Josh (02:43.956) Dr. Pedram Shojai, welcome to Reversible.
Dr Pedram Shojai (02:49.934) Awesome. Awesome.
Dr Pedram Shojai (02:59.822) Thank you, good to be here.
Josh (03:01.227) Pleasure to have you here. I'm looking forward to this one. You know, we don't often get to talk on this podcast about things outside of the science of the gut, the bacteria and how we eat and what's going on and where our food's coming from. It's rare we get to dive into some of the inner workings because I don't think we often realize how important they are in the rest of our physiological function, but our psychological emotional function really governs a lot of our physiological function. And I'm really excited to get into this one. So.
Really quick, I'd like to do two things. I'd like to change things up. Can you give us a quick bead on why this is such an important topic and then lead us into who you are and what we're doing here?
Dr Pedram Shojai (03:39.694) Sure, sure, happy to. This topic snuck up on me. It was the elephant in the room treating patients for decades. Chinese medicine is kind of very central on, you know, spleenchi and earth element and all that. And so it was part of my lexicon, but then the research on the microbiome just kept landing on my desk. And the more I looked at it, the more I was like, holy crap, are you guys seeing this? Right? And it's just for a long time.
to the point where I commissioned, it's probably still not to flaunt it, but the definitive media piece on this ever made back in 2018, 19, 10 part documentary series with all the scientists in all the universities called Interconnected. And so I spent a year and a half of my life traveling, going to the universities and the labs.
interviewing the people that did these studies, right? The founding fathers like Marty Blazer and you know, Basmanian and like I talked to all these guys, right? And I walked away being like, holy moly, the microbiome is just the tip of the iceberg. Immunology is now microbiology and you know, the world has, as we know it, has changed. And to get part two of your question is, I was a Daoist monk, studied with the Dalai Lama, studied.
Kung Fu lineage monk for very many years, became a doctor of Oriental medicine, came back, had a very busy kind of booming thing in Los Angeles, California, realized I was working in the Mass Unit and people were getting sick faster than we could fix them because the problems we were trying to solve were lifestyle problems. And so I had multiple doctors and clinics and all sorts of stuff going on and I realized I was on the.
side of the equation. So I consulted for about 1 ,400 corporations in corporate wellness and then realized all I did was repeat myself because lifestyle is really not that complicated. So I started doing video and writing and so now I'm a New York Times bestselling author with eight books and several films and docu -series and yeah, lost my hair in the process but you know I've done a lot of work.
Josh (05:52.249) You talk about it like no problem, like I just showed up one day, had some ideas, and now I'm an author and it's the best selling thing ever and I made a big documentary series and it gets amazing. When it comes so intuitively and so innately, sometimes at the cost of hair, it can almost sound easy to the general public, but the reality is to some people it's the first time they're hearing about these types of things. And so what were some of the things you found yourself repeating over and over that kind of felt like you're hitting your head off a wall?
Dr Pedram Shojai (06:21.39) Yeah, I mean, probably stuff that you've said on this podcast many times, right? Like, eat much more plant matter, eat different colors of fruits and vegetables, and get variety, and eat things that came from the earth and not manufactured and not laden with pesticides, and all of the artificial junk that's been added to our environment. The toxicity is a very big deal. So, you know, live a non -toxic lifestyle.
Josh (06:45.987) Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai (06:50.216) Continue to heal your body with with real food and then the basics like I cannot heal someone who's not sleeping Right if you have so much stress that you're you know falling apart I don't care how many probiotics you stuff into your mouth you got to solve the marital problem or the work problem or whatever it is And you know moving is not negotiable. So, you know lifestyle the wheels of lifestyle diet exercise sleep and mindset they have to be in place and then
On top of all of that, you need to feel safe. And we could get into that because that's really come full circle from my monk days, but I've realized the science is all pointing to this arousal of the system. And if the system is under attack, perceived under attack, it just won't heal, right? It's just not going to be able to heal the right way. And the gut has become front and center in all of that, in not just my practice, as you know, I have...
Josh (07:24.738) Mm -hmm.
Josh (07:37.889) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (07:48.558) I haven't seen patients in a few years now, more of a media guy, but you know, thousands and thousands of people that I've engaged with over the years, if you don't heal the gut, they're not getting better, right? But if you don't get them to feel safe, they're not getting better. So all of it has to come together. I'm a strong advocate for saying it's a multi -touch, multi -point solution, not.
which probiotic is the Hail Mary that solves me, right? Like the industry has trained people to just be like, what's the miracle pill? And that's just garbage, right? That's just not true.
Josh (08:15.712) sure.
Josh (08:21.085) Mm -hmm. Yeah, I appreciate you repeating the same thing once again here for us just to kind of cover those bases. You know, I often talk about that. They say, well, what should I eat? Like you can find that information everywhere. If your great grandmother doesn't recognize it as food, don't eat it. It's as simple as that. And everything else, we have to even talk about how we eat. That's an interesting topic as well about sitting down and taking breaths. But the concept of safety.
I think especially now in 2024, the concept of safety kind of has a negative connotation because everyone's got safe spaces and everyone's afraid of facing feelings or having hard conversations. So can you define what you mean by the word safety?
Dr Pedram Shojai (09:02.254) I'll give you a little context because I think it's important. A couple years back, I tried to get my kids away every summer and cultured and all that. I came back from a trip in Portugal. It was one of those summers where I had some stress going on. We had a leak in our house and there was all sorts of stuff that I was dealing with back stateside. I'm in Portugal and I'm like, you know what? Their gluten is better. Let's have the gelato.
Josh (09:18.973) Right.
