The Brain Of An Entrepreneur Is Different With Guest Jeff Hays
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
Release Date: 12/15/2023
Temporal Awareness: Where Your Mind Lives
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Most of us spend more than half our waking hours somewhere other than the present moment. Dr. Pedram Shojai unpacks temporal displacement, the chronic habit of living in the past or future, and why it quietly drives stress, poor decisions, and accelerated aging. Drawing on Harvard research by Killingsworth and Gilbert, he walks through the neuroscience of mind wandering and introduces three somatic anchors (breath, gravity, and peripheral vision) that make rumination nearly impossible when held simultaneously. 🎯 What You'll Learn: Why mind wandering correlates directly with...
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Blue Vibe: The 40 Hz Device Reversing Cognitive Decline
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ What if a wearable device using a single frequency could reverse mild cognitive decline in 30 days? Dr. Pedram Shojai sits down with Mark Fox, former chief engineer for NASA contractor Morton Thiokol and creator of the Blue Vibe, a device combining 40 Hz light and PEMF to address memory loss and cognitive impairment. Mark shares results from a 41-person clinical trial where every single participant improved, and Pedram connects the technology to his own family history with Alzheimer's and his clinical work linking gut and oral microbiome imbalances to cognitive decline. 🎯 What...
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Your Body Knows What Season It Is
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ The spring equinox isn't just a date on the calendar. It's a biological signal your body is already responding to. Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down the science of seasonal biology, from circadian clocks ticking inside every cell to annual rhythms that shift your hormones, immunity, and gut microbiome with the seasons. He walks through a seasonal gates framework, explains what's happening in your body right now at the spring activation gate, and delivers a simple three-step circadian reset protocol you can start today. 🎯 What You'll Learn: Why chronic circadian misalignment drives...
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Finding Presence When the World Feels Overwhelming
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ When the world feels overwhelming, where do you put your attention? Dr. Pedram Shojai explores how to navigate anxiety and chaos by anchoring inward rather than being swept up in headlines and external noise. He shares his decision to release the Lights On book for free rather than water it down for mass market, previews an upcoming AI health research tool called Upstream, and addresses student questions on embodiment, journaling, and building a daily practice that actually sticks. 🎯 What You'll Learn: Why living headline to headline keeps you in a fear state, and how finding...
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Why You Can't Heal Without Feeling Safe First
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ What if the missing piece in your healing isn't a better supplement or meditation app, but something simpler: feeling safe in your own body? Dr. Pedram Shojai sits down with Dr. David Rabin, Stanford-trained psychiatrist and neuroscientist, to explore why safety is the biological prerequisite for healing, sleep, immunity, and even spiritual states. From neuroception to breathwork to the gut-anxiety connection, this conversation delivers a complete framework for reclaiming control over your nervous system. 🎯 What You'll Learn: How neuroception, your body's unconscious threat...
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How Your Posture Creates Your Mood
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Your posture isn't just reflecting how you feel. It's creating it. Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down the bidirectional relationship between physical posture and emotional state, drawing on embodied cognition research, polyvagal theory, and ancient contemplative traditions. He introduces the Three Structural Gates framework (root, heart, and crown) that anyone can use to shift their nervous system state in under 60 seconds, and guides listeners through a live practice to experience the posture-consciousness feedback loop in real time. 🎯 What You'll Learn: Why William James was right...
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Your Mind Is Wandering 47% of the Time
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Your mind is wandering 47% of the time, and it's making you miserable. Dr. Pedram Shojai explores the science of temporal displacement and why constantly living in the past or future is destroying your health. Drawing on Harvard research tracking 15,000 people, he reveals how your nervous system can't tell the difference between a memory and a real threat. Learn three anchors to bring yourself back to the present: breath as clock, sensory grounding, and the witness pause. This isn't spiritual theory. It's neuroscience-backed practice that can rewire your relationship with time and...
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When Money Stress Hijacks Your Body
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Financial stress isn't just a money problem. It's a full-body physiological event. Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down exactly what's happening inside your body when financial worry takes hold: the cortisol cascade, the inflammatory markers, the gut disruption, the sleep destruction, and the narrowed thinking that makes bad decisions feel inevitable. More importantly, he delivers three body-based tools to interrupt the stress cycle before it does lasting damage. You can't think your way out of a stress response, but you can breathe, move, and practice your way into enough resilience to...
