Good Stress: Jeff Krasno On The Health Benefits of Deliberate Discomfort, How To Have Hard Conversations & Applying Eastern Wisdom To Western Medicine

33:45All of the interests, all of my various inquests from the business to the physiological to feeding my gut, which was as leaky as a rusty old pipe, I found out. Yeah, I mean, about four or five years ago, I got a, well, I was presenting in all sorts of ways that are so common that we sort of accept them as ordinary, but really what we've done is we've normalized the abnormal. So I had chronic fatigue, brain fog. I was always irritable. I was looking at my phone like every three seconds, I had no ability to focus or concentrate. I was tipping the scales at 206, 210 in that range. I had so hard to imagine.

34:35I had a hard time picturing you at that weight. I mean, I did an excellent job camouflaging it. And, but then, you know, there were also, you know, just odious insults to my vanity, which I talk about in the book. I mean, yeah, I kind of jelly belly and kind of the dad bod complex. But I think the worst was what I clinically known as gynecomastia, but otherwise known as the boobs of man. I think the greatest insult was when my youngest daughter, Micah, left a training bra on my bed. I was like, that's not funny. And then I got a bucket of cold water, which at that juncture was not a deliberate protocol, on my head with a diabetes diagnosis about five years ago, four and a half years ago.

35:30And really, it was a shock to me because yeah, I was the wellness guy. I was running a yoga festival, raising three daughters, shopping at Whole Foods, an upright citizen, paying my taxes, et cetera. you know, how could I be part of the American nightmare? How could I be one of these statistics of, you know, 50 % of Americans are now pre-diabetic, 11 to 13 % are diabetic. And I was well within that American nightmare. And a lot of that was really just the product of, you know, my lifestyle. You know, I was, yes, in service of a well-intentioned goal to bring wellness to many, many people, but I was not well.

36:16And in fact, yeah, my forays into health and wellness took a U-turn into wealth and hellness. Yeah, that's so great. I was like, why didn't I think of that? You can have it. Wealth and hellness, all this wellness, you know, made you unwell in the pursuit of wealth and hellness. Yeah. Or arriving you in a place of hellness as a result. Yeah, and then, you know, I had to, you know, I had to wake up and go on a really significant journey, both physiologically, psychologically, spiritually, really. That sounds a little pompous, but true. To really take a deeper inventory of who I was and how I was living and make some serious changes.

37:08And part of me is because I'm, I have a very cognitive and sort of intellectual approach to many things. Skylar was sitting there as a sort of a specimen of a human being, all sort of ripped doing yoga, drinking her raw milk and eating her greens and whatnot. I mean, I had everything right in front of me, but I actually had to - This is another thing we share. Yeah, right, true. I mean, we certainly married up or at least sideways most of the time, But I had to understand it intellectually. I took initially a very, yeah, cognitive or intellectual approach to understanding human physiology. And originally it was out of curiosity.

37:50And then, like I said, and then it became out of necessity. And so I wanted to understand sort of the empirical values associated with heart rate variability and glucose levels, et cetera. And what I began to kind of attach to is like what I could measure, I could improve. And that slowly led me to essentially jumping into my own Petri dish and becoming an end of one experiment and doing a tremendous amount of me search and like you interviewing hundreds upon hundreds of doctors and health experts and mystics and sages and trying to distill that wisdom in a way that worked for me. And also, like you, had to do a lot of sifting through the grifting, is what I call it, of this space is full of kooky, crazy, cockamamie ideas and what mode and modality and mushroom and pill and praxis is actually going to work.

38:54And so it's been largely an enjoyable journey to, instead of being sort of on a downward spiral of health, I found an upward spiral. And I'm still mostly there.

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44:28This begins with you putting on a continuous glucose monitor and realizing your blood sugar is out of whack, right? This is kind of like the epiphany in which you realize like, oh my God, like I thought it was healthy, but I'm very much not. You go down this rabbit hole and being like myself, somebody who can only be convinced when there is, you know, science and rationality to back it up, right? Old enlightenment values. This strength that we have, like I know that you're somebody who like is very happy when you're sitting with a stack of research in front of you and you're reading it and you're like educating yourself and the like, and as a result of that and all the conversations that you've had, you can talk about mTOR and like, you know, all the stuff, right?

45:12Like you can throw all the buzzwords out there and you have the understanding to, you know, kind of back up your use of them. But at the same time, and also what I think makes you in this book so unique and compelling is this doesn't come at the cost of understanding like the why behind it, which is very much rooted in matters metaphysical, right? There's a whole spiritual aspect to this that's so important that you make it the first part of the book before you even get to all the fun mTOR, cold plunging, sauna, red light, kind of sulfuraphane of all of it, right? You know what I mean? And I love that you did that.

45:56So maybe share a little bit about how the lights came on in terms of like how you came to understand that this is such an important aspect of all of it without which the protocols perhaps, you know, aren't really going to matter or stick. Yeah, well, this is a bit of a knife fight with my editor candidly, because as you can imagine, the books that sell out there, you know, they give me the eight protocols for this or that. And I'm like, yeah, but what about the philosophy and the mysticism? Oh, well, you know, put that in a PDF bonus. I'm like, no, I can't. Because, you know, to be honest, my journey was as much metaphysical as physical.

46:41And in the end, what I saw was the metaphysical patterned in the physical everywhere that I looked. But I guess I'll just say that my entree into really improving myself was not reading Peter Atiyah or Andrew Huberman or figuring out the difference between anabolic and catabolic pathways and whatnot. It was really studying mysticism, particularly kind of Eastern thought. I'm completely addicted to Alan Watts. In fact, as a caveat, I will say, when I'm talking about this, I often drift into a bit of a transatlantic accent. The people pleaser in you, you begin to chameleon so fully that you start to inhabit the sensibility of Alan Watts himself.

47:35Yeah, I really - Do you need some vodka? Well, I say it's ironic that a man so committed to tumblers of vodka precipitated my hellness journey, my wealth and hellness journey um no i mean you know uh well i'll just say this i blame the buddha because uh you know the buddha is saying that i'm you know changing moment to moment relation to my environment all i do is listen to alan watson christopher hitchens this won't be the last time that i blame a spiritual figure for my shortcomings um but yeah just uh you know if i if into an upper received pronunciation. Like I wish I was British. I'll take note.

48:18I'll call you out if I hear it. We were just hanging out with Rungan Chatterjee, right? You know, that brilliant doctor, British doctor. I mean, that guy, he could read the phone book as far as I'm concerned. It's just his accent. His melodic accent. Yeah, just like on the edge of my seat while he's like John Dooley, Tim Doolingsworth, whatever. Yeah, and he's a tall glass of handsomeness along the way, anyway. I wish I was British, oh well. So, but, you know, Alan Watts and Ram Dass, you know, I licensed both of their catalogs for Commune. And so, you know, I listened endlessly to their lectures on Eastern mysticism and, you know, my inquest into Eastern thought and human physiology kind of converged.

49:05and I was having these kind of moments of Satori and I kind of wove up this theory of health called the Tao of Health, very much kind of built on the shoulders of the Tao of Physics, which was a very influential book that I read by Fritz Rav Capra. But there's tenets without spending the next eight hours doing a sort of Buddhism 101 course here with you, But there's tenets in Buddhism that you can see then patterned in human physiology. So I'll just kind of roll through some of them. As the Buddha sort of canoodled around northern India and then experimented with fasting. I mean, at one juncture, it's claimed that he was eating one grain of rice per day.