Dr Pedram Shojai (09:31.374) let's drink the wine. And so I kind of took the breaks off being like, went in Rome, right? And we were in Rome that summer. And so I, you know, whatever, put on five, six pounds, you come back, you work it out, it's fine. I couldn't sleep. And I'm not a guy, I was a monk, right? Like I'm not a guy who had insomnia ever in my life. And I come home with insomnia, I'm like, what the heck did I break? Right? And so I started digging deep into the literature.
Josh (09:32.081) Hmm.
Josh (09:49.051) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (10:00.334) and found all sorts of smoking gun correlations with endotoxemia coming from a leaky gut, a disrupted microbiota, and a torn gut lining, crossing over and creating alarm signals in the body that bring up the arousal, that have second pass clearance through the liver, messing up your clock genes, just messing up your sleep. And then I started looking at all this literature showing,
God, look at all this anxiety that comes from this. Look at all of these kind of secondary downstream issues from endotoxin. And now we know endotoxemia leads to 50 % of the chronic disease, if not more, right? It's a big deal. But all of this other stuff coming from the alarm bell ringing. So if there's a guy banging on my front door with a bat in his hand, yes, that will absolutely ring an alarm bell. And I'm like, hey, danger, right? Circle the wagons. But if.
Josh (10:39.805) Mm -hmm.
Josh (10:53.789) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (10:56.654) My body that's millions of years in evolution old, suddenly is saying, hey, the gate is broken, the enemy is climbing over the gate and we're under attack by bacteria and gram negative, like polysaccharides that shouldn't be in here kind of thing. Raise the alarm, call the troops. That is an alarm that's being set off internally, which then tells my mitochondria.
hey, we can't produce as much energy, we're under attack. It tells my nervous system, you need to change to wartime economy and you can't heal anything right now because we're under attack. If you have a low grade endotoxemia and infection happening from a disrupted gut, a dysbiotic gut, you are not safe, right? You don't feel safe because your body doesn't.
Josh (11:48.925) Hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (11:52.814) have a way of telling you other than some low grade anxiety, some inflammation, and messaging that is way more subtle than your average person even tunes into, let alone the person who's popping an Advil or a Pepsid or whatever the hell to move on with their day. And so it became a very big part of my study is being like, holy crap, the way you eat and the connection with your mental health and your sleep and your ability to heal.
is dramatically impacted by these things that we're talking about. And I went on and did an eight part series on the oral microbiome and then another six part series called Gut Check on the microbiome. I've been up on the microbiome research with the labs that are doing the work for well over a decade now. And the funny part is I've come back to the monk stuff because if you don't feel safe and if you can't.
pull your body out of a stressed out environment, both physically and mentally and emotionally and all of it, you're just not gonna heal. And you're gonna take $300 a month in probiotics and you're still going to have your symptoms. And that's effectively tens of thousands of people who've gone through our media are like, I've tried probiotics for years, they're crap. Like, okay, hold on a second. There's a framework you're missing, right?
Josh (12:55.069) Mm -hmm.
Josh (13:11.077) Mm -hmm. Yeah, we miss a lot of parts and pieces. It's kind of like putting together IKEA furniture without the manual and wondering why it's not working. We're missing key elements. I think it's really interesting you talk about this because, you know, the gut can really only communicate with us in so many ways. You get bloated, gas, pain, constipation, diarrhea, cramp, nausea, maybe blood and mucus on the worst end of the spectrum, but it can only communicate so many ways.
For me, dealing with things like Crohn's and colitis, it's actually shockingly easy to reverse. And not just put to remission, but fully reverse. But we have to look outside of the gut to see how the body's communicating. We're looking at the skin for psoriasis eczema versus acne, looking at the joints, looking at the brain. They tell us so much more.
than the gut tissue itself. What you're seeing here is these other communication factors like the low grade anxiety, the irritability, the insomnia. These are ways your body is trying to communicate with you saying something's not right. Am I assessing that properly?
Dr Pedram Shojai (14:08.462) Yeah, it's like the old story of the guy who was like sitting on top of, you know, praying to God for help because his house was flooding and then eventually he's on his roof and, you know, the helicopter comes and he's like, no, no, I'm waiting for God to save me. And he like, you know, crosses the pearly gates and God's like, dude, I sent you a fire truck. I sent you a helicopter. I sent you all these signs. Like, what do you... And so it's like, well, yeah, you have eczema. You're not sleeping. You have anxiety. Like, these are all your body, not speaking English, right?
Josh (14:26.429) Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai (14:37.55) trying to tell you in neurological signaling and then immunological signaling types of communication, saying, hey, something ain't right. Something ain't right. And we're not tuned to listen to it because this is the dermatologist, this is the gastroenterologist, and this joint pain, man, I gotta go to my orthopedist. And what if they all came from the same inflammatory fire that was being set off by your dysbiosis and your endotoxemia, right?
Josh (15:05.117) Yeah, yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai (15:06.19) Not saying that's always the case, but I'm saying that's where I look first now.
Josh (15:10.749) It's almost always the case enough to look first there. I absolutely agree. I mean, Dr. Lesio Fasano talks about that. I'm sure you're familiar with his paper, All Diseases Begin in Leaky Gut. And it's something that's referenced everywhere by everyone since we really discovered leaky gut existed. And it's such an important part that gets so badly missed.
And I love that we're here doing this because we can go back in and say, okay, yeah, take the $300 a month in probiotics, take the supplements, eat the foods, try to repair that leaky gut, but if there are missing aspects, you are trying to put a fire out while you're still pouring gasoline and it's not going to go out. So.
