Why you should listen –
Pedram Shojai is a former Taoist monk and an accomplished physician of Chinese medicine. He is the founder of Well.org, a documentary filmmaker and an author of two books including the recently penned work The Urban Monk. A Bulletproof Radio regular, Pedram stops by today to talk with Dave about productivity boosters at work, time-management, science skeptics, standing desks, capitalism and more. Enjoy the show!
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Pedram Shojai: The first step is understanding that the way you schedule your day, the way you actually broker that piece happens in your own phone. It happens on your own schedule. If all I had to do today was hang out with Dave Asprey, do preach all day, but if I had 400 other things to do and I’m sitting here looking at my clock, I’m damn, this is taking too long. Suddenly, it was time compression. There’s a stress. You can curate your life however you need to depending on what you say no to, right? Does where you and I get along so well, right, is because once you start powering up that prefrontal cortex, the ability to say no to things, that negation that you get in your brain that is accessible so that you don’t reach for the Twinkie or the pumpkin pie and you say no to the calendar event that’s going to basically pump your kids and your family off to some other time because you now just crowded out your day, those are the things that you got to manage first in your urban environment.
From there, it’s so easy to make better choices now. It’s so easy to go to the store and just buy things that came from a good company, something that isn’t poisoning you, get access to organic foods, get access to things that will be supportive of a better world that we’d all like to see. Just because you live in a city, it doesn’t mean that you might as well just be gargling whisky and driving an SUV and doing all these things that are reckless in a way that says, I can’t do any good from here anyways. I don’t care what city you’re in. If you’re in Manhattan, which is kind of the biggest US city here, there’s parks everywhere and there’s nature within a 10, 15-mile drive from the city. It’s not hard to get, it’s just a matter of frame of reference and how we can schedule that in and value that in our lives.
Dave Asprey: Let’s walk through what I’m doing, right, because you’ve made a study of this and so have I. I imagine we have some differences. I agree, you put stuff on your calendar on your phone. I’m assuming that a lot of people listening are somewhat using a calendar application. Now, there’s few people who still have notebooks and a few people just trying to remember everything, but I think that there’s going to be fewer of them because it’s actually really efficient to have a system just to track what you’re going to do when. I have my day setup. Probably every 15 minutes, there’s something. Sometimes, the meeting is an hour, sometimes, it’s 45 minutes, but basically, there’s no time wasted. When I decide to work, when I decide to start, things are blocked out.
Pedram Shojai: Yeah, I’ll do the 15-minute intervals and just being through 1,000 calls and then I’ll just be like wow, I’m devastated. I need to go take a day out in nature or something whereas I found that if I, every 25 minutes, get up, walk around, I take all my call standing, I have kettlebells and you should see all the crap I have around this office. We have just toys everywhere so everyone is like moving around and exercising and doing things all day because you stay active, your brain is working better. All that built in, what I also do is when something comes up, I will always weigh it against my 30, 60, 100 day goals and also look at my year goal so I always have those lined up.
Dave Asprey: Now, you and I are talking. You’re running will.org, you’ve written a book that will probably hit the New York Times, even if it doesn’t, like we’re both reasonably successful to the point that we have executive assistants and we’re not talking like someone working offshore as a virtual assistant but people who are willing to understand prioritization of the day. Okay, so we’re in this incredible position of privilege and both of us are using it in service to millions of people literally and it’s the only way I know how to do this, but what do we do for someone who … Okay, let’s say that you’re mid-20s at your first, second job, you don’t have a staff, you’re happy that you can make a car payment and get yourself good quality coffee, right? That is an option.
Pedram Shojai: Yeah, that’s a great question and that’s pretty much how I’ve done it. I’ve been kicking and screaming. I didn’t want it to be like this exactly because I was a bit of a control freak, right? I was just like, no, I got this. When I finally had to let it go is because I didn’t want to handle all the email volume that was coming in, right, and so we’ve got systems for email now. I handled this myself for years and I actually advocate this because if you don’t understand it, then it’s really easy to break it and come in and break your own rules because you don’t understand what happens when you break them. Again, taking your 30, 60 and 100 day goals, putting them into a document that you look at every single day and then when new things come in and someone is like, if from so and so. I got this opportunity, you always stop.