49:58I don't know if that's true. That sounds good. But finally, he found his way to the Bodhi tree and under this tree had his great awakening. And one of the primary tenants that then informed what became the Four Noble Truths was this notion of impermanence. So he called it in Sanskrit, anyika, which is that everything is transitory. Everything's always in flux, always in change. So attaching to anything is fruitless because everything is always changing. And in fact, that attachment to things is the source of clinging, or that clinging, that craving to things is the source of suffering or what he called dukkha.

50:51Of course, this notion of impermanence punctuates every single thing that's happening here in the human body. And that sort of really violates our sense of identity. It's like Rich gets up in the morning and feels, looks in the mirror, handsome man that he is, and sees like a stable, reliable self, you know, through this sense of physical continuity. We feel like a fixed thing day to day. But when you actually open up the hood here in human physiology, what we see is total impermanence you know glucose being catabolized to pyruvate being then used for ATP electrical signals zipping across synapses between neurons you know or look at the the microbiome for example that perhaps is like one of the greatest examples of impermanence when you start to look at human physiology we have these i mean the human body is about 70 trillion cells 39 of the 39 trillion aren't even human, right?

51:58And they reside and now are found in every organ on our skin, even in our aura. They say we're no longer even barriered by our skin, right? But primarily they're found in sort of this, the den of our colon. And, you know, these prokaryotes, these single-celled organisms mitigate and regulate almost every system of the body. In In fact, we've outsourced a tremendous amount of processes like digestion, but also they sit right there near the immune system because so much of the immune system for good reason is in the gut. And they're moderating inflammation levels, insulin sensitivity, all this different stuff.

52:39They are disappearing. They're coming and going every four minutes to 24 hours. And so literally the guy that sat down here with you to start this podcast is a completely different human if you're talking just about my cellular makeup. All I do is change. And the Buddha intuited this concept prior to any electron microscope or gene germ theory or even the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. So that idea of impermanence was something that became kind of very potent to me. Then, you know, another very central axiom of Buddhism was this notion of interdependence. So the Buddha had this wonderful image of the universe as a spider web.

53:38And at every junction of that spider web was a crystalline diamond that reflected every other diamond. and it's just a beautiful image and this gave birth to these theories of dependent origination that everything is reliant on everything else and then this was echoed across all many other eastern fields of thought at Gigi Mujay and in Japan and Zen and even in in Africa with Ubuntu this notion that I am because we are. And again, if you then start to superimpose this notion of interconnectedness on what it is like to be human, you find it everywhere. And again, this somewhat violates our sense of identity because we feel, we experience life most times as a loci of consciousness kind of crouching somewhere behind the eyes, is sort of separate from the world around us, confronting the world around us as something external.

54:48But that, under any rigorous examination, that becomes a complete delusion. And so like, for example, like you're a runner, what is your experience of running on flat ground versus up a steep grade, right? Well, they're very different things. But the common denominator of which is this experience that I am doing it, and it is me and the decisions that I'm making that are individuating me and propelling me through the world, which is very confronting to this notion of oneness. It's easy to say like, we're all one and like we're part of a community and all of that, but to really kind of fully grok the fact that there is no separation under this rigorous scrutiny that you're talking about is something that's deeply uncomfortable to us.

55:45Yeah, and I think, you know, I mean, I think about it this way is that, hmm. that the behavior and function of an organism is inseparable from the behavior and function of its environment. so you know you run slower on sand you run even more slowly in water let's just say it's like the you that is doing it is inseparable from the environment that is around you and so that's a very sort of like banal example but we grog this sort of by dint of you know our everyday experience right you know like a car cuts us off in traffic or you know you're running through the hills and you come across a coyote or a rattlesnake and what happens you have this kind of involuntary stress response right your hpa axis is activated and that's you know telling your adrenal glands to create a glutocorticoid called cortisol which is then synthesized from cholesterol all of a sudden and then that courses through your veins and your respiratory and your heart rate start to increase and glucose then gets flushed out to your extremities to fight or fly and the aperture of your attention becomes super, super narrow and your pupils dilate and you don't trust the world and you become very self-obsessed and that actually serves the biological imperative.

57:07All those things are happening around you just because you actually see something that you perceive as a threat, you know, or someone screams in the other room that a sound wave can literally become a hormone in the matter of seconds, you know, that energy becomes matter, that we are completely inseparable from our environment. And so when you merge these two concepts of impermanence and interconnection, what you find is that we are changing moment to moment in relationship to our environment. and that might seem somewhat obvious, but for those of us like me who were stuck in their old story of like, I am just this fixed Jeff whose destiny is written in the stars.

58:10I'll never be good enough. I'll always be fat. No one will ever like me. The idea that I'm always changing in relation to my environment and that I have some agency to change my environment, that was candidly, incredibly liberating. Yeah, the agency piece is the kind of leap that you take once you notice that you are a function of your environment. And then the extension of that is to exert it to create this balance, right? Which is kind of the final principle in this Tao of health. And what's so cool about this is that all of these truths are evident in nature, in our environments. And what is true for our environments is true for ourselves and our bodies, right?

59:00Like it's just, this is how nature made it, right? And we're quick to see how these patterns are so important in terms of like the ecosystem of a forest or whatever it is, right? A high plane or the desertification of a certain piece of land over a great period of time. But we're reluctant to notice those patterns within ourselves or admit that they are equally true. Yeah, well, we don't see ourselves as nature. We see nature as something outside of us that is a threat that we must confront. And, you know, we've been taught that by our Abrahamic traditions, right? It's that we were made out of a ceramic figurine in which God blew a soul into.

59:52This is right out of Genesis. And that matter is kind of the province of the devil and it's dumb. And of course, it must be sublimated because it's susceptible to vice and pleasures of the flesh or whatever. and that nature is something that must be subdued, right? And that we have dominion over, because it's not trustworthy, because it's out to get you, because it's gonna show up as pests and weeds and whatnot. And certainly there's a part of us, human nature, that's certainly not to be trusted because it's sinful, right? And without some sort of old bogey in the sky with a moral abacus sort of monitoring our sexual transgressions, you know, we'd, you know, rape our best friend's sister or something like that.

1:00:47Some crazy notion like that. And this is candidly why, you know, I put this, you know, this blade of grass growing through the concrete on the cover of the book. And I'm sure this is an experience people have had, but like, have you ever, you know, walked through a concrete jungle landscape, you know, it's just sidewalks and roads and buildings everywhere. And you look down and all of a sudden there's just like a dandelion or a blade of grass coming through the concrete. And you're like, oh my God, it's just, nature is irrepressible. And this is a place where we can truly put our faith, not as the typical understanding of faith of like belief in the absence of evidence, but actually trust in nature's eternal reliability.

1:01:40It's actually why we exhale. It's like we exhale because we trust deeply, profoundly that there is another breath waiting for us, right? That's interesting. Yeah, otherwise, why would you ever let go of this precious oxygen? That's it. I mean, that is actually the definition of nirvana, near out, fauna blow, blow out, let go, let go. Because you must trust in nature. And, you know, nature will sometimes let you down. You know, it's perfect by design. It makes mistakes in its execution. You can find that in biology. Sometimes there's mutations, single nucleotide polymorphism, SNPs, right? That predispose you to some disease, or sometimes it's actually dispositive towards with some diseases, but what are you gonna do?

1:02:33Not trust nature and always be fearful of it and live kind of with this paroxysms of anxiety of like, I don't trust myself. I don't trust the world around me. No, I mean, that doesn't seem like a, like an adaptive way to live. But fundamentally, isn't that distrust not only real, it's what kind of created the modern society that is moving us towards ill health, right? Because as a defense mechanism, some part of us doesn't trust nature or ourselves, which creates this scarcity brain that Michael Easter talks about. Like, if we have enough resources, we don't trust that maybe nature is gonna provide us more around the corner.