Let's take this what you're talking about safety. Let's expand it beyond inside of the gut. So right now we know we have these small signals. We have these these chemical signals that I'm inflamed and I'm trying to communicate. So I'm going to produce anxiety effectively through these different chemical channels and neurotransmitter imbalances. So we have we have anxiety. We have psoriasis. We have joint pain. That's your gut communicating. So your chemical reception is like I'm not safe. What other aspects are safety? And I ask this because most guys.
men especially woke up, what do you mean I'm safe, I'm fine bro. If we have to look past this, like what are the things that we're missing or that we're denying or that we're maybe not even aware that we're not aware of?
Dr Pedram Shojai (16:28.11) Well, I'll go with your example first, and then we'll go back to physiology. The guy's like, I'm safe, I'm fine, bro. But he's also buying a gun every quarter because he's listening to the news and thinks China is coming, or Putin has weaponized space. And so you listen to all this subtle messaging out there that the world's not safe, and then you know, you.
Josh (16:41.501) Hehehehe.
Dr Pedram Shojai (16:49.102) do the things, right? You circle the wagons, you do jujitsu and like you take testosterone and so that same guy also just doesn't admit that he consistently doesn't feel safe, right? And so, and he's the one that his wife drags into the clinic once he's actually sick, right? But cortisol would probably be the next.
Josh (17:05.821) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (17:10.35) usual suspect in line, right? So when we perceive that we are not safe, when we are running on deficit time and we are running around trying to rob Peter to pay Paul and get the kids to soccer and, and, and, our cortisol levels go askew and there's a direct one -to -one correlation between our elevated cortisol and secretory IgA, which then is there to help manage the aberrant or aberrant colonies of bacteria that are proliferating.
the LPS is proliferating in our gut. So there's a direct immunological correlation between stress and gut dysbiosis that we've understood for years, and those stress levels make the bad bacteria.
Big word bad, right? The bacteria we probably don't want thriving to proliferate more so than usual because this system is under duress, right? We need to allocate resources to a war. Imagine there being a war on three fronts and you're trying to build libraries. It's like we don't have time for that, right? Make some guns, let's go.
Josh (18:07.069) Mm -hmm.
Josh (18:13.853) Mm -hmm. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the body's looking for these reserves. It totally makes sense. And so you've been doing this for a long time. Where do you find the most common sources of lack of safety, chemically, biologically, psychologically, that people may be experiencing that they're either aware of or unaware of?
Dr Pedram Shojai (18:35.406) Yeah, and before I get into that, I just wanna make one more point because the body needs the reserves and the real rough part of this whole equation is when the body doesn't feel safe, the signaling of the mitochondria is, hey, it's not safe, this animal needs to go power down and not create as much energy. So at the time the body needs more troops, the economy goes down.
there's less energy to send to the areas that need it. So it becomes a real slippery slope and that's why people have a hard time healing. So the way I've always engaged in this and you know stuff that I've done in my academies for a long time is...
People who are not getting better, the first thing I always address is toxicity. I've done films on this, I've done series on this, like I have to spend a lot of time looking at the stuff inside the castle walls that is outgassing, that is making us unwell. And if you are being exposed to toxins in your environment, in your home, the mitochondria go whoops, and then all of a sudden you have less cash to work with, right? You have less energy to be able to deal with your
your detox pathways, to fight the LPS coming over and your endotoxemia, it's like your budget's gone. So I personally have gone after toxicity. For some people you can't detox early because they're so beat up, right? But you gotta get the toxins out and you gotta get them out of the body and you gotta get them out of the home, you gotta get them out of the environment, you can't keep cutting yourself, right? Then inflammation and gut healing.
Josh (19:59.91) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (20:11.438) before any other healing has to happen, right? And that's where you thrive, is you've gotta fix the gut. There are elaborate, specific ways to do it. A lot of people are very trite about this, and they get it wrong, and they take a lot of people's money, and they don't fix people. And so I've seen really bad practice medicine, I've seen really bad practice in general around that, and so there's a whole gestalt around how to heal the gut, how to do it right, and how to take your time. And then, as,
that those first two steps really start to lock in the body is no longer saying hey there's methyl something or other floating around bouncing against my you know epithelial walls and then the endotoxemia starts to come down the alarm bells stop ringing and then the body starts to power up the mitochondria there's more available energy and then the healing starts to actually happen we you know then you just like
you know, the person starts to sleep better, the person's anxiety starts to come down. When their anxiety comes down, then they don't emotionally eat, they don't make the stupid decision, I'm gonna have the cheesecake instead of go to the gym. All of these things are kind of downstream consequences of not feeling well, but you don't feel well, so you start making, you know, poor choices. And so you gotta get people out of that vicious spiral downward, and you put them into an upward spiral by sequencing healing in a way that allows the body,
To feel safe, heal. Feel safe, heal.
Josh (21:43.938) Hmm. Yeah. So where are these, these lack of safety is coming from? And we can get into the healing side. We detox, we get into sweat and we get into healthy food. We get into, I we can get into the weeds and talk about certain genetic sniffs and things we're exposed to in our hair products and chemical products. And that's all fun and well, I mean, that's, I mean, a lot of people are kind of getting into that. We recently did a, an episode of Warren Phillips, non -toxic dad about toxins. And so.
Dr Pedram Shojai (21:55.918) Mm -hmm.
Josh (22:11.073) Then I guess to follow up on that last question, where is it that people are finding the most inhibition in this process? Is it relationships? Is it news? Is it their inner circles? Is it mental, emotional stuff, trauma from the past they have to work on? Like what's really holding them back from feeling safe enough for the body to do what it's supposed to do?
Dr Pedram Shojai (22:30.542) Yeah, the answer is yes. Right, all of it.
And so whether it's one or many of those for you as an individual listening to this is for you to unpack. But look, we live in a tight upper lip, keep marching kind of culture, right? You're only as good as your productive capacity. You need to stay updated on the news, but if you watch the news, it's all drama and trauma and pharma ads. So what is happening to your brain as you watch the news? And then the attention economy.
