Urban Monk: Why Anti Aging Hacks Are Blocking Your Spiritual Growth

If you look at the biohacking world right now, those idiots are loud and they have followers and they are parasites and they're vampires and there's a lot of fat energy in this biohacking community right now. Convincing people to live forever versus immortalizing your consciousness to me is the difference between God and Lucifer.

Dr. Pedram Shojai is a New York Times bestselling author and physician of Oriental medicine.

I never wanted followers. I was never a look at me kind of guy. But there are a lot of people out there that probably shouldn't be talking about health. There's a lot of people talking nonsense because they got a camera on them and they know how to get followers and do the thing. Dude bros giving health advice to middle aged women. If you realize how much influence and cult psychology is put into this industry and try to trap people, you'd throw up in your mouth twice. There's just so much fancy footwork and there's so many nefarious players now that are just trying to get your money and get your attention.

Do you think that could be really the reason why most people experience anxiety or depression? You said we're living in a parasitic universe. What did you exactly mean by that?

That's not a Pedram original. Actually, if you go back to the Gnostic gospel, pre Christian Gnostic gospel, they talked about these trans dimensional entities called the archons that didn't live in an embodied universe, but were parasitic and fed off of our energy, our thought, our emotion and that they pulled energy from reality that we live in in order to survive. It's like a, like a fungus growing on a tree. And I just remember reading that being like, what are you guys talking about? And it was a big part of their thesis. And then it just, you know, in all the shamanic work, everything that I've done, there's this parasitic energy that feeds off of life. And life has its own flow and its own direction. And life flows from the crown to the root and life creates more life and creates these, these stable fields and living to empower life and, and turn on and become more alive is the name of the game. But if you look around you, everything on tv, trying to grab your attention, trying to get the money out of your pocket, trying to exploit you for sex and all the things that are out there are parasitic entities and or energies trying to pull your eyeballs away from your life and into where they want your attention. And where your attention goes is where your energy flows. So if that isn't vampirism I don't know what is.

I remember I was listening to Tony Robbins once and he said, like, you know, where attention goes, energy will flow. I feel like the masters, the ancient masters, were switched on to the stuff that the contemporary personal development gurus are really just reciting.

Do you feel that way? Yeah. I mean, listen, what's. What's better than packaging ancient wisdom, right? Making it your own. And so this in ch. Chinese medicine, in Taoist philosophy, we have jing qi and shen, jing being the essence, your DNA, like the essence of your body. What you kind of came in with. The chi is the energy of the metabolic process. That's life. And shen is the spirit or the mind. And the chi always follows the shen. So where you focus, the shen is where the energy congeals. And then eventually, if I focus on building a shed in my backyard and I put enough mental energy into it, then I finally take the energy I exchanged for time and money, money and go buy some lumber and then bring more energy to it and I could go manifest a shed in my backyard, right? And so I can create with sustained attention anything. But if I don't have my own attention on my own life and reality, and my attention is being gamed away from me and into what Toyota wants me to buy, what any of it, am I really living for myself or am I living for the parasites?

I was on a walk today. I do a weighted walk vest in the morning and sometimes I'll just pop on live and I'll just do stream of consciousness. And I said, you guys, like, I hope, you know, like we're being played, but once you know you're being played, you're empowered with the knowledge that you can change it. How do you think we're really being.

Played in every, every single possible way possible.

What's top of heart for you, though, when you really feel like we're being played right now, we're being played with.

Our emotions through the media. There's bad guys everywhere. There's blue team, red team. There's all this stuff that's happening in the sphere of media and social media. It is all design mind to evoke an emotional upheaval and get us to just not be sitting on our perch to get us on tilt so that we can be influenced by emotions instead of reason. And so, I mean, that's been going on for a long time. We're just better at it now. But we're also being played through the food system. You eat traditional food system foods, you're poisoning yourself. You're killing your microbiome and you're disrupting the life force that then becomes the basis of your ability to be a conscious person on planet Earth. The medical system, I mean, every system has been compromised. And so the first reaction to this, for people who finally get that, you know, you're talking about this aha moment as you're walking, and people might be like, oh my God, he's right.

I mean, I've had the aha many times.

That's what I'm saying. Like we all do. But then our first reaction is, I'm angry about this.

Yeah.

And a lot of people stay in that I'm angry about this place. And then that angry, I'm angry about this place can get leveraged and saying, well, those are the guys that's, you know, it's that other political party. It's, you know, it's the Arabs, it's the Chinese, it's the Russians. It's always a bad guy that you can pivot anger towards. But that anger becomes misdirected because what it really should be is a call to action, to wake up to your eternal self and spring the trap. Because if you just get angry and pissed off and jump into some fight, you're still in the matrix, bro.

You essentially have kind of come out of retirement a bit for the writing of your new book and also to do this podcast in a way. You just moved to Austin. Why do you feel like right now in our human evolution that you really need to speak louder than you have before?

There's a lot of bullshit out there. There's a lot of people talking nonsense because they got a camera on them and they know how to get followers and do the thing. I never wanted followers. I was never a look at me kind of guy. But there are a lot of people out there that probably shouldn't be talking about health, dude. Bros giving health advice to middle aged women, people talking about philosophy, making up stuff, plagiarizing stuff. And so I kind of got called out saying, look, you're temple trained Taoist abbot. You've done the work. You're the guy that should be speaking. And these self development personal guru types are just out there saying untethered things and giving bad advice. And so, yeah, you know, I had to, I had to stand back up and be like, what are you saying, bro? Yeah, right. And so, and I'm introverted, I'm a family man. I don't really care, to be honest, you know, I'm not trying to like be that guy. I just Got shit to say. And here I am. I gotta say it now, right? Like this is, this is what pulled me back out.

Yeah. There's this concept of sedation that I've dealt with in my life. And my audience knows I had a journey with pornography. And whether it's porn or shopping or overworking or you name it, like fill in the blank. I think the sedation hooks come in really early for people. I was born in 1980 in La Mesa, California, which is like, you know, geriatric ward. I was raised on welfare, so money was evil, don't trust people. Hyper vigilant nervous system. There was a lot that I got to uncover for myself. Now notice I said got to because I think language is where the hooks come in first. I wonder how deep you've gone into neuro linguistics and especially with your Taoism training. How major is language for you? The way you speak to yourself, the way you speak to your children, the way you speak to your audience so that you can help them be really guarded from the hooks of sedation.

One of the kind of original translations of the word genesis is as I speak, I create. And so our tonal emanation becomes our reality. And the words are intermediary for us to try to translate the assembly of our consciousness. Looking at these qualia in a reality that we're trying to make sense of and drawing pictures and stories to survive. And so if you can deconstruct language in general, I think linguistics is one of the most. Is a fine art. Right? Like it's important to understand linguistics. And if you could deconstruct language in general and then the language that you carry within your own self talk, you can unravel and undo most things. You still can't eat Doritos and live like an. You got to eat well, you got to breathe right. You got to do all these things. And then as you start to deconstruct the way you speak with yourself and the story you tell about yourself and the. The places you pin yourself because of past fears or survival mechanisms, you can then free yourself from all of these perceived bars that you think are keeping you in a prison.

Was the beginning of this awareness. Your start in kung fu and in the martial arts, did that start to come online? How you speak to yourself? I mean, you've even said that for six months you would just stand in horse dance. And that was your training to just even try out. For a white belt. This is like very serious training for people that don't know martial arts. You've Gone very deep. How much of your own internal self talk is applied in martial arts?

Every time you tell yourself this hurts and I'm going to get out of this stance, right? Every time you tell yourself this is too hard or I'm tired, Those are words, those are narrative. Trying to empower and get clicks or votes for your weakness.