It’s like mindfulness now, kind of extrapolating out into your schedule and just apply a filter of mindfulness and say, okay, where does this fit into my universe with my goals this quarter, this week, this month, this year? Is this something that I need to necessarily have a meeting about this week, and then say, great. You don’t have to be rude. People are so worried about saying no to people because they want people to like them, right? Just be like, this sounds awesome. This is really exciting, this is excellent. We’re in the middle of making a movie this year so for fall 2017, this sounds like a project we’d really want to talk about and hook you with the right people and let’s keep this conversation moving.
I just said yes but I didn’t screw myself over by juxtaposing that on a schedule that was already tight, right? That’s what has really helped a lot of my students over the years. Manage it because time compression creates stress. The things that I learned up on the mountain is about how to bring that stress down had a lot to do with stepping out of time. Sure, you have all these techniques and you could do breathwork and meditation and neurofeedback and shoot one of Dave’s lasers in your head. There’s a lot of tactics to that, but strategically, if you just stand in the ring, you’re going to get punched in the face, right? Curating your life and curating your time and understanding the flow of energy through your day is critical to then having this cushion to offset stress instead of constantly sitting there going like, yeah, it’s bleeding again, right, which is how most people deal with it.
I’ll do 10 squats, 10 lunges, 10 pushups, 10 jumping jacks, whatever, kicks, or whatever it is. Go get some water, go to the bathroom, ideally go outside, get some sunshine, stretch out a little bit back in, right? Take a couple of breaths before you get back in. Look at all the productivity studies. It’s so much better for us to just take a little pause and get back in. I’d like to think we’re doing well by just pushing through things. It has proven to work. We all look at Corporate America, everyone is beat up and exhausted because we think more as better. Taking that time not only gets the blood flowing through your brain, what that does is it then helps keep your blood flowing so that your endocrines are pumping and you’re not needing coffee to try to get back into your day because then, when you start saying, crap I can’t focus. This is trouble. You go over the pot of coffee and you start hitting it all day every day, it’s trouble and I’m talking with a coffee guy.
Pedram Shojai: I found 25. I’ve done 50 and 10 for some. We do wellness for 2,200 companies over at will.org so I got a lot of employee base to be able to draw conclusions on and we’ve tried a lot of things. I got to say personally and for a lot of the companies I’ve been directing on this, 25 and 5, so every half hour, taking a quick 5 minute break has been very, very helpful because what happens is right around that 20 to 30 minute mark, especially if you’re sitting, I’m a big fan of the standing desk, if you’re sitting, right around that 25 to 30 minute mark is when the flow shuts down, the ion flow shuts down and you start seeing kind of the challenges with sitting and all the studies that have come out that kind of slow the metabolism and are bad for your health and all that.
If you’re born in December, okay, are you likely to have more diabetes? I don’t know from the specific study but it actually makes sense, okay, like if you came out in a part of the world where the light and the temperature and things like that were different. On one hand, the skeptic would say it’s all a bunch of crap, but when you dig in, it actually makes sense that the environment would say if you’re born at one time versus another, you might be more likely to partition your calories a certain way. You might burn fat differently. You might have even different genes that are turned on in the womb. We just don’t know, but when you look at Big Data, wait, there’s these disturbing patterns and maybe they’re just random, they just happened to happen or maybe there’s enough evidence that we just start paying attention.
