Dhru Purohit Show - Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Maui Nui, and Birch Living.  When we think of stress, we often associate it with something negative—something to avoid. Our modern culture has fostered an environment of persistent chronic stress, yet at the same time, we've also eliminated beneficial stress by designing a life of chronic ease. Today's guest joins us to explain why stress isn't just unavoidable—it’s essential for growth. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Jeff Krasno, CEO and co-founder of Commune, to explore the benefits of positive stress in our modern world. Jeff explains why chronic stress harms our health and longevity, while adaptive stress—like fasting and hot/cold exposure—has been key to human evolution and survival. He also shares how to evaluate your protocols, behaviors, and routines to ensure they keep you in balance. Jeff is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform focused on personal and societal well-being, and the co-creator of Wanderlust, a global series of wellness events. He also hosts the Commune podcast. His latest venture, Good Stress: The Benefits of Doing Hard Things, expands on his personal story and wellness protocols. Drawing from over 400 podcast conversations and his own experiences, the book explores deliberate, self-imposed behaviors that enhance social, psychological, and physical well-being.  In this episode, Dhru and Jeff dive into: How chronic ease is leading to disease (00:37) How to befriend stress (5:44) Jeff’s personal journey and the health challenges that shaped him (09:50) Fasting, hunger, and stress—how they can benefit you (23:34) Fasting recommendations for women and the importance of an individualized approach (26:50) Jeff’s Substack insights on weight loss (32:42) Research on cold plunges, blood glucose, cancer, glutamate, immunotherapy, and more (36:50) The future of health, chronic disease, systemic issues, and the decline of public trust in health and food institutions (43:19) The impact of health podcasts, their practices, and how people are paying attention to new information (56:24) How to lean into stressful conversations—plus tips for tackling them (59:18) Evaluating our protocols, behaviors, and routines—do they help us find balance and return to center (1:19:50) Final thoughts (1:24:45) Also mentioned in this episode: Jeff’s new book - Good Stress: The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things Commune Podcast  Gabor Mate - Kiyumi retreat Thomas Seyfried's glutamate research KetoPet Sanctuary For more on Jeff, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Maui Nui, and Birch Living. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. Head over to drinkLMNT.com/dhru today. Right now Maui Nui Venison is offering my listeners a limited collection of my favorite cuts and products. Just go to mauinuivenison.com/dhru to secure your access now —but hurry, supply is limited! To get 20% off your Birch Living mattress plus two free eco-rest pillows, head over to birchliving.com/dhru today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeff, welcome to the podcast, brother. It's an honor to have you here. And I'm excited about everything that you're working on, in particular, you got a new book coming up. And inside of that book, Good Stress, a big thing that you talk about is that there are positive bits of stress that can radically make our life better. You know, for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, we as humans have been focused on getting as much stress out. you're here to convince us that maybe the extreme version of that, taking all stress out of our life, is actually a detriment to our health. Let's talk about that.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, Drew, thanks for having me. You are just such a great friend and you platform so many amazing people and I'm very grateful to be here. So, yeah, listen, for hundreds of thousands of years, homo sapiens and even beyond that for millions of years, hominids have evolved in relationship to their invites. You know, to be alive is to be in relationship. And so we've evolved these adaptive mechanisms in relation to what I sometimes call paleolithic stress.

But since the Industrial Revolution, in the West primarily, but really accelerating in the last 70 years, at every turn, we've engineered our society for comfort, for convenience, for ease. and it's my thesis that chronic ease is actually leading to chronic dis-ease. We are essentially using our culture to hijack our biology, and that is leading to all sorts of detrimental downstream impacts. And I can unpack just some of those mechanisms. Yeah, well, let's start off with the first one,

which is from a lot of people's observation, they're looking around, they're driving to work in the morning, and actually a lot of people around them look pretty stressed. So what's going on there? In modern times, we have a negative association with stress and totally justifiably, right? Because in the modern age, stress is chronic. And chronic stress, as you well know, leads to imbalances in the human organism and by extension, disease. But stress at its core is actually an adaptive response to our environment.

So I live up in the hills of Los Angeles. I'm apt to go for a hike, generally before I have a podcast, for example, to clear my head. And every once in a while on that little serpentine path, I'll run into like a rattlesnake or a coyote, right? And I have a very, very natural adaptive response to stress. I see the rattlesnake on the path. What happens, right? I have a bottom up response. My heart rate and my respiratory rate increase.

my liver secretes just the right amount of glucose to center my extremities to fight or flee. My pupils dilate, the aperture of my attention becomes super, super tight. I become self-obsessed and distrust the world. And that's all for good reason, because that serves my biological imperative to survive. And of course, we inherited this mechanism from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The problem in modern society is the rattlesnake never leaves the power. for so many people. So we're in this chronic state of agitation. Now, on the path in Laurel Canyon above my house, what happens after the rattlesnake looks at me and says, I don't think Jeff will be

on the specials menu today, right? And he slilers back off into the tall grasses. Well, I return to homeostasis, right? My heart rate and my respiratory rate decrease. The aperture, my attention opens back up. I become more creative and I trust the world again. And that is a total natural response, right? I return to the middle. I return to homeostasis. The signature of modernity is that we never find the middle again. We never return to homeostasis.

