feel?

Right.

And so I think that there's been, we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and now it's very easy to get excited about these things. And it's great because you can invest in Garmin and it's all this market driven gadgets that people now need to spend money on. And it's just not sexy to tell people to like be aware of their breath and become conscious, right? It's not. There's no industry in consciousness in that way. And I think the Silicon Valley guys have kind of taken off and stolen the narrative in a way that's also not serving humanity. And again, I have all the devices, I just use them as additional data points to confirm or helped me understand what it is that I'm feeling. But I'm not going to walk away from the wisdom of my body because the device is saying something else, right? Like I'm going to correlate it with how I feel too.

That's exactly it. And I love what you said there because that's the biggest message we preach is talking all about enhancement of consciousness and awareness with the validation of being able to quantify things on the back end so that you're no longer guessing. You can actually say, you know what, I am getting better at this consciousness thing because I have the data now. To validate it, to feel good about it, to know that I'm doing the right things and to continue to motivate you if that's something that you need to continue the journey, continue the walk, continue to strive to be better for yourself at the end of the day.

It's funny as I'll go to these conferences, right? And everyone's, you know, everyone's somebody and you know, people talking about like, consciousness and, you know, brain hacking and just all these like kind of buzzwords in the, in that space. And I'm looking for the guy who's glowing, that's got it, that's smiling and looking you in the eyes and is present with you as another human in the room. And 90% of these jackasses are just in their phones and can't hold eye contact and are twitchy and just can't even, like they're disembodied yet. They're all about their gadgets. And so there's something missing there that you will see. Like, if your kid came into the room, which, which person would they like? They'd like the person who smiles back and is present with them, not the person who like, has the coolest, like, one liner about their consciousness enhancing super drug. Right. Like, it's just there's, there's something very wrong in that industry as well. And I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I used to own brain labs. Like, I'm in the game. But the thing I want to know the most is can you look me in the eyes, shake my hand and can I feel the human presence of someone who's actually embodied, not just someone who's talking about it?

I love it.

Yeah, I think we could go on forever because that's one of the things I talk to my wife about all the time. It's like, yeah, you know what? Elon Musk is sending people to Mars. We're doing all this kind of crap, but we can barely sit still. We can barely have a conversation with each other. We can barely go without having anxiety for an hour or two hours. Like, for me personally, it's like, I think we could do a lot more with humanity rather than send people to Mars and do all those kinds of fancy techniques. Not that it's not cool to do, but what's the point if we can't, like you said, if we can't sit here and be present with each other, have a proper conversation and actually feel each other's presence?

Amen. Amen. You know, Mars is just, it's, it's an escape from all of our dramas and traumas and our inability to be fully human. Like we have everything here on this beautiful planet that's worth saving. I don't like the conversations about Mars. I think it's a cop out. I think we need to plant more trees and stop burning this thing down.

I agree 100%.

I love it. Pedram, thank you so much for your time and for showing up with us and being present with us today. Where can people find you? Where can they engage with you? Where can they see more of your content? To truly enlighten themselves and to understand again where to get the not just knowledge, but the proper knowledge.

Love it. Thank you. I like enlighten themselves. Like I don't enlighten anyone, right? Like I could give you all the tools, I could lead you to water, but you gotta, you gotta do the work, right? You gotta enlighten yourself. And if you're that type of person, then go to theurbanmonk.com I got practices that I've shared up the yin yang and I got all of that. I got tantra courses and things on boundaries and just bringing in experts to help people kind of have life, hygiene and spiritual practices that work. And then anything film related, whole TV. So my kind of PDEV monk stuff on theurbanmonk.com and then all my films and series and stuff on whole tv.

Fantastic. I love it. Guys, as you go forward, it takes sitting back, being present, being aware, challenging the status quo, challenging what you've been told, challenging the information that you are taking in every single day and being able to have the awareness, the consciousness and the mental fortitude, the emotional intelligence to ask yourself, is this something that I truly believe or is this something that I'm being fed? Is this something that's going to take me further away from my goal or something that's going to drive me closer to something that I true, wholeheartedly feel is rooted at my core, is rooted at my center, something that I value. And when we give ourselves that time, when we give ourselves that moment and we take responsibility for that ourselves, that is when the true transformation, the true momentum can truly happen. And not just for the moment, but sustainably. So with that, guys, stay hungry, stay humble and we'll see you next week.