Josh (22:56.819) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (23:03.408) is the devil.
They are monetizing your attention away from your life and your priorities into the highest bidder who wants to take your eyeballs and sell you stuff. And so you have to take your mind back from social media. You have to, you know, you can get your news from sources, but don't sit there and dwell on the news because all of that is designed to make you feel unsafe, right? The dopaminergic circuitry that's been engineered to keep you in your social media feeds,
Josh (23:28.255) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (23:36.16) is the opposite of the serotonergic circuitry that's needed to make you sleep well and feel less anxious. Engineered to do so, right? And so fasting for media and social media and then adjusting the inputs into your body.
non -GMO, all the things, right, that you hear in the podcasts are absolutely part of that Gestalt. You've got to stop poisoning yourself and you will start feeling better. You could poison yourself with relations, you could poison yourself with information, you could poison yourself with Italian cologne, right? You could poison yourself by sitting in a new car, right? And so there are multiple areas and the body, whether it's a perceived,
threat or an actual chemical threat will have the same type of reaction to make you feel unsafe, power down and not be able to heal. So we are shell shocked into this crisis of our inability to heal because the world feels unsafe and we're just like, you know, animals that are struggling trying to find our next breath, right? And that can mean.
better boundaries on the resolution side in your marriage.
It could obviously mean better boundaries with how you allocate your time. Am I going for a walk or am I gonna watch TV? Am I gonna spend time with my kids or am I gonna thumb through TikTok? And so all of these decisions stack either in a pro vitality direction or in a anti vitality direction and not feeling safe and not being able to get well. And for me, I do not compartmentalize for any of my patients anymore and be like, well let's look at your left toe.
Dr Pedram Shojai (25:25.055) It is everything and that's the problem is medicine is compartmentalized. There's specialists for everything but I have increasingly become more and more of a generalist because I realize it's every aspect of how we live our lives that become the net result of what our lives look like. Sorry, no miracle pill there. Man, listen, if I could put that into a pill,
Josh (25:30.233) Mm -hmm.
Josh (25:45.881) Well, that's a bummer because I know we all wanted one of those.
Dr Pedram Shojai (25:52.718) you know, I'd probably buy my hair back, right? Like there, it's, you know, that's a trillion dollar solution. That's a shortcut, but I don't think that shortcut is what we're allowed, right? I think we're, we're, are being asked to become accountable for our lives.
Josh (25:54.361) Sure.
Josh (26:08.152) which is a challenge. I think there's always gonna be an excuse as we are in human nature. Well, I don't live in a bubble. Well, I've got this going on. Well, I've got a life to live. I got a business to run. I've got kids who are running around and hungry. They gotta go to soccer and I don't have time to eat and I'm stressed out and this and that. And there's always something, it almost seems like the only option is to build a mud hut on Mars away from everybody with only your favorite things and to live in this bubble. Like this transformation.
where we have all these specialists right now in the Western world, a cardiologist and you have a urologist and a GI doctor. They're looking at these compartmentalized segmented pieces of the body, but at the same time to go through and almost overhaul every aspect of our lives from top to bottom is a multi -year transformational process. Most of which will never, or as you said, most people I don't think will have the capacity to actually complete without.
I guess without really having that proper transformation, the beginning to know I need this almost like that come to Jesus moment. Like I'm done if I don't have this this thing. And so what is it you're doing with these people to make this successful? I mean, it almost sounds unattainable to say, well, I got to take the next five years to fix my health problem or I go take a pill tomorrow.
Dr Pedram Shojai (27:24.654) So I'm gonna start with a story, and the reason why I became known as the Urban Monk was because when I was in the monasteries in high Himalayas, I was perplexed at how many people from our world were running up there thinking that they can hide from all the world's problems. But the world's problems had already made it there. There's nowhere to run, there's nowhere to hide, and getting to Mars is not gonna happen. So you have to stand your ground and fix your life here.
And the next thing I would say to that is the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the next best time is now. So five years from now, what's your life gonna look like? It's gonna look kinda like the life you have now, except probably with less energy and more wrinkles and a little bit more grumpiness if you don't make changes. And that's the part where people are trained to be like, that's too much work. You know what's too much work?
is feeling shitty.
Josh (28:20.628) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (28:21.772) What's too much work is having endotoxemia. What's too much work is waking up with anxiety and not having proper sleep. And so every single thing that is done to bring more vitality makes your life better tomorrow and in five years from now, your life can be miraculously different if you continue to dig out. And that's why, to specifically answer your question, I have kind of shifted over to
saying I have to detoxify these individuals first because the burden of the toxins snuffs out the mitochondria's ability to produce energy effectively and efficiently and these people don't feel like exercising they don't feel like going to Whole Foods and they don't feel like talking about that thing with their husband because they don't have energy so let's get them their energy back and then as they start to feel better let's allow them a path of reinvesting that energy to then maybe healing their
gut and then maybe healing their decisions and helping move along. But I realized, look like anyone else, I came out of med school and I was preachy, right? Like you should do this and you should do that and shame on you for not doing what I told you because I'm smart, right? And I couldn't figure out why people weren't listening to me because I was so exalted and brilliant, right? And I'm just like, okay dummy, maybe you're not a good communicator.
Josh (29:32.433) Sure.
Josh (29:42.609) Mmm, naturally.
Dr Pedram Shojai (29:47.246) And so I spent years really trying to figure out why they weren't listening. And it's like me asking you to pay for something that cost 20 bucks and you reach into your pocket and you're like, there's just lint. You don't have it.