Yeah.

So who cares? I will stay in the stance or I will die trying is what brings the man out of that stance, Right. And so what is it? What are you going to do? Cave to pain? It's just a sensation. So it becomes a physical form of meditation. That's a higher stakes, right? Because now. And you can sit on a cushion and fall asleep and look like a Buddha, right? But in a deep Kung Fu stance, you're. You could see the scowl on people's faces and you could see the guys that have turned the corner and are just right there.

That seemed to impact your life, martial arts almost more than anything else. That's what led you to daoism, correct? Or had you already been dabbling in. In the dao and I was dabbling.

In martial arts as a kid. I was Lady D. My dad threw me into hapkido and you know, I kind of played in different martial arts for a while and I was proficient in all of it. But then when I read about daoism, I was like, oh, oh, got it. I'm in. And then I found Taoist Kung fu master. And then I realized that all these kind of disparate areas. We took martial arts, we bombed the Japanese and then learned some shotokan. And this stuff kind of came over after the war and we're like, oh, this is pretty cool. Or hey, he could win in a bar fight. And these disparate pieces of the. The martial arts that came over. But then I fell into a lineage and realized that Kung Fu is an operating system. The literal translation is hard work. So when life becomes Kung Fu and you get good at Kung Fu, so, so what? I'm going to build a shed. So what, I'm going to, you know, get up because my kid is crying. It's all Kung Fu. And so it just becomes your. Your work. It just becomes what you do. And instead of moaning about it, you do what's in front of you. You just block the next punch. You just, you just keep doing the thing. That's the next logical right move.

You were in a fairly low point. I think that's part of our natural development as men and women. You know, when we're in Our adolescence. You said at one moment, God, if you're real, I'd like to know. And it gives me chills just to even think about what happened next.

Can you.

Can you share that? Because I think a lot of the sedation hooks come in because of a severing or a disconnection with spiritual.

Yes. And I had a different type of relation. Some people get God forced on them.

And, you know, God, spirit, universe, however y' all want to.

Oh, yeah, these words.

These are words that created us.

Sure, sure. And that which breathes us in and out, right? And. And so I came from a place where I was born in Iran, right before these mullahs took over and in the name of God, executed my uncle and raped and tortured people in my family. And, like, we. We got the hell out of there, right? As refug. I was born, you know, I was born Muslim, but my parents weren't religious, but I was actually related to the prophet from both sides of my family. I got, like, religious juju in my blood, and my parents are like, that ain't God. You can find God if you want to on your own. We're not religious. We're not agnostic. We're not atheist. We're just pissed off at religion. And so I was given free reign to just go find ethics and morality, and I couldn't care less about it. I was, you know, playing basketball and, you know, we're good enough people. And, you know, it was the time where religion had already kind of lost its. Its grasp on. It's not like everyone in LA was going to church, right?

Yeah.

But as I started to get more and more confused about my trajectory from a different story, I was like, man, I don't know if I want to be a Western medical doctor anymore. It was me saying, hey, God, if you do exist, now would be a great time for a clue. And he threw a book down, frankly. Right. Like, a book falls out of a bookshelf, and that's not supposed to happen.

Where were you when this book?

University research library at ucla.

Were you just studying?

I was just walking. I was thinking to myself, I, you know, I was studying for some midterms, but, you know, tripping in my own head and. And all of a sudden a book, like, drops out of a bookshelf.

Ghostbusters or something, dude.

It was like, that's too weird. And, like, literally, I walk up and I'm like a classical biology guy, right? I'm not. I'm not a. Like a weird hippie tripper at this Point, right? Like, I'm just like, okay, what? This is some crazy coincidence. I look to the other side of the stack. Maybe someone pushed a book in on the other side, and this one fell out. There's no one there. And I'm, like, thinking, my friends are messing with me, but they can't read my thoughts, and they're not there. And so I'm, like, kind of running through the logical, why the hell would this have happened? And instead, I was just like, okay, what's his book? It's a book on Taoism. And I was like, that's. I've heard of Taoism. Very dis. You know. You know, very distinctly remember that it was a Chinese something or other. But that's it, right? That's not the world I came from. But I was like, all right. I asked God for help, and this weird book falls down. Let me just at least read it. And it was just like, a page turner of, like, Jedi stuff from, like, a guy's account of growing up with his master in China. And, like, he's a credible lineage guy. And I'm like, what? What is this stuff? And I was like, man, this feels so true. This feels so right. And then at that point, I was just like, well, I'm in. What? You know, where could I learn this? Found a tai chi teacher and was like, oh, my God, what is this? I feel my hands. And then it just kind of went down the rabbit hole and found a kung fu master who just passed by the way, I'm speaking at his memorial next week. And I walk in the studio and, you know, there's all these guys doing this stuff. And I was like, oh, this looks pretty cool. Different than what I had learned. And he just turns around, walks across the whole studio, comes straight to me and goes, I've been expecting you. And again, I'm like, that's weird. Yeah. Who the. And he's just like, come on, let me show you around. And next thing I know, I'm like, you know, wearing a white sash and in this thing for 30 hours a week, crossing hands and doing kicks and learning how to breathe. And I felt so alive doing this work that I knew it was right. Like, I'd found my calling. And my parents, you know, these poor immigrant parents that are like, you were going to be a doctor, you know, and they're like, you know, you're doing all this, like, witch doctor stuff. I'm like, look, don't worry about me. I'm not gonna hit you up for money. This feels right. I got this.

When you were there. Those are two big breadcrumbs. The book and the sensei come to you. Is it sensei?

Is that sifu?

At that moment, looking back, can you feel your energy flow at that time, did you have anger towards God because of what happened in Iran? Did you have doubt of God in that moment?

You know, my parents insulated us enough and they didn't bang us over the head with God, right. Like, because I came over here and all these people are like, well, you got to go to Sunday school. And like, God was like an obligation and, you know, you're supposed to fear God. And I never knew, like the love of God conversation, right? I just knew guys that were just like, oh, I'm in trouble with the nuns. Right? And so the, the, the God vibe that I got as an immigrant looking, you know, from the outside in on my friends that had God in their lives was like a bunch of rules and you're going to go to hell. And so that, that didn't really feel like, oh, that's yummy, I want that. I didn't like, the love of God thing came later through my own discovery of, you know, the teachings of Christ and all the things that you learn if you get past the bullshit.

Yeah.

Of the religion. Right. So I think my parents did a pretty good job of insulating us from all that and just being like, you know, learn English, learn math, you play piano, you do karate. Like, they just did the like. And they were scrambling, right? They, we lost everything. We started over and they like, they were paying it forward into the next generation, which was myself and my sister.

So how many decades ago was that?

I was born 75. We got here in 78, 79. So, you know, I spent my 80s trying to find my way in, like, this world, you know, called LA. And by my 90s, I kind of figured it out and I realized that people leave you alone when you get good grades. So I just became a straight A student and was top of my class and went to my university of choice and at, like, I could be doing crack in the bathroom and nobody would even care because I was a straight A student. Like, I got away with whatever. I didn't do crack in the bathroom. But I'm saying you can get away with stuff if you show up on the right scoreboards in the right way. And you see it all the time in corporate America, right? These guys are complete and up everywhere, but they make money, right? And so I, I learned how to game the system pretty easily. Got into my school of choice, was on my way to becoming a medical doctor, and met the guy that I was, you know, trying to shadow, and he was a dick, and he wasn't happy, and he didn't have ethics, and, and, and, and, and. And I was like, what the hell am I doing? I don't want this guy's life. Yeah. What track have I been on, right? I was six years away from joining some golf club and, you know, get. Hey, guys. Right? Like, just all the bullshit. It was all matrix and so intelligent enough and probably emotionally wounded enough and not had healed any of that, right? Like, we didn't. I don't have any trauma therapy or anything. We just. We were lucky to be alive. So all of that soup came together in an explosion where I was like, wow, I'm going to do this stuff. And I did.