1:03:18So we need to gather and collect as much as we can, when we can, and to consume as much as possible because nature is an unknown. that maybe isn't going to provide if we exhale too much. And so gather we must. Yeah, true. I mean, I think that, I mean, if you look at like the cycles within nature that exist like abundance and scarcity, nature in some ways provides for both and we adapt in relation to it. So for example, if you can imagine in Jeff and Rich on the Serengeti of the East Africa some 10 ,000 years ago, off we go to forage and hunt and gather. And in the late summer, early fall, we might arrive on this copse of ripe fig trees, right?

1:04:17And you and I, what would we do? We're just gonna like gorge as many figs as we can and become a little bit fat. and that is completely adaptive and by nature's design, we were actually designed to be a little bit fat in the fall because nature innately knew they engineered us for the paucity of winter's fallow that was right around the corner. And this is where we get into the ideology of chronic disease because we live in a world now where, quote unquote, from a food perspective, winter never comes. So the way that we live, our lifestyle, our culture is hijacking our biology. It's actually using our adaptive mechanisms to store fat which is just warehouse to energy.

1:05:07It's using that our adaptive mechanisms against us and making them maladaptive. And so this is where you get into these evolutionary mismatches and all that. Right, but this is the portal into the subject matter of the book, which is this notion of stress and distinguishing good stress from bad stress. So the overabundance of our hyper convenient world is a recipe for the chronic level of stress that's driving all of these ailments that are making us unnecessarily sick and unnecessarily killing millions of people. The antidote to which of course, are these acute forms of stress that nature kind of took care of in and of its own to provide to us, to keep us healthy, but which we've kind of eradicated from our daily experience.

1:05:59Yeah, we're not making good use of our hard-wrought adaptations. For tens of thousands of years, really 200 ,000 years as it pertains to Homo sapiens and millions of years of hominid life, we evolved these adaptive mechanisms that served us extremely well. And now, essentially, in a very, very short period of time, really since the Industrial Revolution, but accelerating in the last 50 years, what we're seeing is all of the artifacts of modernity are hijacking those adaptations. They're upending our adaptive advantages, if you will. And so, you can isolate and identify a whole bunch of them, our continuous eating cycle.

1:06:49I mean, I went to Denny's. I don't often end up at Denny's, but I noticed on the little sandwich board, this was a couple of years ago, on the wall, they had breakfast, right? Served all day, thank God. They had lunch, dinner, and then they had a fourth meal of the day, late night. That's probably where they make most of their money. When the bars close, it's Denny's time. It's Denny's time. And I was like, oh my God, we just never stop eating. Abundance is never balanced by any degree of scarcity or repair. But we know that in that scarcity and repair, all of these pathways in the body are activated that promote longevity and resilience.

1:07:38And this is where we get into some of those like autophagy and ketosis and activating AMPK, right? And stifling mTOR, et cetera. And those enhance the body's ability to be resilient. And so now what we really need to do in order to align ourselves with our biology, with our engineering is superimpose some of these old paleolithic stressors back onto our life. And that's really what informed from this amalgam of protocols. Right, the onus is now on the individual to take responsibility for ushering in these things that just happened as a matter of circumstance of living your life in the days of yore, right?

1:08:25And this goes to like the agency piece, like this is where we need to exert that agency all the way down to an epigenetic level, right? To get certain genes to express themselves as a result of taking actions that are uncomfortable to invite a stress that you would call is good and promoting of health and health span and all these things that we're coming to understand and lean into for maybe the first time out of necessity because they've been so eradicated from our lives. Yeah, well, if you go back and you really ask this seminal question, this is what the question that I started to ask myself all the time is because it's very difficult to kind of navigate the wilderness of wellness.

1:09:14You know, we're getting so much deluge of information all of the time. But if you ask this one simple question, how did I evolve, right? How did I evolve in relation to what I ate and when I ate or how I moved or my relationship with nature or my relationship with temperature or my relationship with light or my relationship with the people around me? Just ask that simple question and the answers will really appear candidly. So if we can pick any one of those, we were exposed to constant large fluctuations in temperature for the overwhelming majority of human history. So on the plains of the Serengeti or elsewhere, you know, there would be 70, 60, 70 degree fluctuations in temperature.

1:10:06It would be freezing cold at night. It would be scorching hot during the day. We were largely living outside or maybe in little tiny huts. So we established mechanisms within the human body to manage and not only manage, but thrive in these conditions of stress. And so instead of resorting to the nice digital thermometer or thermostat over on the wall, we actually had an internal thermostat right here kind of above the mouth below the nose and the pre-optic kind of area of the brain that communicated with the hypothalamus that when our core body temperature, for example, plummeted, we would have an adaptation to that stress.

1:10:53We would start to shiver. We would start to oxidize fat stored triglycerides in our fat cells to then use them in our mitochondria to make heat to upregulate ourselves back into that Goldilocks zone of 98.6. So getting cold on a regular basis was actually incredibly adaptive. You know, the same thing for getting really, really hot. You know, we have mechanisms to cool down, perspiration and sweating, but also there were all of these other proteins that were activated when we get really hot. There's these things called heat shock proteins that kind of maintain the three-dimensional shapes of proteins and the functionality of proteins, you know, particularly, you know, in the brain there, they also stimulate what's now known as BDNF, brain drive neurotrophic factor, right?

1:11:46That actually maintains the functionality of neurons and potentially the creation of new neurons. So there's so much benefit in getting extremely hot and extremely cold. But now we live primarily indoors in thermoneutral environments. In fact, we don't even really generally have to get up off the couch to maintain a 72 degree little snuggly nest because our thermostats actually learn our own proclivities. And so, you know, you can see how this endless march towards convenience and comfort actually create a lot of inconvenience and uncomfortable truths later down the line, because no exposure to fluctuations in temperatures makes us weak.

1:12:36It makes us unresilient. It lowers metabolic function. It lowers emotional resilience. And so, you know, So you can find these areas almost everywhere you look. It's like most of us now wrap our feet in kind of big casts of vinyl and plastic, talking about shoes, right? That's not how we evolved. We evolved with minimal shoes or we went barefoot most of human evolution. And so in the last 50 years particularly, but even kind of going back, actually the history of shoes and high heels is actually fascinating. It actually started with the Persian cavalry. This is a piece of interesting trivia. So the Persian cavalry, like in the 10th, 11th century, they domesticated horses and they had stirrups.

1:13:34And so they were wearing boots and they developed the first heel because they wanted to be able to stand. They put up straight in the boot to shoot arrows and to maintain their stability. That's the origin of the heel. That's the origin of the heel. And then they brought it, like there was a Persian emissary that brought it to Europe and the European nobility just like loved the heel. And so the heel was initially established by some of the kings of King Louis XVI, I can't remember which one he was, who then brought it into the court and the men were all wearing heels. And then eventually it caught on with the women and then the French Revolution happened and it wasn't too cool to be part of the aristocracy anymore.

1:14:24So men ditched the heels, but then women ended up inheriting them. And obviously now we see that kind of in the high-heeled shoe and the high-heeled shoe undermines the health of the human foot in so many different ways. And so, you know, part of good stress or my good stress protocols is trying to be more barefoot more of the time, align ourselves with how we evolved, you know, or wear minimal, you know, minimal shoes with bigger toe boxes and minimal soles. So you're actually leveraging the biomechanical masterpiece of the foot, you know, all of the muscles and nerve endings and joints instead of letting your shoes do that work for you.

1:15:07So, yeah.