Josh (30:02.129) Hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (30:02.926) So I can't ask someone to invest energy that they don't have. They're already an energy deficit and stumbling into all these lifestyle things that sound exhausting because they don't have the energy to invest. So then I started really reverse engineering saying, okay, how do I get the big rocks out of the way, help them have more energy?
And then they'll feel like taking the next few steps. And then they'll start to crawl, walk, run, and smile again, right? And that became, you know, in my elder years, right, the sequencing that began to really work effectively for people.
is stop preaching to them, give them what they need back, which is energy, and then have them reinvest that energy into actual healing and feeling more safe so that they can continue to heal and chill and relax. Because you know better than any, with the diagnoses and all, that there is fight or flight or freeze, and then there's rest and digest.
Josh (30:56.141) Mm.
Josh (31:06.733) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (31:07.79) And those nervous system configurations are pretty binary. So if I'm in fight, flight, or freeze, I'm not resting and digesting, which means I'm not healing. So I have to, have to train my nervous system to relax.
Josh (31:21.261) It almost sounds as if you have this big elaborate flow chart where it's like today you're going to see a psychologist to learn to deal with the trauma and tomorrow you're going to see a nutritionist to help you make some changes in food and the next day you're going to go see a trainer. What does this look like on a tangible basis? I mean it almost sounds really great in theory but I think it can really sound overwhelming to a lot of people from the outside looking in where I've got this major overhaul I got 40 things to do at once. Where do we even start?
Dr Pedram Shojai (31:44.846) Yeah. Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai (31:52.558) and then start detoxing your body. Get the shit out of the environment that's making you feel poisoned. Stop poisoning yourself and then pull the poison out of your fat cells, out of your brain cells, out of your bone, and suddenly you're.
and maybe you don't need to see the psychologist for 14 years, right? And so as you start feeling better, you have more agency, you have more energy, you have more clarity, then it's like, man, now I'm like, you know, I'm so broke I can't pay attention. Now I have enough energy to be like, you know what's interesting is I was feeling really good and I had that cheese burrito and now I'm not feeling good, huh? And you have enough agency and clarity with a little more energy to put two and two together and be like, huh.
maybe cheese burritos. What is it? Is it the cheese? Is it the gluten? Right? And then you start to figure out what your body is telling you it doesn't like. And you start to come from a state of, if you're at low energy, you can't see anything, right? If you bring up the energy, then at a higher energy state, when something diminishes your energy back down to kind of like that flat line, you're like, what did I do? What did I do?
Josh (33:02.643) Mm -hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (33:05.902) And you start to learn about lifestyle. One day at a time, life becomes the workshop. And then you get better and better at not making dumb decisions and staying with the decisions that give you more energy. And then eventually, you start to get to a place where you're like net overflow and your tissue starts to heal.
Josh (33:15.146) Thank you.
Dr Pedram Shojai (33:27.694) Right? And you start to feel better and better. Does it mean you don't go to trauma -informed therapy? Does it mean you don't talk about what your mom said? It doesn't mean those things are irrelevant, but my challenge with it, and I'm like a Marty Seligman kind of positive psychology guy in that place, right, is if you don't have enough energy to talk about it, you're not gonna be able to process it, learn from it, and heal from it.
and the energy systems are just flickering. The mitochondria are just not working. In 99 % of the patients I'm seeing, they're compromised. So start there, then start healing, right?
Josh (34:08.584) You're very obviously a dad of like preteens or teenagers like just stop making the dumb decisions and everything will be fine. That's really what it is and I think some of us just need to hear it straight right from the horse's mouth. Just don't do the dumb things and it's so true and I think we can often lack that self -control whether it's patterning whether it's actual you know we've really dove into at least I have.
throughout my studies, the biology of belief, say Bruce Lipton, not only how our beliefs influence our body, but our own psychological blocks of, do I really deserve this? Am I a good enough person? If I get better, we don't even realize what I'm gonna do with my time. How have I been as a mom or a dad or a spouse? Do I deserve to feel better? We can kind of self -sabotage. What are the most common roadblocks you're seeing between people making the dumb decisions and just making the smart ones?
Dr Pedram Shojai (35:00.878) Yeah, so I will.
I'm a tough love kung fu guy, but I'm also, some of it is not your fault guy, so I'm gonna contextualize this somewhere down the middle of that road, which is, if you are in a low energy state, the highest energy kind of blossom to the flower part of your brain that needs the most energy and needs all systems firing to be able to power up correctly is your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that is responsible for negation of impulses higher, more,
moral reasoning, not making dumb decisions. So if you're in a low energy state and your prefrontal cortex is struggling to do the thing, then it's a lot more likely you're gonna keep choosing beer over water or cheesecake over dates, right? Like it's just that part of your brain that helps triage in that moment just doesn't have enough power to like step up and be like, monkey no, monkey no, don't do that, right? That's literally the part of our brain that separates us from the chimpanzees.
Josh (35:57.346) Hehehehehe
Dr Pedram Shojai (36:03.76) that's the part of our brain that isn't getting powered enough, right? So that in context, right, is if you have your biology working correctly, you have less stacked against you for those bad decisions, right? But then I am a strong advocate for pulling your attention back to your life.
your life garden is what I call it, and your priorities. Because TikTok and Facebook and LinkedIn and Channel 3 News or whatever the heck you're watching is competing for that attention. Taking the water away from the plants that matter to you and telling you to worry about China, Toyota.
Icebergs polar bears, whatever it is. There's plenty to worry about in this world and if you take your eyes off of your priorities your life your family your health and Allow them to be reprioritized by the highest bidder into this media dumpster fire You're not going to have the attentional capacity to come back and say No, I'm not getting drinks with you guys. I said I was going to the gym
It's very easy to make bad decisions if you don't keep your lifeguard in as the filter for your priorities.