And it took you on such an incredible path, going from the traditional medicine path to then being Chinese medicine doctor. How long have you actually held that title?

2001. I got my master's. Then I got my doctorate a couple years later. But then I took a big sabbatical and went to India. Studied with the Dalai Lama. I sat with the Karma Palma. I went to a bunch of. I just. I went on sabbatical for six months, India and Nepal. And then I. I went on a lot of sabbaticals because the Taoist training was. And I'm like, look, man, I'm not dropping out of school for this. And they're like, of course you're not. Right? And so I became part of the lineage, and I had to just kind of show up and do the work when I could. But then I had a quarter off every year, and that quarter belonged to them. And he'd be like, okay, here's some breathwork exercise. I want you to go fast on nothing but water. Go. Go hike into the woods, Find, like, a river and find a safe place, call it home fast for five days, and then do this practice and come back in a couple weeks and tell me what you learned. So I'd spent a lot of time in the wilderness just circulating energy and, like, learning to see light with my eyes closed. It was really cool. I don't know very many people who've had these experiences, so it's hard to even, like, relate when, you know, every once in a while I meet another wizard, and it's like, oh, my God. You know that so and so, so and so. And, like, we will talk for hours.

You can see light with your eyes closed.

Yeah. Yeah, right. You know, you could close your eyes and push yourself to the other side of the universe. And I mean these are all practices that the ancients underst. Understood.

Yeah. And that they would place their adolescents, especially young men, they would go through a vision quest. I've done two vision quests. So I've never seen light with my eyes closed. But I've hallucinated and talked to my grandfather who was deceased in 2000 and had full blown spiritual awakenings out there with nature, just with water for four days. So I can totally relate to what you're saying. The reason I'm saying that is because I, that was the beginning of me letting go of my anger and my resentment towards God. And I think, you know, begets my other question of like when society's hooks come in, I think it's because we either don't have a relationship with God, creator or spirit, or we've been taught not to have one, that God can't be trusted, that God isn't real. So so many people have that moment like you had with the book, but they don't get the book dropped. And then they use that as unconscious evidence that God isn't real. What do you think from your sphere now? That the price we pay for not having God in our lives or not having a connection to spirit, what's the real price of that that we're paying?

Look at, look at the news. And I think this is where there's like this conservative resurgence and people are like, you know what? This is what happens when you have a godless society.

Yes.

And there's no governor on this. Everything can just go and you could just be what you want and do what you want. There's no ethics. And so I think that we've had a tremendous price to pay for it. And I say that very guardedly because there is a lot of orchestration still by the middleman that disintermediates your relationship with God.

Who's the middleman?

It could be the church, it could be the temple, it could be the mosque, it could be whoever you follow. The middleman is constantly jumping between you and your relationship with God and telling you how to interpret what the infinite is trying to tell you if you would shut up and listen. And they're telling you so loud you can't shut up and listen. And so the word God has a lot of energy on it and a lot of people have God intercepted and people have done horrible things in the name of God, obviously. Right. But like I, when I sit with people that Have God in their hearts or have Jesus in their hearts or, you know, Krishna on their hearts. There's no freaking debate. You're just like, hi. You get it, right? And the people that are just talking and frothing at the mouth and you know, there's a lot of bullshit out there and, and you could tell that they're just being puppet puppeteered by the archons. They're being puppeteered by the parasites. And they're not on Team God. They're using God as part of an agenda. And so it's very difficult talking about God for people who don't actually have God in their hearts. Yeah, I have a business partner who's a very like good Christian and I see him get abused and taken advantage of all the time by people that come in and say from their, from his church. Just because a dude goes to church with you doesn't make him a good person. He's just saying he goes to church. And so good people get taken advantage of by folks within religious communities all the time because there are a lot of wolves in sheep's clothing. Right. So you have to learn to listen to the voice of God. It's not that hard, but there's too many of the things that you tuned into. And so the next book I'm writing is teaching people how to turn down the signal strength on all the noise so that they could hear the voice of God inside. And don't take my word for it.

I'm guessing that a big part of that is actually slowing down, which is good to intellectualize. Oh yes, Pedro, I know I should slow down. Even that word should is like an obligation. How does one even begin to calibrate their really intuition to be able to slow down and make slowing down important. In other words, how do they make the risk reward make sense for their mind so that their body can follow?

Yeah, and it's a layered question and it's a multi pronged approach. I would say, one, stop eating poison. Two, start sleeping better. Three, fix your microbiome. Four, stop putting poisons in your home. So you got to do all the stuff that brings your neuroceptive arrays back online.

And what is the neuroceptive for people?

So neuroception is our safety signals. And so, you know, if I'm like, oh man, I'm so tired, I'm out in the woods, I really need to close my eyes and sleep right now. But there's wolves. I'm not really sleeping deeply. Right. But if you and I are both out there and I'm like, all right, you hold the sharp stick. I'm asleep. And then I'll hold the sharp stick. We'll take turns, and I trust that my buddy has got my back. Then I feel safe enough to sleep. My body can rest, recover, and heal. And our neuroceptive arrays are being attacked by that dude's cologne, by the gas diesel truck that just drove by, by my inability to feel safe because I just read that Putin has a hypersonic missile that could hit us in any minute. And all of these things are safety signal triggers. And if I can't feel safe, I'm in a wartime economy, so there's no school books, there's no hospitals. There's none of the stuff that actually allows me to slow down.

Yeah.

And so I always work first on saying, okay, where are your safety signals? And then we have so many others. So we have interoception, we have extra reception, we have proprioception, equilibrioception. So all of these different arrays that our ancestors were in tune with, like, I did a bunch of wilderness survival training and, you know, tracking lions. Not killing them, but tracking lions and learning to survive in Africa. And every sound is information. Everything you feel has data coming back. And so when you tune into your breath, feel your heartbeat go, oh, yeah, my. My tummy's doing this weird gurgling right now. This is all information that is feeding back with your vagus nerve in your brain telling you what's going on. And these have been cut by modern society. They've been cut by glyphosate. They've been cut by TikTok. They've been cut by all these areas where we are all out getting information in instead of turning our awareness inward. And the anterior cingulate cortex kicks on, and then it starts to turn lights back on. And the more you turn the lights back on, the more you check in with yourself and you're like, you know what, man? I'm good. I don't need a drink with you guys right now. I'm going to go for a walk. I know you want to run. My body's telling me otherwise right now, whatever that is. And then as people start to get that back, that's when you could start to hear the voice of God again. You can't hear crap if you can't hear your own heart beating. You're sitting there, oh, God, give me a sign. Give me a sign. You can't even hear. There's too much noise. You're in a stadium. So bringing all of these Perceptual arrays back. It doesn't take long. If you're drinking your coffee, feel the heat of the coffee on your hand. Feel the texture of the creamer as you're sipping it. Smell it. Feel your feet on the ground that's already four of your sensory arrays. Feel it going down and swallowing. And as you do that, and you work on layering your perception, there's parts of your neurology that have gotten dull and they start to come back. If all you do is sit in square rooms and look at flat walls and walk on concrete, you're missing the contours of planet Earth that we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years walking on and getting proprioceptive information. So wear some. Some shoes that don't have too much fill and go for a hike and feel the ground under your feet and feel yourself going up a hillside and let your brain come back online. And so all of these things become part of what we need to do to jumpstart this biosuit that then becomes an antenna for the voice of God.