So when you're driving here and you're in traffic and you're looking around and you're seeing people are stressed out, that's because they're in a state of chronic stress. And we know, just like hormonally, for example, that chronic stress is going to lead to all sorts of different kinds of disease. So chronic stress, again, a state. adaptively activates the liver, for example, to secrete glucose into the bloodstream. That is totally adaptive, but you don't want high levels of glucose in your bloodstream all of the time, right, because that leads to prediabetes and diabetes and insulin resistance. You don't want high levels of cortisol also because it degrades immune function.

It actually lowers the production of certain kinds of innate immune cells like neutrophils and macrophages, et cetera. It also degrades gut function. over time. It creates dysbiosis and eventually intestinal permeability, which leads to chronic inflammation, et cetera. So this is the problem in the modern age is chronic stress. And I feel like I'm sort of a PR agent now for stress because stress doesn't have to be chronic if you learn how to manage it. If you learn how to emotionally regulate, then in many cases, you can manage stress. And in some cases, stress can actually be your friend and confer beneficial results. Well, let's talk about

some of these ideas in the book, which is stress, befriending stress. And you have all of these practical ways that people can bring to their life. We can make some of what you're saying tangible in the early part of the podcast. Let's pick your favorite one. What is one of the best ways that you found for your personal self that you've incorporated this making stress your friend, befriending your stress. What does it look like for you? Part of the research of this book was just intellectual curiosity, but the other part was really necessity. I was diagnosed with the chronic disease in 2019, and I was very, very overweight. I was 210 pounds, so I lost about 50 to 60 pounds with a lot of me search and end of one

experimentation, et cetera. So fasting and intermittent fasting was a big one for me. And in the early days, I was candidly pretty fundamentalist about it because I needed to be because my fasting blood sugar was 125 milligrams per decilator. So I was on the very, very top of the pre-diabetic range at the very bottom. bottom of the diabetic range. And I was having crazy spikes, you know, up to, you know, 250 milligrams, 300 milligrams per deciliter post-pranule. And so this is why now I wear this little disc on my triceps called a continuous glucose monitor. So fasting was one of the key protocols that I

developed for me really early on. And it makes total sense because if you ask yourself the basic question, and this could be applied to all of these adverse hemimetics, how did I evolve, right? Well, I evolved having to endure periods of calorie scarcity. My body was engineered to become a little fat in the late summer or, you know, the early fall. Why? Because it knew that the paucity of winter was just around the corner. But of course, in most of the modern West now, winter never really comes from a food perspective. There's always a surfeit of shelf-stable nutrient-deficient calories that we can call up in the palm of our hands.

hand, by the end of this podcast, we could have a whole array of foods here, right, in and out of season. So I really had to examine this and say, listen, I need to balance my consumption of food with some degree of restriction because part of nature's plan is to balance abundance with some degree of scarcity. But now in an era of very little scarcity, we have to self-impose this protocol. So this is what fasting was for me. For me, I adopted a very simple 16-8 protocol because I found that there was the most data around that. And that's simply just consolidating my consumption of food in an eight-hour window. For me, that was more or less between 1030 and 630.

I've subsequently played with that window a little bit, but I saw very, very significant results pretty quickly from that protocol. time restricted eating doesn't mean you're necessarily calorie restricting because you could eat 10 pints of chubby hubby in an eight hour window right but generally when you're becoming disciple to a practice like that you're making more conscious decisions about what you put in your mouth and i was of course pairing that with data that i was getting directly from my cgm and i was seeing vast improvements so fasting was a huge one. Now, of course, there's all of these other benefits to fasting outside of just potentially losing weight. You know, there is the, obviously the activation of certain pathways like AMPK, which I'm sure a lot of experts have talked about on your show, which is associated

with autophagy, cellular cleanup. There's mitobiogenesis, the creation of new mitochondria. There's the production of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor that seems to even grow new neurons, but certainly manage the functionality of pre-existing neural health. So there's all of these kind of like under the hood benefits, but the benefits that I was seeing was a tremendous amount of weight loss in combination with a couple of other stress protocols. Give us an idea. What was your life like before that?