Josh (37:26.912) Yeah, it almost sounds like priorities also tie into purpose. Like, why are we doing this? Am I doing it because I want to get better? Am I doing this because I feel like my life is made for something bigger than watching Netflix and chilling, you know, than eating a bag of Doritos. What is really the broad spectrum impact? And that's something I talked to Dr. Terry Walls about, you know, she does a lot of MS research and she's done amazing stuff. And one of the biggest things that she brought up as part of.
you know, her patients going through clinical trials is meaning and purpose. Is that something you find people are kind of spinning in this overdraft of purposelessness where they're so distracted, so busy, all they really know is how to get that dopamine hit from Instagram or from the likes and they're lacking purpose? Like what's going on? What do we do about that?
Dr Pedram Shojai (38:14.158) So I'm gonna get a little woo because I have to here in that the Buddha called most humans hungry ghosts.
because we are trying to find energy, meaning accolades, attaboys, just around because I need other people to fill me up because I don't know how to fill myself up kind of thing, right? And the solution to that is learning how to drink vertically, right? Through your spine, through your crown, connect with the center of the universe, the heart of God, whatever you want to call it in the earth, and just be whole and full and pure in the suchness of your being.
And so to me, it is a mark of a spiritual malady because we have no purpose, we have no connection with something bigger than ourselves. And it's like, okay, I'm gonna go gas up my truck, but I don't know where I'm gonna go.
that gas is the food that you eat and the mitochondria's ability to let the cylinders fire because you are like, we are making it to Yosemite and that's where we're going, right? And so I think that that is incredibly relevant. I think, however, having been on the personal development side and written multiple books on the subject, that there's a trap in that as well.
And here's the trap. I think a lot of people go, yeah, all right, that's so true. I gotta go find my meaning and purpose while I also feel so horrible and not well and don't have energy. And they'll spend years being told where their meaning and purpose should be because they don't have the, they don't feel good enough and have the agency.
Josh (39:44.987) Hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (39:54.19) to find that for themselves. So they end up getting eaten up by the middle man, you know, these false gurus and all these like personal development wannabes that intermediate their connection with that because they're just taking their money. So I think you need to absolutely keep your eyes on meaning and purpose and your deeper connection while also fixing the physiological systems where the lights are flickering because if you don't feel well, you
are easily leveraged. If you don't feel well, you start saying my meaning is now the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or my home team or whatever it is because you fall into these macros of belonging that don't necessarily have meaning but they have volume and population, right? And then you make that your identity and that's not your identity. That's just another club.
Josh (40:25.114) Hmm.
Josh (40:49.466) It's amazing. It is. It is. I think it's a brilliant way of saying it's just another club. Now, I got to ask because, you know, you're a doctor of oriental medicine and everything in the westernized world is very compartmentalized. You see a dermatologist for the skin and like we talked about, right? And so what is the difference here? I mean, you come from such a wide array of background. You have such a holistic and I know people kind of confuse the term holistic and think we're, you know, dancing naked in the rain with crystals and really holistic is whole.
body but also mind body spirit and they're things that depending on your knowledge base and where you're at might sound a little bit woo -woo but the reality is they exist.
We know frequency and vibration exists. We know that there's a lot more to it. They've proven through string theory what like 13 dimensions. Like if there's things beyond our basic comprehension that we have to consider as part of our holistic being that whether you believe we came from the big bang or God or gods or whatever it is you believe in, we had to have come from the same place. Therefore it all has to be interconnected like.
Avatar's Pandora in some way shape or form which I think can be really amazing But you come at it with such a well -rounded approach to the whole person the whole being and dealing with this Centering is this what they've taught in oriental medicine. Like what is the root of that? And why is it so different from Western?
Dr Pedram Shojai (42:12.59) Yeah, I mean, look, the original medicines of...
antiquity, we're all vitalistic in origin, which is there is this energy to this thing called life that wants to propagate, it wants to grow, it wants to laugh and it wants to love, and when something is healthy, you can see it overflowing with energy and has enough energy to create more life and can keep going. And we compartmentalized and really in a very Cartesian, and we get into like why allopathy,
kind of just broke down out of vitalism, that's a whole other topic, but we moved away from that. And so we started cutting out parts and giving steroids and Western medicine really hasn't excelled in the treatment of many of these things. There's really good diagnosis, right? And so, and there's really wonderful elements in Western medicine that I think are incredible and doing wonderful things. So I'm not a...
can't be guy in that, right? But I just think the philosophy of vitalism remains and needs to be retained because you want to build the resilience of the individual, physiologically, emotionally, mentally.
energetically and that resilience comes from what this energy of life and that's a je ne sais quoi if you would right but we understand that the the body is fundamentally fueled by energy and those energy systems are deeply integrated
Dr Pedram Shojai (43:49.166) with internal communications networks that happen at photic levels between our mitochondria, which come from ancient form of bacteria and our microbiome, which is a colony of bacteria that is a flowing state of life that is coexisting with us. And so there's so much more, you talk about avatar, you know, there's so much more connecting us in the rhizosphere and the fungal kingdom that came before all of us under our feet with the plants.
around us and the bacteria around us that we are barely scratching the surface of understanding and so there has been an Arrogant teenager phase of medicine that I think we are finally coming out of where it's like we figured out sterile's excuse me, we figured out sterilization
for surgery, we figured out antibiotics and we figured out steroids and frankly those things helped us win World War I and then World War II and put this one philosophy of thinking in the lead of medicine and it has embarrassingly proven to be ill -suited for chronic disease and lifestyle, right?
and because it became a multi -trillion dollar industry, money talks. That's not what heals people.