This is so good. And I love that you went through these stages, because most people get into traps of, I can't meditate. And then they fall into a shame spiral that they can't meditate, but they're trying to meditate with, like, a fire alarm going off. You know, the food, the chemicals, the things you mentioned that static. The fire alarm has to be turned off before they can meditate. I'm sure you've talked about this a lot, but for somebody that's in a shame spiral of, like, Pedro, I know I should meditate, but I can't. And so I'm looking at breath work. I always say that breath work is for people that can't meditate. I got that from one of my instructors. Breath work is really good. But some people are a little averse to breath work. It can be very emotional. There can be things that come up from our tissues. Can you talk about the fire alarm and the shame spiral with meditation? And what you've seen in multiple decades with people putting themselves in that shame spiral?

I will start with a confession that I come from a history of being a shitty teacher and a shitty doctor. Because of this very thing is people would come in and I would be on this side of that shame fence being like, what do you mean? Like, you're not working hard enough. Like, you sit down and meditate. What's wrong with you? And then I at one point was like, why am I getting pissed off at my student, my patient Whatever. And maybe, maybe, just maybe, I can take at face value what they're saying and then help troubleshoot and see why they're saying that this is happening, happening. And it led me down this real empathic path of just like, holy shit, you can't meditate because your gut lining is torn. Look at these zonulin levels. If your gut is torn. And you have. So one of many examples. But, like, let's just say you have a tear in your gut lining, you have leaky gut, and you have the wrong kind of bacteria. So you have gram negative bacteria which harbor in a standard American diet. You have grammar negative bacteria that are thriving. And you have had gut permeability for more than six months. What happens is the lipopolysaccharides coming off these gram negative bacteria get through the leaky gut and get into the bloodstream. That becomes something called endotoxemia. We now understand that 80, maybe 90% of chronic disease is downstream from endotoxemia, which means the bad guys are jumping the TSA line. The alarm bells are going. And you're sitting here thinking you're going on vacation to Hawaii, and this airport's on lockdown. Of course you can't meditate. There's alarm bells going off, and your body doesn't speak English. It speaks anxiety, it speaks inflammation, it speaks unrest. And you're like, oh, I don't know, I should, you know, maybe I'm not taking enough kava. Instead of being like, what the hell did I just eat? And why am I on fire right now? And so I've actually gone backwards from monk to doctor, back to monk many times in my career where I'm like, oh, well, okay, I will take that at face value. Here's a gut permeability and food sensitivity test. Let's figure out why you're having these reactions. Let's look at your toxicity. Let's fix your sleep. Let's fix. Let's. Let's set the table. And then nine times out of 10, these people are, like, naturally meditating again. Shame on me for not listening to them in the first place. Right? It's that whole, like, sensei, you know, like, I'm the doctor. You don't know what you're talking about. And so, like, I've had a lot of personal growth in my ascent as a practitioner to just be, like, humble yourself. Listen to what they're saying, dummy.

Has that been the biggest change of your personality? This journey from doctor to sensei to back and forth?

Yeah. And in between, inject a couple kids if that ain't a kick in the teeth right where it's just like there. It's hard to dad, man. It's hard to dad while doing all this stuff. And so every day it's my kung fu. You're like, okay, where am I taking myself so seriously? Where am I being rigid with what I think I know versus listening to the person in front of me? And how do I humble myself and just perceive what the solution set might be for this person given their circumstances?

I wonder how much of the anxiety and children's labels that are put on for health conditions really come down to this. Downstream from leaky gut. It has to be a high percentage if.

And so the literature's coming out on this now and you know, the world's 20 years behind, which means we're going to lose another generation or two of kids. I mean, I'm trying my best to get this information out there.

Yeah.

But that's absolutely it. It's like the glyphosate's killing the, you know, so if you're eating out, you're getting a lot of these pesticides that are killing your microbiome. And then the bad guys reside. We have so many food sensitivities. We have so much stress we're putting on these kids. We are poisoning them with the food system. And then when they're showing reactivity because their body is at unrest, you take them for a neuropsych eval and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, this looks like add. This is adhd. Here's the shit, get out of here. And so they're getting on this conveyor belt because now they're going to go back to school, go through some shitty education, get a job for McKenzie and take over some company that fucks with its financials. Like the whole damn thing is a joke. Instead of saying, what is wrong with my kid? How am I? What did they just eat? And the problem with this is people are like, well, I don't. They don't have any allergies, right? That's IGE mediated immunity. What we are finding is it's IgG and IgA mediated, which is if I had gluten three days ago, my joints hurt today. That's really hard to trace back because guess how many meals I've had in the last three days. Was it last night not getting sleep? Was it, you know, it's human. There's too many variables. And so I have learned that that three, four day period, you know, it's One to three day latency creates so much ambiguity that it's almost impossible to know unless you're on a very strict elimination provocation diet for way too long. I personally, I can't eat honeydew. I didn't know that. It's like, oh, I feel kind of depressed and inflamed. Oh, it might be my old, you know, million martial arts injuries coming back. I don't know. I don't know. I don't feel great today. It was honeydew two days ago after dessert at Frank's house. You know, and I'm good at this. It's really hard to put two and two together. So I've just become a strong advocate for testing. Like literally, I send tests to friends and family all the time. Like we put all, like my students. I'm like, test your gut.

What is the preferred test? Is it the Leap MRT or which one is it?

I've been using KBMO's Fit 176. I think it's a great test. The guy who invented it came up with the original HIV test. And what I was able to do because I was using this so much in my practice was negotiate a discount for my folks because the pro and, you know, this problem, well, is okay. Yeah, I heard I was supposed to go to a functional medicine doctor. This Guy's got an eight month waiting list. It cost, you know, $1,200 to see him. Then he's going to do a bunch of expensive tests. Yeah. And so I hate that because it makes it inaccessible to people. So what I did is I went to the CEO of this company. You know, we sent him a lot of business and done a lot of transactions with them, like help me make something affordable. So I was able to cut a deal where we could get the 22 foods with the gut permeability for like 200 bucks. And for a couple like 250 extra, you get the full 176. And you can't even. That's like retail at the thing. And Dr. Shojai over here runs it through his house. And so you get it and you get an interpretation. And I've been able to get that for several thousand people now.

Amazing.

Because if not, you got to go wait in line, go see a doctor, then come back and see a doctor for the interpretation. And people lose a year of their lives. And if you're Talking about my 9 year old, that's the difference between her having confidence and her thinking that makeup is the solution to her anxiety problem.

Yes. Yeah. There's band aids and then there's specialized knowledge.

Yeah.

And I feel like success or health or wellness is really an amalgamation of, like, talent, timing, relationships, and specialized knowledge. That's how I've gotten everything done in my life. Right. The people that I interface with, the work that I do on myself, God, bringing certain situations of serendipity and also specialized knowledge. Somebody could try to meditate forever. They could be working out.

They could be.

They could be doing all the things wearing their ring to track their sleep. If the gut permeability is not addressed. Do you think that could be really the reason why most people experience anxiety or depression?

Yes, definitively. There's down, hands down. There's plenty of studies that. That show this. Now, insomnia, anxiety, depression, these are all downstream. Now, I do not want to have anyone hear me saying this is the only reason you have childhood traumas. You have adverse ACE scores. I mean, there's a lot of that happens to people. Yeah, that haunts you. But okay, that's over here. And you're also adding fuel to the fire by having a cheese burrito. That's bringing up your baseline anxiety so that your coping is here versus here. Yeah. So you want to lengthen the fuse so that you can then turn around and face your demons and heal.