What got you into the mess in the first place? Because I've known you for a long time. I generally have thought of you as being somebody fairly healthy. When we look at like the larger population, you're in California, I think, you know, even one point in time, you had like a very healthy restaurant and cafe, right? And the reason I ask is because I think a lot of people can relate. They generally feel that they are doing a lot of healthy things, but maybe a few things had been off.

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Yeah, well, I feel bad, Drew, because I'm not an extraordinary guest. I'm actually incredibly ordinary in terms of the presentations that I were in my life. So I was chronically fatigued. I was brain fogged. I was pretty. irritable, very hard time concentrating, couldn't read a book, needed to grab my phone quite often. And then, of course, as I described, I was heavier. So it was about 210 pounds. But with that kind of deposition of adiposity sort of dad bod, so a lot of fat right around the

middle, you know? And as my children love to tease me, I like to use the clinical name, Gynacomastia. My kids were like, dad, you have the boobs of man and would sometimes leave one of their bras on my bed just to rub it in a little bit. So I had, you know, that whole sort of panoply of symptoms. The thing about everything I just named, chronic fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, they are so common now that we essentially have accepted them as normal. But they're so, so, so abnormal. And so I was walking around in this incredibly compromised state. Now, subsequently, I started to do some testing and I realized that I was pre-diabetic, borderline diabetic, and then I did some microbiot testing.

And my gut was as like leaky as a rusty old pipe, basically. So I was dealing with all of those things, but that just basically makes me average. And what about your diet at the time? Your diet, your life, some of the things that kind of contributed to, again, a lot of the things that a lot of people are dealing with. Like, what was going on? Yeah, so I'm a serial entrepreneur. Not in the serial sense in that I can't stop making businesses.

And so prior to Commune, which is my main gig these days, I was running a festival called Wanderlust. Some of your guests might be familiar with it. It started with just like one little festival in Lake Tahoe, California, geared around wellness, ironically. I was pretty focused on growing that for a number of years. and I think by 2016, that concern had grown to about 68 festivals annually in 20 countries. So you can imagine what my life looked like.

First of all, I have three daughters, so we were traveling like a band of gypsies, basically. But I was on a plane nonstop. You know, I was in every time zone you can imagine. I couldn't even cover the amount of events that we had, candidly. So I was sleeping very, very poorly. you know, I was constantly stressed. I very, very naively raised a lot of private equity money, which I thought was a great idea in the moment.

And then, of course, you know, I was under the thumb of, you know, some cigar smoking plutocrats in Midtown, you know, looking down at me scrutinizing all my moves. And that was a lot of stress, bad stress, chronic stress, endless emails, endless pressure. And yeah, my diet was basically carbon. side, you know, because I was eating in airports. And even when I wasn't eating in airports, I was having that bagel for breakfast or that muffin for breakfast. Obviously, over time, doing that for many,

many years, I just war down. The issue here with a lot of these chronic diseases, as you well know, is that they are progressive. You know, they don't just come on like the Texas chainsaw murder or whatever. They're slow and, you know, they unwind like a little film noir, you know. So this is what was happening in my body. But the problem here with so many of these chronic diseases is that they're so anodyne. They're so prosaic that we can just write them off of like, oh, I just had a bad day. I just got a bad night's sleep. And then we never really address them until, you know, you get a bucket of cold water over your head.

You know, you get a diabetes diagnosis or you get, you know, worse, you know, mitochondrial. All sorts. You know, that would be really bad. But you know what I mean? So this was my life. And, you know, I just had to wake up and start to really examine the way that I was living. But also something deeper in my own psychology, I had to really untangle this story that I was telling myself about myself. And while I want to talk about the really the key.

core protocols that I think people can adopt that are super actionable that will bend the arc of their health. I do think for many people, there's a step before that, which is really what I call my biopsychosocial intake form, which is like a very personal inventory, about the story you're telling about yourself. I mean, I grew up as a very chubby kid. I was moving from country to country, which was wonderful on some level. I was learning languages and having cultural experiences, but I was moved into a new school every six months in a new country with a new language, with a new click of friends. And of course, when you're a kid, all you want to do is fit in, right? All you want to do is connect. And so being a chubby kid, having to learn these languages,

I was essentially willing to sacrifice any and every authentic part of myself in order to fit in. And really the output of that was I became the world's biggest people pleaser. And that people pleasing was like a rucksack that I essentially lugged into my adult life. And the story in that sack went like this. Like, I'm just that chubby kid that will do. anything to be liked, that'll do anything to fit in. And I really had to get super honest with myself about who I thought I was and then realize that change is actually possible, that I actually do have agency, that like my fate wasn't just written in the genetic stars. You know, my whole

story was like, I just have the thrifty gene, right? You know, great in a famine. but like really bad for Instagram, you know. And I had to re, I had to relearn a new story about myself. And that was really key. And then that propelled me into, you know, adopting head first, jumping head first into these protocols like fasting and cold water therapy and some of the other ones I begin to stack. What was part of that?