Josh (45:14.735) Always. Yeah, I mean, if you go back and follow the money, it really is, for lack of a better term, one big financial circle jerk.
You go from the FDA to the insurance companies, to the medical, to who's sponsoring the medical system and the medical schools and what doctors are learning and the studies that are paid for and what's put into textbooks. And it just goes round and around. And then a CEO will leave Pfizer or somewhere else and go and work for this medical college or go to work for the FDA. And they just bounce around to these different companies. And...
It's really unfortunate and we are responsible for our own health and our own everything. It's sort of curiosity here. My brain's going to left field. Oriental medicine, I think most of us are maybe familiar with Chinese medicine, right? We're dealing with acupuncture and meridian lines and chi and wind in the spleen and fire in the liver. What is this that we're talking about? And is that the same or different than Oriental medicine?
Dr Pedram Shojai (46:11.054) It's effectively the same, the Koreans, the Japanese, the Tibetans, everyone's got a version of the chi and how it works, and this point's here and this point's there, but fundamentally, Oriental medicine is what you alluded to. Now, there are forms of natural medicine like shamanism and other things that are equally as relevant and incredibly powerful. I just happened to study that stuff because I was a kung fu guy, and it was the same system.
Amazing stuff. And people are like, well, there's no studies. It's like, excuse me? There's millions and millions of studies. Yeah, and hundreds of millions of people that do it and attest to its efficacy. And these are rational, pragmatic, intelligent people. And so the naysayers are also the drug dealers. And so I just don't even know. And so it's an incredibly effective form of medicine. But I also consider myself a functional medicine guy. I love labs. I love science.
Josh (46:43.551) 4 ,000 years.
Dr Pedram Shojai (47:08.888) and I love all of it, right? There is somewhere in the middle where if you keep your eyes on the prize of vitalism and enhancing the energy systems and the life, be getting...
power of the human body and you shift your perspective to not playing whack -a -mole but going after the root cause of the problems and bringing balance and vitality to all the systems of the body, you start to see people thrive and they start to make better decisions in life and they become better parents and they become better citizens and all of it comes together because they start to feel safe from the inside out and then they exude a peace time economy.
instead of this craziness of everyone just honking at each other in the world we live in because people just don't feel well.
Josh (48:00.486) Mm -hmm. Yeah, all the honkings. I get that for sure. You know, it's really interesting when you start diving into the integrative approach. That's something I'm a big advocate of. I think integrative medicine is very important. We take into account the Western world. They do a phenomenal job with emergencies and surgeries and some things. But I'm with you when it comes to long term chronic inflammatory disease that for the most part, Western culture and lifestyle has created. It's laughable, if not criminal.
really by all by all rights and standards. And so this integrative approach really takes us to a cool place. We start to look at medicine like Pandora, where we start to look at energy and frequency and vibration and purpose and meaning. And it brings me back.
You know, I used to say, we're talking about this a fair bit, that the Westernized world will understand and acknowledge things like stress and anger on disease processes. We can tangibly see that stress will shut down the assembly line of the gut and the, you know, stomach acid production and digestive enzymes and motility and blah, blah, blah. We can see it shutting it down, but you can't have light without dark. You can't have positive without negative. And so we look at stress, but completely ignore happiness and joy or purpose and meaning.
Why do you think that is? Is that because there's no money in it? Like, because joy is free and it's a choice?
Dr Pedram Shojai (49:20.206) I think it's part of our spiritual malady in looking at the negative and saying not negative.
and instead of worrying about your problems, just focusing on gratitude. And so I think there's an orientation issue around a spiritual malady that has infected the West. And so we play whack -a -mole with problems instead of fixing solutions. Again, positive psychology is like, I'm just gonna tell my wife I love her not because I'm in trouble, but because I wanna stay out of trouble, because I want to fill that bank account with love.
Josh (49:57.415) Hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (50:02.382) And so I think stress is a result of how we're living. Stress is something that is effectively inevitable in a world that has bullets flying at you. But I am a strong advocate for fuse -lengthening practices, for a fuse -lengthening lifestyle, so that when the stressor comes, you're not already kind of back on your heels and freaking out, but you can say, okay,
son, it seems like you made a bad decision at school, let's talk about it, let's go take the dogs for a walk instead of, I can't believe you did that, you numbskull, right? Like it's very easy to go the wrong direction if your fuse is too short, right?
Josh (50:40.322) Sure. Yeah.
Josh (50:48.482) Yeah, I think that's huge. And those fuse lengthening activities is this meditation, is it breath work? Is it detoxifying the body so your cells have what they need? What does that look like?
Dr Pedram Shojai (51:00.27) Yes, all of it, right? And so the three kind of pillars of detoxifying, healing inflammation, healing the gut, and then healing the body are just part of my medical gestalt. But what I've found...
in the literature that affirms the life path that I chose, which is nice, right, is that all of these mind -body practices, whether it's contemplative prayer, Tai Chi, Qigong, the mind -body practices have a very powerful signaling effect on your NF -kappa -B pathways, which is the master switch to your cytokine expression and the inflammatory pathways of the body. And study after study is like, wow,
body practices modulate this NF kappa B expression and bring down the inflammation in the body, how the hell do we put this in a pill? And so instead of, you know, they've spent 30 years trying to figure out how to patent this and put it in a pill, instead of saying, yo, do Tai Chi, right? It totally works and it's free. That's the problem. It's free. What the hell are you gonna sell people, right? So everyone listening to this, just do Tai Chi. Yeah, and Tai Chi classes are cheap and you go and you meet people and you make good friends, right? But,
Josh (52:00.002) Hmm.
Josh (52:05.282) Yeah, tie. She classes.