It's so good. Look the physical parts on the screen right now. You guys, we've talked about this a million times. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and financial. That's the lens that we see speak about in this podcast. It's right here on the mic. The only way in my life that I've gotten anything done is by doing it all at the same time. The balancing of these five, you know, it's. It's a struggle for many, but really, once you get the physical done, which is the gut testing and addressing your water, your food, the soil, your breath, then it comes to something that I think we're all really seeking. And I'll read this quote that you said because I absolutely loved it. You said, who am I? Is the most important question we should be asking ourselves every day. And the more important question behind that question is, who just asked that question? To me, that encapsulates mental, physical and spiritual and emotional and all of it. If I'm not asking that question followed by the other question, I can do the physical part, but I'm not really going to thrive unless I'm seeking, Unless I have a heart of God, unless I'm seeking the spiritual answer for a spiritual question.

Amen.

Can you talk about Your quote.

Yeah. So just to be clear. And I'm. And I'm never this guy, so I give credit where it's due. That is Ramana Maharshi, one of the great Indian saints.

Well, thank you for borrowing his wisdom.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so. And we should all borrow his wisdom, Right?

Yeah.

And so, you know, there's a lot of guys that make quote cards and put their own names on them. I'm not that guy. Yeah. That is a Ramana Maharshi. Yes. That is a Romanum Maharshi thing. And I'm a big fan of his work. I'm a big fan of a lot of the legends, Right. And it's the. The inquiry behind the eye. Right. And a lot of the Vedic thinking goes along those lines. It's like, okay, well, if this. If I'm not my hand, am I my brain? Well, you know, am I. Who's. Who's in my brain? And so you keep deconstructing the eye and you keep going further and further because really, trying to come up with an answer isn't the game. It's asking better and better questions. Because now you're probing into this eternal aspect of yourself that happens to also coincide with an eternal aspect of the universe. And that butterfly that just fluttered by that starts to skew us into this realm of magic and grace and beauty and divinity. And so those questions are the questions worth asking. Right? And those questions are liberating because they really start to take the scaffolding off and the defenses off, and we realize who we think we are and who we say we are is just this Brazilian shanty town of constructs and defense mechanisms that we've layered on trying to survive. And look, I was a scrappy immigrant kid. I learned how to fight. I had to get good grades. I had all this shit that got me where I was, and it served me up to that point, but it doesn't serve me now to hold on to narrow definitions of self that were defense mechanisms. So who am I? I'm not what I do, right? I'm not what I'm wearing. I'm not even this body. So who am I? And those questions give us the better questions, and the inquiry that becomes the process of all computer alchemy. Alchemy was. And I. And I had this debate just recently with a friend of mine and Neil, who's lovely, like, systems biology. Like, probably the. The authority of systems biology at Harvard or wherever the hell he's at now, but just, you know, bright, bright science guy, right? And I Went to one of his lectures, and he was talking about, you know, well, this is just alchemy. And, you know, now what we're talking about is science here. And I said, look, I love the talk, but let me tell you about alchemy and how you're mishearing what alchemy is and what it became. Because what alchemy is to a Taoist qigong master is you are turning your lead into gold and that transmutation, because gold is the perfect conductor. So everything that is less than is an impurity in my ability to conduct the full flow of the universe. And what alchemy became is these idiots who started mixing together to try to live forever. And if you look at the biohacking world right now, those idiots are loud and they have followers, and they are parasites and they are vampires. Convincing people to live forever versus immortalizing your consciousness, to me, is the difference between God and Lucifer. And there's a lot of that energy in this biohacking community right now. Immortalize your consciousness and you are free, period. Try to live forever and take all these tonics and follow these idiots and do all this weird shit and drink baby blood. I mean, it's as vampirical and parasitic as it's ever been. And people follow these guys. I'm not going to mention any names, but there's some notable names out there that are making a name for themselves and doing parlor tricks and using. Using all the, like, linguistic tricks to capture people. And all these tech bros and all these sheep are following Luciferian advice. Sick of it.

I love that you said that, and I love where we're going, because on my neck right here is the philosopher's stone. And I look at it more through the Jungian lens, where Jung described this process of going from the sheltered self, which you described as like someone with childhood wounds. And for me, it was hyper vigilance that I'm still unwinding now. I believe, and I wonder how you feel. I believe that alchemy for the soul or alchemy for the human is this process of shedding all the things that were projected onto you by people that loved you most.

Paradoxically, yeah, 100%. There's. They were doing their best. My immigrant parents did their very best to protect us the best they could with the circumstances they had. And it came in with love, which brought it under the radar. And they opened the city walls and they came right through the gate. And those are the hardest parts. The easy parts are like, well, you know, the priest molested me Right. Like that guy was a bad guy. Like, you know, those are bad, hard moments that people have to deal with in their kind of traumatic upheavals when they realize what their history actually had. Yeah, yeah, that's obvious. My mom made me anxious because of the way she worried about me and doted over me is mixed with a lot of love and a lot of tenderness and affection. But the way I behave in response to that has clipped my wings and disempowered my eternal self. So I also have to lovingly thank my mom and release that. And that's also my alchemy.

That's so good. This is what I shared with you before we hit the red record button. The next five, ten years of my life is understanding emotional epigenetics. The piano keys, we can't ever change our DNA. It's fixed. But we can turn off and on with our behavior and our environment and really our awareness of our emotional patterns. So one pattern that I'm from an Italian family, loud talking people eat all the food on your plate, even if you're full. You know, even the archetype of like the, the nervous Italian grandma because she worries so much and that's her badge of honor. In other words, there's a lot of societal conditioning that in my own alchemical process, I've had to look at, I've gotten to look at. And a lot of the things, they still pop up now. Have you had anything like this happen for you? From cultural conditioning, where Even now at 50, you still realize, wow, I, I acted like my dad, I acted like my mom. I'm, I'm learning how to be a better husband, I'm learning how to be a better father. Do these things pop up for you?

Every moment in my life. And this is. And this is where. And this is. It's funny because I'm from here, I'm picking up my parents from the airport, they're visiting us for a week and.

Sounds like a spiritual practice.

It is, because, you know, and they're not going to be here forever. And so I'm like laying on the altar of saying I'm going to spend as much quality quality time I can with these people and at the same time keep the bouncer at the door for imposed belief systems that no longer serve me, that need to be checked at the door and respectfully be like, mom, you know, that's not how we do things here. Or you know what? My kid actually does have to make his bed. Don't. These are our rules. Right? And so every single day you are managing boundaries better, learning about yourself better, forgiving blessing, but also, you know, don't take my kindness for weakness. That's not, that's not how we do here. Right. And so I am consistently deconstructing and to your point, and it's a very astute point, the ones that came in under the guise of love are the hardest ones to extract. Yeah, right. And so I love my folks and I have to manage a lot around their beliefs. They're all like macros, these archetypal cultural code that just kind of comes in, in these batches of transmissions. And if you don't architect your life in a way to have enough awareness to witness and not immediately react and to self diagnose and to clear some of that code on a daily basis, you're just picking up more code.

I love that you said code. What do you mean by code?

It's programming. I mean we, we now code in whatever languages we're coding it. Right? But there is code. What is our epigenetics. It's just code, right? Our DNA is code. And so somehow we have been encoded with thoughts, belief systems, language, reaction to words, our perception of what certain words mean. And so within the framework and in every generation, you know, we used to talk about like steam engines and like things running like a clock. So our technology metaphors are just how we interface with our reality. And right now code is. Maybe there's a better word for it ten years from now.

I love the word. I'm always getting new.

Because we're in the code era.

Yeah, right.