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1:16:56How do you distinguish what's valuable from these lessons around like how we evolved from what we are understanding is in promotion of thriving? So for example, I'm not sure that it's all that helpful to look at what we ate over the course of our evolution as a predictor or a proxy for what we should eat now because human beings were evolved to be, you know, very adaptable to their environments. And as a result, you know, we can kind of eat anything, right? And we needed to in order to survive. So how informative or helpful is that in terms of like trying to figure out what we should eat now? Analogously, you know, I guess you could say, well, this is what we did to adapt to survive, but is this really what we need to do now in order to kind of overcome our current, you know, sort of malaise to better thrive.

1:17:57So I guess distinguishing those two things and trying to elucidate like the truths within them. Yeah, I mean, we evolved as opportunistic omnivores, I would say, you know, we ate a massive variety of food of, you know, in terms of what was available, maybe 800 different plants and seeds and nuts and tubers. And then if Rich's luck was good on a particular day, his stone spear might puncture the belly of an odd toad ungulate and we'd have some wonderful lean wild game around the fire. And this is, I think, primarily how we evolved, at least in Africa. There was no obesity. I mean, we don't have any census data, right, from this time.

1:18:51But, you know, I think it's safe to say that there was very little obesity. There was very little metabolic dysfunction. There was very little heart disease. There was a little bit of cancer. There was virtually no dementia or Alzheimer's or other neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, there were very few of those diseases even as late as 1900. I think the obesity rates in the United States in 1900 were about 3%. And, you know, moving forward through kind of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, which were times of significant scarcity in the United States, the obesity rate really didn't move very much.

1:19:27It wasn't until really after World War II when we started to industrialize food that we started to see obesity issues and other kind of metabolic issues creep into the American landscape. And so, you know, I think it is fair to say that nutrient deficient, shelf stable, ultra processed foods that have been introduced over the course of the last maybe seven decades, but certainly accelerated in the last, you know, three or four are a very, very significant contributor to the scourge of chronic disease right now. Our genome really hasn't changed much, right? You know, evolution is awful slow and culture in this particular case is very, very fast.

1:20:19So, you know, I would say we know what not to eat. I mean, if we had a million years, could humans evolve to sustain themselves on Twinkies? Maybe, maybe. Well, I'm not sure what we would look like. We would look like sort of like a blob or something, but the problem is that evolution is that slow. And so, for me, because I had significant metabolic dysfunction issues, I know what worked for me, which was kind of the adoption of this kind of ketotarian approach towards diet, which was essentially low glycemic, which flies in the face of like ultra process refined grains and sugars and starches, right?

1:21:11Which predominate the standard American diet. But it was also plant focused because I really needed the fiber to feed my gut and to take care of my gut bug friends. So there was this kind of low carbohydrate, high fiber diet that then I combined with kind of intermittent fasting, which again, really is just like a reflection of more or less how we evolved where I consolidated the consumption of food more or less into an eight hour window. And that little tryst, that little combination yielded tremendous results for me. How long did it take to really reverse all the metabolic dysregulation? You know, not really that long.

1:22:01So when I put on the CGM, so I still wear it just kind of for Hawthorne effect, you know, just anything under observation will behave differently. So even if it's your own observation, it keeps me somewhat on the straight and narrow. So when I put it on, I had fasting glucose levels of 125 to 130 milligrams per deciliter. So that's the highest end of the pre-diabetic spectrum, the lowest end of the diabetic spectrum. Then I went subsequently in and, you know, actually kept my appointment with my PCP and, you know, got a hemoglobin A1C test and, you know, that was six and a half or something. So, you know, I was, that was reflective of what I was seeing on the CGM.

1:22:47And then about, it took me about four months to get down into sort of more of an acceptable range and then about six months to really more or less reverse my pre-diabetic diagnosis. And so this was really due to a kind of fairly fundamentalist approach towards my health at that juncture. I wouldn't necessarily recommend now that people become sort of neurotic fundamentalists about health because there's other risks associated with that. there's this whole kind of world of orthorexia, right? Where you can become over obsessed with being healthy. But in the early days, I did need to take some relatively severe measures to address a relatively acute problem.

1:23:38So it was the stacking really of a number of different protocols that really yielded kind of the best results. And for those of people that just like really kind of like want, hey, just tell me what to do, Jeff. I will first give the asterisk that everybody is different, everyone's a bio-individual. But there was a stack of protocols that I self-applied that had results that I found almost miraculous, which was really these. So I kind of pointed to a couple of them already. It was really the adoption of a low glycemic diet. so I was essentially reducing my consumption of carbohydrates which would become glucose essentially and then an intermittent fasting protocol to consolidate all the consumption of food in an eight-hour window more or less between 11 and 7 so 11 a.m.

1:24:36and 7 p.m. although if you really want to get optimal about it you probably shift that window earlier because we're a little bit more optimized to metabolize food a little bit earlier in the day but it's not very friendly. And I have three daughters who like to eat dinner with me. So that was my window. So it was kind of this ketotarian approach to diet and intermittent fasting protocol. And then where I really saw the kind of incredible results was layering in a cold water therapy component to this in a very particular time of day. So this will make total mechanical sense for people that kind of understand just general rules about metabolism.

1:25:15but because I had a low glycemic diet, I had low glucose, I was limiting my glucose because I was on an intermittent fasting protocol at about 10.30 a.m. I wouldn't have eaten for about 15 and a half hours. So I would have relatively low glucose levels even though you generally have a little cortisol spike in the morning that will stimulate some glucose. I had pretty low glucose levels at about 10.30 a.m. And then before breaking my fast, I would get into the treacherous ice bath, right? And what would happen? So my core body temperature would plummet and my body would just engage in an adaptive response.

1:26:07It would start this process of thermogenesis to upregulate my body temperature back into that Goldilocks zone because my body is always trying to find homeostasis, right? In order to upregulate my body temperature, it would start to look around for an energy substrate because it needed that energy substrate to make heat in my mitochondria, but there was not a lot of glucose around. So then it had to opt for an alternate energy substrate and that was fat, right? So basically I was just burning fat because that was the only substrate around for my body to make energy, to make enough heat, to thermoregulate and get me back into that Goldilocks zone.

1:26:55And the combination of those protocols was crazy. I mean, I went from 206 to 142. Wow. And how long? Like not that long, like six months. I mean, people thought I was sick. And what was the exercise regimen? Yeah, I mean, it was candidly, like sometimes I call it my Jesus protocol, which is, or Jehovah's fitness. Jehovah's fitness? Yeah. Sorry, dad jokes all day over here. Is a lot of zone two walking in the desert, come back on a Friday, eat some fish, do a little CrossFit. The Jehovah's Fitness, bro. This goes on, a little CrossFit, you can probably get that one too. By Saturday, I'm totally dead.

1:27:51By Sunday, come back to life, Jehovah's Fitness. There you go. There you go. I see, yeah, sorry. Look, if you ever are like hard pressed to put a few nickels together, I think you could sell that. I'm keeping that in my back pocket, Jehovah's Fitness. Yeah, the CrossFit references is a little off color. But in any case, no, it was like a lot of zone two walking, candidly. I mean, look at Jesus. The guy was live. He had a great body composition. I mean - At least as depicted. In the way that we conjure him. As depicted. Yeah. But yeah. So it was a lot of zone two walking. And then resistance training for the first time in my life.

1:28:40I was sort of a disciple to what I call now chronic cardio. So I would like sit around in front of a computer all day and then go and like huff it out on the elliptical or the Stairmaster for 45 minutes. And then back to my life. That was not a profitable regimen for me. In fact, that's how most people approach exercise is that it becomes this commodified productized little cubbyhold part of their life. And the rest of the time they're just sitting around. And you look, I mean, we have 45 ,000 places in the United States to sweat and grunt and lift and run. And at the same time, we have a 45 % obesity rate.