Dr Pedram Shojai (52:13.424) like just learn chai chi, learn yoga. You don't have to wear $300 lululemon pants to do yoga. Go online and find some yoga stretches and do them in your living room. But like just do the thing. And the problem is we've been trained away from doing because we have been trained to become consumers. What do I buy to fix this instead of what can I do to fix this? And until you shift that,
in your consciousness. You are a hungry ghost and a consumer of a trillion dollar parasitic healthcare meets food meets media system that is designed to extract your energy and feed itself. Wake up.
Josh (52:57.693) Well, coming next week, our Tai Chi class is sponsored by Pfizer. I'm sure we'll see that around the corner. Yeah, here you go. Drink this. Amazing. Well, Dr. Shojai, I want to open the door here because I know I've sort of my curious brain, I could pick away at this for hours, weeks and days. You've literally got.
Dr Pedram Shojai (53:02.254) That's it. That's it. In this bottle. Yup. Yup.
Josh (53:17.475) several hours in multiple volumes of documentaries and docu -series and books and courses and you got all kinds of stuff on your website for this. So I want to leave the door open to you here. Is there anything we haven't really dove into enough or something we haven't quite talked about that you'd like to make sure we go over in the time we've got left?
Dr Pedram Shojai (53:38.99) I mean, the only thing I think we've had, this has been a delightful conversation, I appreciate it. You're a good interviewer, and so thank you. A lot of times also, this is an old joke, my deceased grandmother used to always ask me when I became a doctor, what do I eat to lose weight?
And I'm like, maybe the answer is, how do I stop eating to lose weight, right? And so people are always looking at inputs and what do I need to buy or consume? Again, I think it's part of our consumption ideology of what do I have to put into me from the outside? And sometimes, maybe water fasting for three days is the answer for you, right? What if it's the negation of inputs that gives your body the breath and the time?
Josh (54:00.475) Sure.
Dr Pedram Shojai (54:26.416) it needs to heal. Now...
Grain of salt, work with your doctor, fasting is hard and all that kind of stuff. I'm not like one of these intermittent fasting like, you know, put the electrodes on your six pack and you know, just all the like dude bro crap that comes with that. But I was a monk. Fasting was done for very important reasons. And one of those was to bring down the volume of the inputs so the body could catch up on information, cellular processing and detox. It's not the worst idea.
Josh (54:56.409) Yeah, it's interesting because.
You know, some of the hardest things I've done in my life growing up, I was a high school wrestler, did a fair bit in college as well in martial arts my entire life and I love them. They're amazing. And those are the foundations of discipline. But it's a very different discipline fasting because it's not you against the exercise or your teammates hyping you up or you against someone. It's you against you by yourself and no one is watching. And it is such an amazing discipline building practice that you can walk out and you feel proud.
You got this badge of honor, like I can fast, I can put off hunger. It almost seems so small, but it's such a big thing where you can walk out and say, I did that, what else can I do? And it really gives us an inner power and an ability to look beyond the right now, the gratification of immediate, because that gratification, you put it off for days or weeks is very, very difficult. And it's a very different practice.
Dr Pedram Shojai (55:51.822) Amen. And look, the only way you get good at pull -ups is doing pull -ups. So the only way you get good at attention and negation of impulses is practicing that. And fasting is wonderful because we're so habituated to eating all the time. So to me, fasting becomes a focus practice, to your point, that allows for you to flex that muscle and realize, wow, if I could do that, what else can I do? Now the power's coming back.
to the person who's supposed to be driving this life.
Josh (56:22.326) That's powerful. One last question out of curiosity as we're wrapping up here. Why did you leave the monk lifestyle toward a more westernized monk to become the urban monk?
Dr Pedram Shojai (56:34.446) Good question. I felt almost decadent up there. I felt like I had come from a revolution in my country and people were killed and we escaped to America and I became educated and all that. And I knew of all the world's problems and up there I felt like...
I was ignoring the problems of the world so that I can cultivate my own spirituality and consciousness. I sat with the head of the temple I was in up there. I was like, man, here's what I'm struggling with. And he just looked at me and he's like, you don't belong here. I'm like, what? He's like, you know, you know this to be true. You are no longer.
Josh (57:09.589) Hmm.
Dr Pedram Shojai (57:15.212) destined to be an ascetic, you should be a householder. And the reconciliation between an ascetic and a householder is a world apart. Because a householder has kids, a householder has mortgage, a householder has to deal with the problems of the world. So I took it, it was like a 10 year reentry of learning how to live a mindful life and help people without being preachy.
in a life that I share with the people I'm trying to help instead of being some exalted monk guy saying you should meditate more. Right? Like I have a real life and now I have context through which I teach.
Josh (57:54.613) That's powerful. That's amazing.
Dr Pedram Shojai (57:57.678) Not as easy as living up there, I'll tell you.
Josh (57:59.345) Yeah, I can imagine it's his own kind of shit showdown here for sure. Amazing. Dr. Shojai, thank you so much for being here and just coming and being so willing just to jump on a call so quickly with this. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here listening to you. If you don't do like nighttime sleep meditation through an app, you have a voice for it. Highly recommend. My wife will listen to this. She'll come back and be like, his voice is just so nice.
Dr Pedram Shojai (58:04.782) It certainly is. It certainly is.
Dr Pedram Shojai (58:27.214) I've done a few. I've done a few meditations. I do a lot of, I always serve my audience by doing meditations and stuff to help people. I try to be as helpful as I can where I can. You know, that's the game.
Josh (58:40.336) That's what your life is designed to do here. That's amazing. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate your time, your expertise and everything you've built this life around just to try to condense some of these principles and hour. It means a lot to me and to the audience. We appreciate it.
Dr Pedram Shojai (58:56.718) Thank you, I enjoyed it.