And so this is our best way. And again, linguistics, this is our best way of relating to the level of reality that we could comprehend through our words right now. And our technology, code is how we run. And so my operating system being kung fu, is to constantly virus scan and be like, does this code serve me? Does this code bullshit me? Is this code where I need to be? Right? And so food has code, right? Your mom's stories have code. They all just, it just comes in. And so you have to have code hygiene or else you pick up snippets of code here and there and then you're just one of these confused people who doesn't have thoughts for themselves because you're just a patch of a bunch of code. And if you realize how much code is being projected on the airwaves and through the socials and using AI and all these big nuclear powered servers now to drive your sentiment, to drive your belief system, most people I Know who are smart enough to tune out? Tune the fuck out. Because I'm not smart enough to watch TV anymore. They'll get me.

Yeah.

There's so much neuropsych that goes into the code that's being thrown at us. Go walk in the. I run in the woods three days a week. I swim laps two days a week. I literally scrub code and go breathe and go out into nature just to reset. From what I pick up, are you.

Down to go a little bit deeper?

Let's go.

I love this code metaphor. I am not a programmer, but in other words, I don't know how to write code on a computer. But I know that I'm a player in this game and I'm the programmer at the same time. And the first time I learned that I couldn't grok it, I was like, what do you mean? It was from a mentor a few years ago. But you said something that hits this right on the head and I love it. You said, reality is the quantum coherence of microtubules inside the collagen of my glial cells that have access to the information without time and space limitation across this entire universe. That is a code, my friend. What is that code for you?

That's a song of God, right? And that's the voice of creation. That is the harmonic of the entire universe that we are tuned into every minute of every single day. Should we get out of the way and listen? Now, the glial cells and the microtubules and the colors, that's the best operant theory we have through Penrose and these guys about how we have access to quantum information. But the jury's out on people who are saying, oh, we're just bits of data and I'm perceiving all this. It's all bullshit. I have access to to quantum reality through my consciousness. And there's plenty to substantiate that statement. So then the question is, if that's the case, and I could just close my eyes or leave them open, but tap into the pulse of the entire universe, or the heart of God or whatever you want to call it, what am I hearing? And I got to quiet my heart enough to hear it. And I have to turn off all the smoke alarms, not by smashing them, but by taking care of the fires so that I can be in a place where I can perceive the much more subtle and important information. So if I'm death scrolling on my phone, I've lost my soul to the external universe that is gaming my eyeballs and my Energy and my consciousness away from that. And that right there, that's the devil's play.

Well, there is some theory, if you look at a lot of ancient texts, that this is inherently the devil's playground and that we're here as a school of souls and we're learning how to unconditionally love self and other, which, you know, good luck perfecting that. There's lots of challenges. I. I wonder, though, if there was a grand orchestration. There's a lot of theory about us being in a simulation and maybe a simulation inside of a simulation. I personally don't give a about any of that. My mission here is to learn how to love myself and love others and do something that my heart is calling me for. Do you find that even people that are worried about simulation and all these different things are actually falling into the Watiko trap by that narrative?

100, 100.

Same with the flat Earthers and everything else. It's all. It's all distortion. It's all a distraction.

I'm so fricking worried about the map instead of enjoying the terrain that I'm arguing about bullshit with my colleagues. That's what's happening with these folks. They are perceiving something. And usually, and this is the devil's greatest trick, is as you perceive something, then you get pulled over and say, oh, well, this is so and so theory. This is this, this is that. And then you get it pulled out of that feeling of connection with the divine into some abstract Jack Offery about trying to describe it.

That's a scientific term.

Yes. And jackoffrey is probably the most common thing that's happening right now in all these circles. It's insane. People are getting blue in the face arguing about stuff instead of sitting in that feeling and being present with spirit. And I mean, to your point, you just mentioned it, but, you know, it was called the Lucifer experiment. Lucifer was God's brightest angel. And he said, you know what, man? I could do this better and I'm going to prove it. And he created this other reality. Again, this is just another metaphor, whether you call it code or simulation or a hologram. And within that Lucifer experiment, the ancients say we are dwelling, and that is the bubble that becomes this reality through which we are trying to find ourselves in our divinity again. But if you're part of the Lucifer experiment and you're part of this abstraction, you keep going down and losing your attention to that which isn't real and eternal. Your soul gets lost in that. So you have to wake up to your eternal self and live in that space and share that space. And then there's no difference between a Buddhist, a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew. We're all divine. And so that again becomes that level of abstract Jack Offery that pulls people out of the actual work.

It feels to me like just a massive distortion. You talked about signal and noise a few times already in my life, the greatest distortions for me and also for the audience who have written in, has been trying to keep their head above water and being in a state of constant sympathetic nervous system drive of like paying bills, responsibilities. It feels like everyone's just holding their breath essentially because of this distortion. If you had to guess from your studies and your own personal life, is the emanation of this distortion from the Luciferian experiment or is it something else?

It's from our buy in. I think it's from the Lucifer experiment in the abstract archonic reality. It's just a fantasy. It's just a fantasy phantasm. It's not real. What makes it real is our buy in. We have to participate in it to co create it. And that's the energy that makes it manifest because we are the creators. That's not real. And so the only thing that makes it real is us being convinced that it's real enough for us to co create it because it's our creative energy that manifests it. And if you understand that, then you understand how this whole fucking house of cards is such a joke. We're creating the prison with our own creative principles. And the minute you stop co creating that, you are the light and the love, you are eternal. And that's the, the funniest part of this whole thing is that cosmic joke is one deep breath away.

For whatever reason. I have that scene in the Matrix popping up where Neo put his hands up and the bullets just fell. That's the moment.

That's the moment.

That's the moment we all can have at any point in time. Yet we fabricate. I do stories as to why I can't have that moment. Why do you think our human psyche does that?

Well, because I got to go do this and then I got to retire and then I'm going to go to like, you know, Bali and that's where it's going to happen. On this perfect rock when I'm wearing this shirt. These are all the stupid stories. I have a metaphor that came up that I just, I don't want to drop it because it was a vision that came when you, you were mentioning people in water yes, Many people feel like that is, I immediately just saw the solution, which is, if you're in water, treading as hard as you can to breathe, all you have to do is take a deep breath and lie down and float on your back. And now you're floating down the stream. And I saw it clearly when you were saying, that is, I could sit here and kick and try to stay up in my shitty life and my circumstances, or I can let go and flow down the cosmic river and float on my back and look at the clouds and enjoy this ride. And it's really just a perspective change from all the energy you're exerting. And you're not supposed to be in the water like this because you go down like a nail. Relax. Yeah, right. Relax. Yeah.

I was having a vision when you were speaking, and it was Alan Watts, who I love. If there was one guy I could interview who's deceased, that would be it. Maybe I can interview, like, a Alan Watts GPT one day. That'd be fun.

Totally.

He said that, you know, you can't bite the tip of your own teeth, you can't touch the tip of your own finger when you're in water. Just relax and the water will carry you. So it was homage to what you just said. And I love Alan Watts so much, but he was still human. And I think it's this fallible concept of, like, you can be here and give us an insane wisdom. Wisdom that could change someone's life right now if they choose to embody it. But it's this fallible concept of human beings. I think the Toltec calls it controlled folly. This controlled folly that we're in, it's actually still part of the game itself. How much of that have you owned in your own life? The controlled folly, while also bringing such wisdom to the table, holding the two worlds is what I mean.

Someone watching this right now is like, all right, I like Josh, but, you know, I'm not sure about the brown guy yet. Did he say he's from Iran? Did he say he's Muslim?

I think they're less judgmental.

What I'm saying is like, no, their brain's doing that, right?

Their brain's doing it, sure.

Maybe every time they're like, wait, who is this guy? Do I trust him?

Sure.