1:29:26So that whole approach towards productizing exercise is this one little part of your day. It's just like, for me, it didn't work. And again, if you ask yourself, how did I evolve? I was moving all day. I was walking like crazy. I was climbing trees and building structures and lifting some heavy things. And that's more or less what I did. I mean, you could even categorize zone five as like escaping from a tiger from time to time, whatever, getting your heart rate up. So I kind of combined those. I was walking every day, I was lifting some weights And then I was probably getting my heart rate up to zone four, zone five, maybe twice a week.

1:30:09And that sort of elixir of things really had incredible effect. But I mean, you think about good stress and probably like the most obvious example of that is muscle building, right? So you overload a muscle, you tear the microfibers in that muscle, you give that thing enough rest and enough protein, enough leucine, and it grows back bigger. So what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. You can see that mapped on a bicep or a quadricep quite obviously. And then you apply it to other places. Have you ever trained at high altitude? Periodically, but not for extended periods of time, yeah. But this is a very common practice like for Olympic athletes, right?

1:31:03And why? Because there's a form of deliberate hypoxia right at high altitudes because the air is less dense. And so there's less pressure of the oxygen to diffuse into the lungs to then get delivered to the cells for energy production. So what does the body do under that stress of hypoxia? It has an adaptation. It starts to make this particular kind of protein called EPO that then makes more red blood cells, which are basically more couriers for oxygen to deliver to the cells for energy creation. And your mitochondria then adapt and become more efficient in relation to the environmental stress.

1:31:48So like hypoxia is like one of the, like a deliberate form of hypoxia is another like obvious stressor that can confer a health benefit. And all these things are, they're all about dosage. I think it was like Paracelsus. He said the dose makes the poison. I think that was that dude. And so, you know, you obviously don't want too much hypoxia. Yeah. Yeah. You know, or you don't want to be hypothermic. Or too much exercise or too much fasting or too much cold water exposure. Yeah. You don't want any of those things. And, you know, in fact, you know, when people come to me about advice around protocols pertaining to their health, you know, I always say like, you don't run a marathon after never having run, right?

1:32:45You know, you ease into it. And, you know, this is very much true with like cold water therapy or ice plunging. You know, you can get a tremendous amount of benefit from that. Even at a relatively high temperature, it just has to feel cold for you. And then, you know, you slowly can, you know, elongate duration and decrease temperature. But these things take time. But what's amazing is that we often associate health with downward spirals. That's how we generally experience kind of the degradation of health. But upward spirals are equally possible. And you can generate a tremendous amount of momentum when you get on these upward spirals.

1:33:36And this is the amazing thing about seeing health as a process is that day to day, you can be on the trajectory towards wholeness, that's healing. Or you can be on the trajectory towards disease, that's ailing. And you have a tremendous agency over which direction that you're going. the impermanence of it all on some level, we are all on the spectrum, you know, towards this trajectory of ultimately, you know, death, right, like, so it is degeneration on a macro level, you know, from an absolutist perspective, the agency piece comes in to, you know, kind of direct the depth and level of acceleration towards it, right?

1:34:28Like, and these, you know, the agency is exerted in the form of these interventions, which you call protocols, all of which are different variations on hormesis, right? Like you're introducing an acute stress to like disrupt this pattern, to, you know, kind of introduce something that deregulates whatever your body is doing and causes it to like stop and take notice and then have to kind of repair itself. And as the muscle gets stronger in that recovery process, so do we, right? It's Alan Wattsian in the kind of macro sense of like what is true in nature is true in our bodies. And you drill down on these various things.

1:35:15We've already talked about a bunch of them, fasting, cold water exposure, exercise, of course. But you have a whole bunch more of them here. I guess since we just talked about cold water therapy, like then there's the other side of that, which is heat exposure. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I have my morning ritual, which involves kind of sauna bathing on a regular basis. It's a little embarrassing. I generally do it nude and with a Buddhist Nichiren chant. And I don't want anyone to have a vision of that in their head. While staring at a mandala, while I do it, you know, like burning incense, and like, you know, like you're stacking your.

1:35:56Yeah, I was on tour with, well, you know, you have to be efficient. I was on tour with - Holding a crystal. I was on tour with Herbie Hancock back in my music days, I was kind of a refugee now of the music business. And he is a Buddhist and he follows kind of the Nichiren school. And so, you know, he would have this inner sanctum kind of beyond the green room and he would invite everyone kind of backstage, hey, you want to join me before the gig? And for people that don't know, he's a legendary jazz pianist, just incredibly brilliant guy, played with Miles Davis, et cetera. And so then he would start in with this chant, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

1:36:44And he would be reading it out of like Buddhist scripture, but really I don't know what the I think the literal meaning of it is sort of you know the the blooming of the lotus flower or something but that wasn't even the point the point was that you actually get consumed in the vibrations of the chant such that you just completely inhabit the present moment. And he used this as a tool to become sort of non-judgmentally present prior to every show. This is my... This is your chant. This is your naked chant in the sauna. This is my naked chant in the sauna. It really stayed with me because I use it as sort of the sauna because it's a very safe, enclosed, consistent environment.

1:37:37I use it as my meditation place. And, you know, I don't always chant, but chanting mantra is a very effective gimmick, almost a tool to get you into the present moment. So yes, I'm in the sauna, you know, generally for about 20 minutes, you know, the suggested protocol there from, at least from the data that primarily emerges out of Finland, which I believe has like two and a half million saunas in a very small country. You know, the data that's I think organized mostly by Rhonda Patrick, I think she's the one that has - Yeah, she was just in here the other day. Oh, cool, yeah. You know, she's put together these meta-analyses from all these different studies that have emerged out of Finland.

1:38:28So the going protocol is 20 minutes, about 180 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, height, maybe a humidity level of like 10, 15%. And then in terms of frequency, four to seven times per week. And then that's where you're really going to get the massive cardiovascular benefit, et cetera. And of course, just by a kind of dint of your own experience and sensory experience, you get into the sauna and it is a form of sort of low grade exercise, right? you can feel that your heart rate is going up a little bit. But there's all of these other benefits. It's obviously a vasodilator. So you're going to start to move circulation, move blood around the body, move lymph around the body.

1:39:17There's all of these other proteins activated. We touched on them quickly before, but the heat shock proteins and the BDNF, et cetera. And then I combine that and do sort of a counter bathing deal with my cold plunge. And so if you're kind of going between cold and hot, what you're getting is vasodilation, vasoconstriction, vasodilation, vasoconstriction. And so that's really beneficial for your circulatory system. So yeah. It also makes it easier to get into the cold ones the first time if you're coming out of a sauna. But I like the going back and forth. I find that to be kind of the most impactful in terms of mood as well.

1:39:58and also later on that evening, my sleep quality. I know you're supposed to end on the cold. End on the cold, yeah. Sometimes I cheat on that depending upon how cold I am, but I do feel the best when I am able to end on the cold. Yeah, that's really when you're gonna get the most metabolic benefit for those reasons that we talked earlier is that your body is engineered to find homeostasis. And so if you're lowering core body temperature, you know your metabolisms have to click into effect to upregulate you know body temperature interestingly you know i think sleep is generally aided by kind of some sort of heat therapy at night because and it's slightly anti-instinctual because your body your core body temperature actually decreases in the evening so if you get it if you get yourself hot like in a warm bath or even in a sauna, your body will do what it's supposed to do.