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Lights On: The Recovery Paradox — Why Rest Leaves You More Exhausted
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ You took the weekend off. You slept in. You did nothing. So why do you feel worse? Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down the Recovery Paradox: the frustrating phenomenon where rest leaves you more depleted than the work itself. Drawing from polyvagal theory, he explains why simply stopping activity doesn't equal recovery, and why the way most of us "rest" (scrolling, bingeing, zoning out) actively works against us. 🎯 What You'll Learn: The two faces of parasympathetic: ventral vagal (safe, social, regulated—genuine recovery) vs dorsal vagal (freeze, shutdown, foggy—collapse...
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Lights On: Get Back in Your Body and Shift Your Relationship with Time
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down proprioception—the sense that tells your body where it is in space—and why losing it erodes balance, posture, and neurological resilience. He shares how moms crawling with their kids stopped having migraines, then shifts to time perception: challenging the mindfulness industry for reducing ancient practices to stress-relief apps, and arguing that your relationship with time drives anxiety and quality of life. 🎯 What You'll Learn: How slow, intentional movement reactivates dormant sensory pathways shut down by injuries, desk jobs, and sedentary...
info_outlineThe Urban Monk podcast with Dr Pedram Shojai.
Pedram Shojai is the Urban Monk. He is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine, a Taoist Priest, a Qi Gong Master, film maker, author, and Kung Fu world traveler. He invites you to join in the conversation exploring what it means to live with balance in the 21st century.
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Meet Jeff Hays
Jeff Hays, an award winning filmmaker, author, and television producer since the early nineties, gained national attention with Fahrenhype 9/11 (2004), a response to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. He followed that with On Native Soil (2006). Narrated by Kevin Costner and Hilary Swank, the documentary focused on the perspective of surviving family members of 9/11 victims and their efforts to create the 9/11 Commission. The film was acquired by LionsGate and NBC and was short-listed for an Academy Award. Hays produced a yearlong television series for Lifetime Television, and then returned to documentary film with Doctored (2012), and Bought (2014).
In 2017, Jeff partnered with Dr. Patrick Gentempo to create Revealed Films. Together they have released many multi-part series covering subjects including health and nutrition, medical issues, wealth-building, religious and political topics. (Money Revealed, Vaccines Revealed, Crypto Revealed, End Game, GMOs Revealed, etc.) Revealed Films launches 5-6 series each year adding to the rich stream of information they’ve produced in the past. Revealed recently released a series on the use of psychedelics in therapy, Psychedelics Revealed, and has completed a new series on addiction. Revealed Films was acquired by Genius Group, an NYSE listed company on October 4th, 2022. Hays and Gentempo will continue to run the company for the next 3 years. In addition to the Revealed projects, Jeff Hays Films was the Executive Producer for The Fix, a documentary series based on Johann Hari’s NY Times bestseller, Chasing the Scream, which was made into both an Academy Award-nominated film and an eight-part TV series presented by Samuel L. Jackson.
JHF has acquired the rights to three other books to produce via film: the NY Times bestseller Lost Connections by Johann Hari, The Bad One by Erin Tyler, and The Real Anthony Fauci by Bobby Kennedy, Jr. Additionally, JHF produced a series with Adam Carolla on resilience and another on happiness with Ben Greenfield, and completed The Millionaire Within Her with Kristi Frank. In 2021, JHF produced Amy Redford’s new narrative film, What Goes Around, which had its world premier at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022, and was sold to IFC. In September of 2022 Hays completed his newest documentary, The United States vs. Andre Norman, to be released in 2023. This film covers the poverty to prison pipeline for people of color in the US through the amazing story of Andre Norman. The covid lockdowns of 2020 provided ample time to finish two books. The first on entrepreneurship, The Entrepreneurial Brain, which has been acquired by Harper Collins and will be released in October of 2023. The second book, on spirituality called Love and Drugs; Tripping past Trauma into Joy, will be released in 2024.
Jeff resides in the mountains of Utah and works out of Jeff Hays Films’ soundstage and studio in Midvale, Utah. Together with his beloved wife Dori, he has eleven children and many grandchildren.
Find the full episode transcript and additional info here: https://theurbanmonk.com/the-brain-of-an-entrepreneur-is-different-with-guest-jeff-hays/