Right. Same with you. And you've already, you know, they're following you, so they're there. And so every single word is still in that Luciferian world where it's like, I'm so used to being exploited and Manipulated that I don't trust anybody, and I'm shell shocked, right? And so I could say the. The most important thing someone has got to hear right now, but it goes through the filter of them judging this guy. And I just want to be clear about something. I am fucking nobody. I'm not important. I'm just a guy talking on a podcast. I'm not trying to be a guru. I'm not trying to be someone's hero. And don't look at me, because I'm flawed and I'm human, and I make mistakes all the time. But hopefully you can hear what we're saying.

Yes, that's very, very humble. Very true. You know, you're known as the urban monk, and I love this because, you know, I think about taking the ancient teachings and living them and wearing them and embodying them in modernity. That's the ultimate challenge. The urban monk concept, like, when. When did that first come online for you? When was it palpable? When did you know that that was actually the. At least the vocabulary that you would describe your mission on earth as the urban monk and. And give people a definition of what is an urban monk in modernity?

I think the throwback goes to something we spoke of several minutes ago, where I was like, wow, bad monk, bad doctor. Why are you judging? Why aren't you listening?

Right?

And so when I came back after, and, you know, I did, our temple in China was burned down. So the grandmaster lived in Chinatown, la. And then we would drive and train with him all the time and train. But, like, I wasn't in an actual temple in China because the communists killed those guys. My grandmaster was the last guy to get out and survive. And so I did this training, and then I go on sabbatical and come back. But, like, you know, I'd got a lot of monk in my head, and I coming back from that and being like, oh, here I have all this stuff to share. Was arrogant about it, not knowing. So I'm trying to help people. But I was arrogant about it because I did not understand the mistranslation of where I was in this ecosystem. Here I am a guy who had the luxury of changing his stars and going off and learning an ascetic lineage from an unbroken chain of masters, spending hours a day breathing to my navel and finding stuff. And, you know, it's a very luxurious privilege to a guy like me who got to do that. But then I would sit there and listen to someone complaining about their life, and I'd be like, well, you're not meditating for the hour. I told you to meditate. And they're like, dude, I freaking have kids. I didn't have kids at the time, right? Or, you know, do this or do that. And so I then had this harsh reality, having come back from becoming, you know, I got ordained as a priest, and, you know, I'm in this lineage, and I'm trying to reconcile what advice I'm giving to the lives that are coming to me for help. Realizing pretty starkly, and this is where I, you know, I give credit to the training is, wow, this isn't landing. And there's like a. There's a syntax error here. And it occurred to me through painful insight that I am trying to give householders ascetic advice. The ascetics, the 1% of the folks, would go up in the monasteries and sit under the waterfall and touch the cosmic void. Householders got bills, householders have traffic, householders have kids. And so I realized very quickly, and I was told by one of the babas in India that I should go back and be a householder. And I didn't like it at the time. But the lesson came in later that a householder lives their life with integrity and lives with conscious intent in everything that they do. But they don't not walk the dogs because they got to meditate. They don't mind, just their practice because the kid's hungry. That becomes the practice. And so as that burned into this young man who then realized that my message was a translational message that became the concept of the urban monk, which is, you can't run for the hills. So how do we get you to wiggle your toes on the ground that you're in, make your home safe, and make your life meaningful here and now it's different.

This is why when I met you, shout out to Justin Knox Nalt. I was walking up to Justin Nault at a conference, and you were standing there, and within like a second or two, I was like, this man is authentic. And I think we were around a bunch of biohacking tools, you know, some of the. That you described. And it was like, wow. That was probably one of the biggest highlights of that weekend was just meeting you, because I thought, here's a guy that could have extrapolated more money and taken advantage of people and sold a bunch of lasers and lights and done these things, but you chose not to. And I think it's really honorable. It's very honorable because we're in an age of people who are essentially false prophets. I've had people, you know, unfortunately, that sit across, and then we've had to delete their content because I find something out about them that they were being dishonest about, and I. I can't share that with y'. All. So we've just deleted episodes before.

Good for you.

The reason I'm saying this is because I think we're at an age of just a quest, an unquenchable thirst for authenticity. But it's never been so easy to be inauthentic because of how someone is presented. Do you have a starting place for people to train their intuitive faculty to know? I mean, I've been doing the work now for a while, 10 years of podcasting. I'm a dad of two. Like, I'm married. That's a spiritual crucible, Pedro.

Yes, sir.

But for people, wherever they are in their life, is there a starting place where they can train their intuition to essentially know when someone's being authentic and when someone's pretending to be authentic?

Yeah, and I really appreciate you asking that question, and I wouldn't mind spending a few minutes on this, because I think this is the. The ailment of our age and certainly of the industry that you and I are kind of.

And maybe not even ours, just all of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is. This is. This is the Luciferian game played out now with tech. Right. It's been going on for a very.

Long time and now even amplified by AI.

Yeah.

Pretending to be humans.

So if you look at the. The tarot deck, the hermetic turret. I studied Kabbalah and Hermetic Christianity and the card for the devil. The esoteric understanding is it comes through the electric energy. And so this entire realm of AI and social media and infospheres is very, very easily corrupted by that energy. Not saying it's all evil, Right. Like, we're doing something right now that's beautiful on that medium, but it's a very easily corruptible medium. So let's start with that, but then let's start with what the narrative is around the good life. And so people dangle things and say, oh, you know, you get these things. You've arrived. Most of that's bullshit, right? I've arrived. When my kid comes home from school and I drop everything and we hug and we connect. Yeah, that's my moment. Not the shit that I acquire, not the accolades that I get. This is all bullshit, Right? Those are. Those are. That's the wrong scoreboard. So people that are flaunting the phony scoreboard are part of the thing, whether they're not all evil. They're all just playing a game. Right. They're all part of the game. And a lot of them are just unwittingly doing it. Right. Because that's where the money comes and I got bills. And, you know, you just fall into this. The crap. Yeah, but I think the more nefarious elements are the ones that play middleman. We talked about it with church, we talked about it with some of these biohackers. The parasite always wants to disintermediate your relationship with the pure eternal flame. So, yes, you can be healthy if you just do it my way and join my group. Yes. My way or the highway. Right. Follow me. And my people are the ones that get it. Like all of that Pied Piper crap. These folks that are trying to. And if you get. And there's a rabbit hole. But, you know, in the next iteration, I'm going to spend a couple years studying cults and cult psychology. Because if you realize how much influence and cult psychology is put into this industry to try to trap people, you'd throw up in your mouth twice. Do they feel gross? Are they saying the words you think you want to hear? And what is your heart telling you? And that's why folding your attention back and feeling your heartbeat and doing all this internal work becomes important is because we've been hypnotized by the noise. And because we're hypnotized, we are more capable of falling for it. Milton Erickson, who's the founder of modern hypnosis, was asked in an interview, hey, what's it like putting people in trance all the time? And he's chuckled. He's like, I don't think you understand what I do. I take these poor people out of their trances all day, every day. They walk in in trances. And so where. What you think you need deconstruct that? Is that because you were told you need that? What do you actually need? I need air. I need water. I need clean food, and I need shelter, and I need my family around me. That's all in one hand. I don't actually need a car. I can walk everywhere. I don't need fancy clothes. I just need, you know, warmth. And just start deconstructing your wants and your needs and then see where these messages are being orchestrated because there's just so much fancy footwork and there's so many nefarious players now that are just trying to get your money and get your attention and get your. Why because your eyeballs are now feeding their dreams instead of your own. Right. And that's where I just feel a responsibility to come back out. Right. That's why I drove here today. Is that message right there is you are the only person that can save yourself. There's tools, there's resources, there's medicine, there's doctors and all of it. Yeah. But no one's here to save you. It's in your own heart, it's in your own consciousness. It's within the nexus of your control. And if they're trying to take credit for saving you, run for the hills.