Dave Asprey: That’s why I’m a fan of the Quantify self because it illuminates things that shouldn’t be. One of the most frustrating things that I run across and probably you do too is you get these, let’s call them self-validating skeptics. The line goes something like this, that didn’t happen because it can’t. That is completely anti-science, okay? If someone presents data or someone has something that actually is happening and happens dozens or hundreds or tens of thousands of times, but it violates a belief, a theory, a hypothesis that you believe to be true, all right? All of a sudden, you’re like okay, if this happens one time, then the hypothesis is probably false at least in some cases. That means it’s not always true, but the gut reaction of our ape-level humans is to actually say that what happens didn’t happen because it would violate a law versus hypothesis. I see that all the time. How could eating more fat make you lose fat?
Pedram Shojai: That’s it, it’s just like, check it out. Don’t even go there, right? Just experience it. If it helps you, then your experience of acupuncture was positive and that has been for millions of people over thousands of years and that stuff works, right? There’s a lot of people who have a dog in the race. There are naysayers that are coming from establishments that are funded by just special interest. I don’t want to get too conspiracy theory, but you could follow the money and a lot of the science medical thing here, right? Because of that, I first came out and I was kind of wet behind the ears, I was just like very defensive about it. Now, I don’t even pay any interest or energy into it, right? It’s just like you can live there all you want and enjoy that neck pain, but these people over here, they’re fine, right? They’re not sitting on that rock stuck in some sort of belief system and masquerading that they’re still talking science, right?
Pedram Shojai: Vitality, yeah. I pulled a couple of punches because I didn’t realize that you shouldn’t back then and then I started following that into the environment and just this masquerade that we’re in where it’s like we don’t know why everyone is getting sick. It’s like, there’s 72 billion pounds of chemicals being added into the environment every single day and no one is saying, maybe that might be a problem, right? The movie you’re in, Origins, was that. It was like just follow that story. As I followed that story, it really became a follow the money kind of story and I started looking at the history, we’re filming a movie on this next year, the history of capitalism, what it was and how it came over and obviously long story short, because we have a whole movie on this coming and it’s a big story, but when we in America because I know you’re sitting in Canada, when we started looking at breaking away from England and getting independence and doing things differently, one of the things that snuck through was this corporate charter where in the old days, the king and the queen would have to just be like, you want a corporation, why?
Pedram Shojai: It’s like, all right, you stop making nukes and then I’ll stop making nukes. You take out five, I’ll take out five, right, because they have all these competitors and it’s so hard to do the right thing and not just getting wiped out of the market because the competitor has less morals than you and so they’re, even when trying to do the right thing, this is why conscious capitalism is such an important movie topic for me is because as consumers, when we wake up and we’re like, hell no, you do that, I’m never buying your stuff again, that then creates this level of transparency and accountability that will shift and we’re seeing it shift in corporate culture because the consumer is not just like, okay, I’m just going to down myWalmart and buy whatever commodity, it’s like, why would I buy this? Who made it? What’s it about? Who are you and why should I buy it from you? Those are important questions that we stopped asking.
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What You Will Hear
- 0:00 – Cool Fact of the Day
- 1:15 – MVMT
- 2:45 – Introducing Pedram Shojai
- 6:05 – Discussing Urban Monk
- 10:52 – Scheduling your days
- 15:17 – Managing your days pre-success
- 23:00 – Work breaks & standing desks
- 28:38 – Astrology & birth months
- 34:28 – Self-validating skeptics
- 38:43 – Pedram’s perspective of capitalism
- 42:36 – Corporate culture
- 50:45 – Top 3 most important pieces of advice from The Urban Monk
Featured
Quarterly box – Search: Dave Asprey
MVMT Watches – Coupon code: bulletproof
The Urban Monk on Amazon
The Urban Monk
The Urban Monk Podcast
Well.org
Well.org on Facebook
Twitter – @taoistpath
Be More Magazine
The Health Bridge Podcast by Pedram Shojai and Dr. Sara Gottfried
Origins
Resources
Pestalotiopsis microspora
Pomodoro App
Intelliskins
Taoism
Bulletproof
Bulletproof Coffee
Brain Octane Oil
Moldy
Mineral Water Benefits
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