1:40:58It'll immediately activate mechanisms to cool your body down and bring it down. And so that's why oftentimes taking a warm bath actually helps with sleep. Sometimes people attribute that to epsom salts or magnesium, et cetera, but it's really more to do with your body's relationship with temperature. we don't have time to go into all of the protocols, but just in terms of kind of flagging them, you talk about red light therapy, which is super interesting. Then of course, the protocol of like interrupting our attention deficit disorder to work on focus. And that comes of course, with mindfulness practices and meditation.

1:41:47We talk a lot about that on this show. The stressed plants, I think is interesting because again, that's another like mimicking of like nature, like what nature does and the impact that that can have on our bodies. But I think, you know, one I would like to kind of drill down on because it's sort of counterintuitive for a book like this is the good stress of engaging in difficult conversations. Because I think this is something, you know, that we're all kind of like, you know, debating in our own minds right now. I think, you know, in this moment of division where it does feel like there's an edge that wasn't there, it's easy to kind of retreat from having challenging conversations, but the community that we're trying to engender in our lives, that's so much of your thesis and a part of what it is to, you know, feel whole and, you know, be a human being is sacrificed in our unwillingness to kind of engage in that activity.

1:42:53And I know I feel my own resistance in it, you know, with doing that. Yeah, again, you know, if I ask myself, how did I evolve? Well, probably in a tribe of 80 people where we had to work it out, you know, we didn't have a digital screen to anonymously sit behind and hurl vitriolic barbs at each other. We actually had to, you know, work it out face to face. I sort of unwittingly got myself into a whole series of very, very stressful conversations. So it was a little bit trial by fire for me because as I freely admitted earlier in the show, I was a people pleaser. So I was generally - This is the most uncomfortable experience for a people pleaser.

1:43:38Totally. Where you're avoiding conflict really at all costs. And that's the way I spent really the first, almost five decades of my life. But kind of in March, 2020, as we anchored into port lockdown, you know, my business partner, Jake, really encouraged me to start to write a weekly essay to my burgeoning commune community because, you know, he felt that people were really scared and feeling very alone. And if I could package thoughts in words and share those vessels of emotions, people might feel less alone. It was a nice idea. And so I was like, okay, sure. I naively agreed to doing this. And so I was producing 1500 to 2000 words every Sunday and sending them out to like 1.2 million people.

1:44:42because it's a pretty significant list. And for better or worse, I put my personal email at the bottom of that missive. And of course I was tackling pretty difficult, contentious issues because 2020 provided plenty of fodder for that, right? So anything from COVID to the reckoning of social justice in the wake of the George Floyd murder to the election, the rise of QAnon and every other emanation out of Trumpistan, et cetera. And I was trying to be thoughtful and rigorous and find some middle ground with these essays. But inevitably over the course of 2000 words in a time that was very, very triggering, I managed to offend people.

1:45:40and Monday morning, I would send this email out on Sundays and the opprobrium would come flowing in Monday morning, sort of cresting the bow of my inbox with recrimination, if you will. And I'm slightly exaggerating. Much of the response I got was encouraging and thankful, but I got tons, hundreds of emails from people that didn't agree with me. And some of them were just like, there was nothing I could do with them candidly because it would be like Trump 2020 pasted 5 ,000 times in an email. There's nothing I can really respond to that. But I also won't paint it as coming from any particular political wing.

1:46:32They were actually from all over the political map. You know, there were people I was writing about race and there was plenty of people on the left that didn't feel like a white man should be centering himself in that discussion at that time. Okay, so I was getting that. You know, there were plenty of people on the right that felt like I was a shill for Pfizer, but then I was also a conspiracist at the same time. You know, it was crazy. So with the more thoughtful detractors, I would send them an email and I'd say, hey, you know, thank you for your note. I appreciate that. And after a couple of volleys of these emails, I pulled what I call my David Copperfield routine.

1:47:12I would actually ask them to join me on an hour long Zoom. And I call it David Copperfield because I made most of them disappear at that juncture. But about 26 people took me up on it. And so over the course of two months, kind of August and September 2020, I had 26 hour long Zoom calls with people that really did not like me or disagreed with me about a number of things. and initially like I didn't have any training in non-violent communication or you know subsequently I got schooled in that whole field of Marshall Rosenberg who did this and kind of the most immiserated parts of the world and you know brought you know tribes together around this technique for having compassionate empathetic conversation I was just kind of going in in cold and I'll give you an example.

1:48:11So in August 2020, I think I wrote an essay about COVID. So there was a lot of data coming out at that juncture that the people that were most severely afflicted by COVID that ended up being hospitalized or died tended to be people with multiple comorbidities or obesity or diabetes. And so - Or elderly. Or elderly, yeah. So I wrote an essay about that topic. And this was also right during the body positivity movement. Right, I mean, that was third rail at that time. And so I got just a lot of, particularly women that felt like I was like fat shaming people. And of course, growing up as a fat kid, I thought I was very, very sensitive to that issue.

1:49:08And I was just writing a sort of rigorously researched essay, but whatever, I offended people. So I started getting on these Zoom calls and it was so interesting, Rich. I mean, the pattern of these Zoom calls basically just repeated themselves over and over again. You know, I would get on the call and at this juncture, like people weren't as good at Zoom as they are now. So it would be like jabbing at buttons and stuff. And then there would be, you know, the exchange of a couple of pleasantries. And then I would generally sit there for 45 minutes and not say anything. And people would essentially just gish gallop their entire life story about me, their relationships with their pets and their children and their spouses.

1:49:58And, you know, really kind of what I learned through this experience is that people were just so desperate to be seen and heard and that I was providing an opportunity for them to be seen and heard. And I was doing that in a relatively safe setting where they felt trustworthy. They felt like that they weren't going to be attacked. And over time, as I got better at this process, I started to kind of annotate areas of convergence in my life as they were telling me their life. and so oh yeah you know they have daughters too and oh yeah they you know were born in Chicago and they drove cross-country and their car broke down or whatever and so finally when they had exhausted themselves I would um I would essentially bring up these areas of convergence so it's like oh so funny like I have daughters too and you know mine are about to go off to school I'm not sure how I'm going to manage that and stuff like that and what I was doing kind of unwittingly was really seeking connection and not seeking solution.

1:51:16And many, many times, Rich, we never actually got around to discussing the original issue that had put us at loggerheads. We just found some sort of deep level of human connection. And I basically built this kind of whole Rolodex of frenemies, you know, because I was talking to people, you know, rural voters who were super Trumpers and, you know, who were really just telling me about the quality of their lives, about, you know, working, you know, two minimum wage part-time jobs, not being able to afford their insulin, living in towns with like boarded up main streets, like shopping for all of their food at 7-Eleven, you know, kind of this, you know, in some ways really sad stories that people would tell me about their lives.

1:52:19And so I really developed candidly a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for those people. And from kind of that experience of connecting with so many different people. You know, I, I, I built kind of a protocol around having these stressful conversations. And part of which was building my own psychological immune system. Because I was very susceptible to insult for most of my life, you know, as a people pleaser. It's like, and so, you know, when I first embarked on this process, when people, you know, would call me like a libtard or an asshole or be like unsubscribe you dick or whatever, all the emails that I get, I would take that quite personally and I would be very defensive and I would be up all night, you know, concocting various rejoinders and rebuttals and like driving myself crazy, like holding that ember of resentment, waiting to throw it and getting burned all the time.

1:53:27But over time, I built my psychological immune system very, very similarly to how you build your physiological immune system. So if you think about that, we build our physiological immune system through low-grade exposure to viruses and bacteria and pathogens. And they enter the body. you know, this floating brain of the immune system sees, you know, some sort of insult and, you know, starts to wind up different proteins that then we know as antibodies that then neuter that particular insult, that pathogen. And, you know, through the miraculous immune system has a memory such that these B cells can produce these antibodies if they ever come into contact with that pathogen, that virus or bacteria again.