So profound. Thank you so much, y'. All. Play that back again. Share this podcast with somebody that is believing a nefarious message where they can simply just switch the channel. You know, one of the biggest codes. I love your framework on codes. I say this all the time. One of my friends, he has a mushroom company. They're coming out with a legal psychedelic mushroom. They've already launched it. And he speaks in codes. Codes is his whole podcast and his whole vernacular. One of the best codes I ever let go of was the code that I have to ask others for permission for my heart to shine or for me to do what it is my heart is calling me for. Have you had a time in your life where you just let go of the permission to do what it is that your heart was calling you to do? And if so, how did that transform your life?

Always for the better. Always for the better is those bars are perceptual bars. And I don't want to step out. I don't want to get skylined, I don't want to get seen. These are all safety signal issues. Instead of just being yourself, what was that for you? I mean, it first started with this stuff and stepping out and being an author. And like, I never wanted. I'm not trying to be the guy. Right, and so you fought it at first. Yeah, I still fight it. Right. Because I see the guys that want.

It, they're horrible, but they want it from. Their intention is fame.

Their intention is fame. I mean, I have guys that plagiarized my work, you know, guys that, like, took that Ramana Maharshi quote and put their name on it. There's a lot of douchebags doing nasty things. And I'm like, man, I don't want to anything to do with that. I just want to raise my kids and love my wife. And so I never wanted it. And so. But then I had to just be like, well, what's the Right. Logical move. It's like, well, I. I am here to help people and I have to pull myself out, right? And so then you have to kind of parse out your distaste for what the nefarious plays you're doing and your path and what you should be doing in service and separating that out. And so there's a lot of deconstruction, right? Like the. The who am I to do this? And all the, you know, the imposter syndrome crap and all of it, right? And I get a lot of it because I chose. I consciously chose a different path. I was pre med at ucla. I graduated top of my high school, went straight in. I skipped the first quarter or two. I had so many AP units, and I was a fast track to be a medical doctor. I chose not to. But then when I went along and did this other path and became a doctor of oriental medicine and all that, I had a moment. I had about five, six years where I had, like, mdmv, because those were the guys, and we were just these punchy little shitheads that were alternative and no one took anything I said seriously. And I was like, wow, did I make a really bad career move? Did I just throw my life away to go get this less than degree? Although I spent the same amount of time studying and all of it. But society said play golf. Society said, this guy's the guy, right? And so I had this really difficult few years of being like, you made that choice and it was the right choice for you at the time. And lean into that. And lean into that. And there was a lot of difficulty because of the societal norms still to this day, like, you know, I hang out with the people I hang out with. I have very amazing friends, right? But, you know, my son plays football, and there's these regular guys that go to the golf clubs and they're football guys, and they're like, so what do you do? And if I. And if I were to say, oh, I'm a doctor of Oriental medicine, I just watch some of them snicker and like, oh, you're not a real doctor. And then I have to fight this thing where I'm like, dude, you're 40 pounds overweight and your skin is all up and you have to write and like, I go to this, like, angry place, and then I'm like, oh, that's unbecoming. Right? And then I just forgive them and bless, and I'm just like, yeah, nice to meet you too. Right. Like, and I'm not trying to sell me. I'M not trying to sell any of it. Right. And. And so, I mean, it's a long, long answer to a pointed question, but it's every single day, the urban monk still struggles with the same things everyone else does. It's just self definition. It's identity. It's all of it. And then I just have to be prepared enough to be in the moment to catch myself and be like, yeah, that's not. That's not how we're answering this. That's your hurt little boy saying that right now. So don't say it.

That's great awareness, man. Last question for you. I think about my life. I shared with you my story. I could have gone a totally different route. I could have been wrapped up in drugs and womanizing and porn, but I chose a different path. It was because my soul wanted something different. And I knew it ever since I was a kid, but nobody had showed me the ropes. And I didn't have a sensei. I didn't have a teacher. My dad did the best he could, but, you know, he was burdened with his own stuff. We talked about my necklace and the Jungian alchemical process. And I think about what's most needed on earth right now is actually a byproduct of what I've gone through and will continue to go through. And that is identity transformation. This word transformation is thrown around. It's very. It's used in a not sacred way. I treat transformation very sacredly, very sacredly. If you are really going to be a caterpillar and a chrysalis that goes and turns into a butterfly, you have to know that transformation does not come without pain. There will be pain. And so can you speak to that aspect of identity transformation in the world now? It's what I'm doing with my life method and my groups and my community, we're honestly, courageously looking at the parts of self that have been projected upon and honoring our past and moving forward with the future. And there's a whole science and methodology there, which I'm so fascinated by. And I learned so much by me just teaching it and doing it. What do you believe is needed most on the earth right now when it comes to the concept of identity transformation?

I think you hit it on the head. We live in a culture that sells sugar cereal to children, and we live in a culture that says, Advil solves your tequila problem. And so the aversion of pain and the driving of dopamine and sugar has become the mo. And so averting pain, averting the Lessons averting the growth and going the easy route has become the false narrative. Kung fu means hard work. The other translation is eat bitter. Right.

Interesting.

And so that's how I learned to be better. Not to say I want to suffer in life, but I want to not avoid the suffering, because that's where my lessons are, are. My school is here, the temple is here. And so transformation is an inside game. And I get. And I get this all the time. And I teach qigong workshops and, you know, I try to help people as much as I can. And the first thing I do is say, listen, if you're here for a amazing, transformative weekend, and that's what you walk away with, and then you're like, hey, I want to come to. It's bad for business, right? What I say. And then you want to come to every event. I do. Because, you know, this is where you get your. Your fix. You're in the wrong place. Because it's my job to teach you how to fish and get the hell out of the way. Because the transformation is their game, and they have to find where to do the alchemy in their own body and their own lives. And so the teacher shows how to fish and has to step out of the way. The transformation is not something you could buy. It's not something you get in this podcast. It's not something that you get at any weekend workshop. It's things that you then take from this podcast as a workshop and apply to your life with your daily spiritual hygiene that then becomes transformation. More information does not transform.

Beautiful podcast. Thank you for being my guest. There's a lot more there. Maybe we'll do another one and you've learned more things to share, which I know you're going very deep into the array of things in which we identify as proprioception and all the different ways that we process the world, which is a fascinating topic. It's such a cool book that you're writing.

Thank you.

When is this book coming out?

I don't know. I keep pushing it back because I'm doing a clinical trial with 150 people. We're tracking biometrics, we're tracking cortisol, we're tracking cardio metabolic function. Because the thesis is when you turn the lights on and you become more self aware, there's an epigenetic switch that I think is actually higher than the hormetic switch that has to do with the awareness. Is it the ice bath or is it the awareness of the pain and the ice and all of it that brings you into your body. And so we're looking at the epigenetic switches that then code for NF kappa B shifting and code for systemic changes that lead to less inflammation and more vitality. And so we're tinkering in the lab. I don't. I don't like making proclamations. I'd rather do a clinical trial and say, here's our published data. And so the book will come out. When the book comes out. I'm just nerding out right now and really enjoying it.

That's a good place to be. That's pretty trustworthy as well. Where can people go to swim in your water?

Theurbanmonk.com Everything's there. Films, books, all of it.

Y' all share this podcast with somebody who is struggling. You have learned so many codes today from Pagerum, so until we see you again, I'm wishing you love, wellness, but most importantly, peace and power. You cannot have power unless it comes from peace. We'll talk with you next week.