1:54:18And so in a very, very similar way, I built my psychological immune system through low-grade exposure to quite a bit of insult to the point where I start to look forward to being insulted. In fact, sometimes people would send me these emails, I'd skip the laudatory parts and I'd get into the place where, you know, that were recriminatory because I really started to lean into the discomfort of it. and um and so this you know led to kind of the the development of you know a protocol around how to have stressful conversations that that i um that i outline in the book and then it kind of came to a head this past august and this is not in the book um where i hosted a summit at Commune Topanga, which is our retreat center, just not far from here between Palestinians and Israelis.

1:55:23And in this particular case, I was not the one having the hard conversations. I was actually the one moderating the conversations. And yeah, so this was a... And how did that go? Oh man, it was so interesting and very, very emotional. So everyone arrived and obviously they were coming. So they were already open on some level, but the Israelis, and these were Israelis that were raised in settlements in the West Bank. These weren't just like Americans that had visited Israel or something like that. And the Palestinians there, a number of them had grown up in refugee camps in the West Bank, like in Janine and near Hebron.

1:56:16And so, yes, they had come and they knew who was gonna be there, but they were very, very anchored in their own political identities and certainly in advocating for the rights of their own people. And there was a really interesting professor there from University of Michigan. He actually Zoomed in named Mark Tesler. And he said that the key to successful mediation and peacemaking is through understanding each other's narratives. So really we spent the first couple of days just in storytelling mode where the Palestinians present would tell their narratives of growing up, of what it was like to grow up in a refugee camp in the West Bank.

1:57:09And then the Israelis would get up. And these were all students, I should say. These were all students from Columbia, Brown, and UCLA. And they were actually the students that were leading the movements on their campuses. So there was that extra level of intensity that was just coming out of the whole season of encampments that happened on college campuses. So after a couple of days of sharing each other's stories, I got I started to pair up the Palestinians and the Israelis at a table very very much like this one except I was sitting in the middle and then I would turn to the Israeli and I would say now you know we spent the last two days you know Aheron learning about Mosin's story can you tell Mohsen's story.

1:58:02And they had to look each other in the eyes just like this and tell each other's story. And it's actually just like emotional talking about it. Yeah, as a way that being like the pathway to empathy on some level, right? Only by really trying to inhabit that other individuals, unique experiences, can you begin to understand it? 100 percent and um by not only understanding each other's narratives but by telling each other's narratives it was like a damn broke and so that was like the wednesday and this whole summit happened from a monday to a friday and then by wednesday night everyone was sitting around a big table with their sleeves rolled up writing white papers together they were like okay hey, what does a confederation model look like?

1:59:01What does a two-state model look like? What does a one-state model look like? What are we gonna do about the right of return? What are we gonna do about the settlements? They were then able to get into the hardcore political structural work, but it wasn't until the psychological and trauma work had already happened. And man, it was an incredible learning experience. Have you kept tabs on them? Like how has that, has that, like, I'm curious around how fragile that sort of state is. As soon as it's disrupted, when they go back into their lives, do you just sort of rubber band back into your position?

1:59:38I think a little bit that does happen, except that the students that were present at this were also, you know, as I was saying, the heads of the Palestinian student unions and movements on campus. And then, you know, other Israeli Jews that are very involved in their own campus. So then they had, they still like are on the same campus together. So that, and they have this level of bond now that I think is so deep and powerful that they list towards cooperation and common ground and compromise. And, you know, I think coming out of that experience for me, what one of the challenges that I started to sit in was...

2:00:29how, how, so easily, but how healing is such deep, lengthy work. And how does one institutionalize and scale the kind of healing work that we need in order to solve some of the world's biggest problems in some of these areas? So I started to think about it in terms of actually creating structures for the work to then bring back into these campuses such that more environments like the one that I created for a very short period of time in Topanga, you know, could be replicated within the campus environment. And the students at Columbia have largely done that. That's a worthy investment of your time, I think, pursuing that.

2:01:23Thankless, probably, and very difficult. I guess the punctuation there is that we tend to avoid these stressful, hard conversations because they're so easy to avoid. But we really have to ask ourselves, what is the opportunity that sits on the other side of them? Because it's often these very, very thorny conversations that stand between us and the world that our hearts imagine is possible. And if a Palestinian and an Israeli can do that, can you not do that with your sister or your spouse or an ailing parent? You know, just think about how important that stressful conversation could be. On some level, all the growth is on the other side of, you know, whatever it is that we're avoiding, right?

2:02:22And in the context of a difficult conversation, the avoidance is a function of some, you know, emotional wound, right? That we perpetuate through that avoidance and we'll never be healed within ourselves until we can compel ourselves to engage in that sort of thing. But the bigger gift is the kind of domino effect or the downstream impact of those conversations, which ultimately, like we avoid them because we think that they're gonna separate ourselves even further from other people, but it is only in doing them and that we are kind of brought closer together on the other side of that, right? It reminds me of Susan David's work on emotional agility.

2:03:07She says like discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life. And it's easy to restrict our idea of that discomfort to the physical things like the exercise and the diet and all of that. But the real richness is in the emotional discomforts, right? A hundred percent. That's really, like, we can go down all that stuff that is sexy, but honestly, you know, the real work is in this emotional landscape. Because it's amorphous and easy to avoid and easy to overlook. And even more so when we're like, yeah, but I'm look at my diet and look at my, look at what I'm doing every day to like introduce all of these discomforts in my life.

2:03:47Sometimes that is a way of, you know, it's an avoidance technique in and of itself to avoid those other things. I 100 % agree, 100 % agree. I mean, what started honestly as a physical inquest became a psycho-spiritual inquest. And while I would say that these good stress protocols are obviously incredibly beneficial to human physiology, what they can offer in terms of emotional regulation are way, way, way more important. In fact, what I found for me that fasting, for example, the most potent impact of fasting for me was not autophagy or mitobiogenesis or weight loss or ketosis. It was actually my ability to emotionally regulate, to find space between stimulus and response.

2:04:52You know, just because I stopped eating at 7 p.m. didn't mean I didn't get hungry at 9.30. Can you sit with your own discomfort? Yeah. Can you sit with it? And how do you apply that in other areas of your life? Totally. And instead of just mindlessly walking to the cupboard to assuage some sort of, you know, discontent, I actually had to witness the source of the stimulus and ask myself, is this hunger a biological need or a psychological or emotional desire? And when I was forced to actually find the space to witness that, it was almost always emotional or psychological. I was bored, someone insulted me, and I was eating my feelings, right?

2:05:46And because the calories that are engineered to hit your bliss point are right there, it is so easy just to fall prey to them. But when I was really able to then create that space between stimulus, the hunger and response, either eating or not eating, You know, that space actually became so useful in other parts of my life. Like when my children were inevitably annoying, how was I going to respond at that juncture? Was I going to just yell at them and have a reactive kind of knee-jerk response? Or could I apply that same space that I had cultivated from fasting to the way that I treat my children or the people that I love in my life.

2:06:41And the same is true, honestly, with cold water therapy. What happens when you get into cold water? You have an involuntary stress response, like the adrenaline starts to flow in through your veins. You feel like a sense of panic. And then you have that brief moment to apply conscious top-down pressure on top of involuntary bottom-up response. You can do that often by leveraging the breath or by leveraging your prefrontal cortex. But again, that space, that ability of putting top-down pressure on top of involuntary response, that can then punctuate your life in so many other important ways. It's not just about the metabolic benefits or the dopamine of getting into the cold water.

2:07:34sure, that's great. But what's it like when then you're in a very, very stressful situation? For example, when you walk into a room and you walk into a stressful conversation, can you use that same ability that you've enhanced yourself with in the cold plunge or with fasting in that situation that requires a tremendous amount of emotional regulation? And that's, again, I think you nailed it. That's where I think a lot of these protocols are way, way more powerful. Yeah, beautifully put. What still trips you up? Like what's the outer edge of this horizon for you where you still find yourself challenged more than you would like?

2:08:12Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm a million miles from my best self, man. And if you don't believe me, ask my daughters, they'll happily tell you. You know, it's a, like I said, you know, it is a process being healthy or being emotionally regulated is not a product, You know, I've recently had kind of a falling out with someone. It didn't really have anything to do with me, but anyways, it's happening. And, you know, I've been up at night kind of brooding over it and kind of questioning myself of like, wait, Jeff, you're so evolved here with your emotional regulation techniques. Why are you up at night really brooding about this?

2:08:59And so, again, life is a process. I think the most kind of challenging thing in my life right now is sort of a product of kind of where I sit just within my family. So I have children who are, well, they're all teenage girls. So God help me, my eldest is 20 now, but, and then I have very, I have aging parents. And so I'm sort of in this kind of in-between stage, sort of caring on some level for both of them and confronting elements of inevitable mortality and transience and kind of navigating that as I see my parents get older and older. And I think that this really kind of speaks, I think, to the ultimate challenge or potentially the ultimate target of the spiritual and examined life is how we manage our awareness of our own mortality or freedom from the fear of death, I suppose.

2:10:24And that is something that I'm thinking about a lot right now. I mean, we sit in a really curious place in the human story, kind of in the evolution of our species, where by dint of some fortuitous combination of atoms in our brain, Like we have this thing that we call consciousness that you and I can sit here across this table and be totally here and engaged with each other and find words as vessels for emotions and thoughts and feelings and package them up and share them such that we can enjoy that and feel each other. And that's just amazing. I mean, it's one thing to be connected like this.

2:11:20It's another thing to know that you're connected. You know, it's one thing to be happy or sad. It's another thing to know that you're happy or sad. You know, humans just have this incredible capacity to know that it is something, it is like something to be themselves. And we often kind of attribute that quality to this concept of qualia. but you know consciousness also has a shady side which is this awareness that everything that we love and know including ourselves is totally transient and gonna die and you know this fear of death has you know caused paroxysms of anxiety across human history i mean we've gone out for millennia.

2:12:15And, you know, we killed off essentially everything bigger than us, you know, all of the wonderful bears and dire wolves and mammoths and tigers, you know, and all the megafauna of the world. And then, you know, Louis Pasteur came around and said, oh, well, it's not just the big things that kill you. It's also like the little things that we can't see. And then we spent the last 170 years or so killing off everything smaller than us. and you know we've been paralyzed by this concept of death for so long you know such that you know we've created these myths that somehow you know promise eternal life if we you know subscribe to a series of edicts you know created by some old paternalistic bogey in the sky whatever we keep trying to cheat it all to the point now where a lot of our friends are into this concept of escape velocity, right?

2:13:15That our organs are going to regenerate faster than they're going to degrade and we're never going to die. We're never going to do it. We're going to cheat the whole game. We're going to become immortal. I'm really working on trying to kind of reframe my relationship with death. And, you know, there's certainly been practices in various traditions. You know, you've probably had Ryan Holiday and some of those folks, you know, Memento Mori is one of those that's baked into Stoicism. Buddhism has, you know, Marana Sati. But I think a lot of getting comfortable with death is really kind of reframing our relationship with the natural world and with nature.

2:14:08And realizing that, yes, my five senses as kind of circumscribed by sight and sound and my ability to hear and taste, those things may be coterminous with the cessation of my heart and my brain. But there is something about me that goes on. and you know if you start to again kind of delve into the sciences and the sort of improbability you know that eight billion years ago there was some supernova you know made of hydrogen gas and very much like in the sun these hydrogen nuclei were fusing you know and becoming helium and helium was becoming you know carbon and carbon was becoming oxygen and so forth to the point where there was so much pressure and so much temperature that this supernova exploded and vomited all of its elemental guts all over the universe.

2:15:08And somehow those clouds then reformed and formed a rock called Earth in the middle of the solar system. And all of those same elements then self-assembled to become a freaking woodpecker and a bear and rich roll and me. And in me and in you is one of the seven octillion atoms that was in Lao Tzu and in the Buddha and in Martin Luther King. And when we die, we simply go on and we are just these links in this sort of continuous chain of animated captured sunshine. And, you know, when you start to, I think, really cognitively understand yourself as part of this greater intelligence, you can begin to at least cognitively let go of some of that fear of like, as Alan Watts used to say, like look up at, see, you know, that star in the sky and point at it and be like, look, that's me, you know, that's me up there.

2:16:27And, you know, I think what we're inevitably seeking, you know, is not the ease in life that comes with sort of a pint of chubby hubby and, you know, a Netflix binge. I think we're seeking like a different kind of real ease in our life. And we tap into that kind of moment to moment, you know, when you're running or when you're in some sort of creative activity or some sort of collective enterprise. Sometimes we associate that with flow state, right? Like this true ease of like awareness of yourself and body and space and some sort of transcending outside the fluctuations of time and space and location and form.

2:17:13And then you're just kind of pure essence for just that one brief tiny moment. You're it. You're all there is. You're the entire universe experiencing itself in the here and now as your organism, you actually feel that and then it's gone. And so, you know, this is the place that I'm trying to inhabit as a part of experience more, not just in here. I can say it to you here, you know, in this beautiful podcast studio, but can I truly feel it? Can I truly let go, blow out all of that fear, that's the biggest challenge. I can't imagine a more beautiful or eloquent way to capture those ideas. And as much as I have many things to say about it, I think it's best that we end the podcast here because this is what I wanna leave everybody with.

2:18:10That was really beautiful, thank you. I have tremendous respect for the work that you do, the rigor that you bring to the work, all of the synthesis of which is found in this beautiful new book, I think is incredibly helpful and again, very well written. So thank you for your gifts, my friend. And I think we should point out though, just in the event that people might be confused, you have this place in Topanga that is called Commune. Yeah. But I think people might be like, is he running a commune? Like, who is this guy? He's like doing all this stuff. He is literally running a commune, this guru across from me.

2:18:52So it is called commune, your podcast is called commune. You have a digital platform called commune where you have courses and you have like, you know, filmed lectures with all of these very interesting people. But it is not in fact a commune. I can say that as somebody who's been there. Yeah, yeah. Unless you think that you may be attacked by a wild group of hippies on acid. No, I'm sorry, that's not gonna happen, sadly. Yeah, we use the physical property to host retreats generally around yoga and spirituality or in some cases, longevity and physical health. And I also leverage the property to host these masterminds like the Palestinian Israeli Summit, but also ones on ecology and sustainability, et cetera.

2:19:46And I know you've been up on the property many times to celebrate some of our friends like Paul Hawken. We've done book releases up there. And then we also use it as a production facility. So we film all of our courses. I think we've filmed 150 courses up there now that sit on the online platform. And then, you know, I do host a number of my, of the podcasts up there. But, you know, Rich, I just want to say before we conclude, you know, you've really just served as the model exemplar of like a rigorous and thoughtful human being for so many people, but specifically for me. I've just seen you like hold the course for a really, really long time and eschew some of the more kind of like glittering, tempting ways of being out there.

2:20:46And I really just have tremendous respect and thank you for your footprints in the sand. I've tried to follow them. Appreciate that. Thanks, man. Until next time, let's do this again. This was great. Awesome. To be continued. Peace. Bye.

2:21:18That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change and the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:22:39Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.