What was, I'm sure you're into so many different things. You learn from so many different teachers. You have your own podcasts. You get to have a lot of people. Do you want to just mention your podcast? so that people can check you out? Yeah, sure. It's the commune podcast, and you know, you're absolutely right.

I mean, I feel like I am a product of everybody else's wisdom. You know, I don't have any letters at the end of my name. You know, I'm not a doctor. Sometimes I wish I went to medical school. But I guess someone told me, when you're not an expert in anything, that makes you a thought leader. I like that thing. So was there anything that you felt was super helpful in unwinding that story?

Because I think a lot of people listening feel like, I am at least somewhat aware of that story, but it has such a grip over me and my life that I sometimes forget that it's a story and it just becomes my reality. Like how can I step out of it? Are there methodology, systems, workshops, books that have been helpful that you might recommend that were helpful for you? So I spent a lot of time with this guy, Gabor Mate. Yeah.

This is the wonderful thing about having this retreat center in Topanga is that I get to host a lot of these brilliant people and then distill their wisdom to the best of my ability. And Godwer really opened me to that notion that people, but particularly children, will really sacrifice their authenticity for belonging. It is reconnecting with your authentic self. So he was really instrumental in helping me sort of tell a new story about myself. And also for me to recognize that in some ways, what was my biggest shortcoming as a child turned into my biggest superpower.

And it's crazy. Sometimes the most obvious truths about yourself are just hidden in plain sight. It's like that optic blind spot. It's like, he was like, well, Jeff, tell me a little bit about what you've done in your life. And I was like, oh, yeah, well, I used to put on big concerts in the music industry and help to tour bands. And he's like, oh, okay, so you brought people together? I was like, oh, yeah.

And then what did you do? Oh, I started wanderless. He's like, oh, what's that? Oh, that's a big festival. Oh, so you brought people together? I was like, oh, yeah, I guess I did. He's like, well, what's your business now? And we were laughing.

It's like, it's called commune. It's like, I bring people together. He's like, that is the thread of your life. Because you value belonging so deeply because of your experiences as a child, you turned your biggest shortcoming into your biggest superpower. You bring people together. You have to embrace that now. And that was a pretty beautiful, eye-opening experience.

Yeah. That's awesome. I've had the chance to meet Gabor a couple times, Gabor, a couple times, but not spend as much time as you have with him. I can only imagine that that moment must have been, it's something I'm sure you were sort of, you know, kind of aware of these different things. But it's when you know, the master comes in and he tells you, you're like, okay. You can get it cognitively, but then when you'd feel. yell it somatically when you embody that. It's a different form of satory or catharsis. So you're talking about this idea of sort of reshaping that narrative to also realize that,

you know, partly what I'm hearing is that a lot of these quote unquote bad habits that you had, maybe not, we're a byproduct of you, people pleasing, putting everybody else first and not putting yourself first. Is that part of what I'm hearing? Totally. And then it was also not completely understanding my own physiology. I mean, I remember sitting down with a Dr. William Lee, who I'm sure you've known. I was like, yeah, well, you know, Will, I just have bad metabolism. And he's like sort of smiling at me. And he's like, no, no, no.

The variation between people's metabolism on a genetic basis is really, really small. And that our metabolism naturally doesn't really decline very much at all between ages of 20 and 60. It's actually the accumulation of fat and other things like that that actually then hurt metabolism. But just from a genetic perspective, you know, you got to lose that narrative. Like, let that little meme of I have bad metabolism just disappear from your consciousness. And so that was helpful. And then there was like a bunch of candidly like a spiritual part of my journey that kind of converged with this curiosity around my physiology.

And it was the bridging of that of the mystical and the medical that, um, I guess propelled a lot of other awakenings in me, you know, this notion, this Buddhist notion, that all we are really is change, that everything is impermanent. And so clinging or craving to anything is always just going to result in a lot of Dukha, you know, suffering and dissatisfaction. But as applied to human physiology, you know, that really violated my sense of self. I, you know, wake up in the morning and I look at Jeff in the mirror and I'm like, there's Jeff. He's a stable, reliable thing. He doesn't really change. You know, he looks more or less the way he looked yesterday. So there is a sense of self that is really anchored in physical continuity. But as I started to learn

more about human physiology, I was like, nothing could be less true. You know, what we are seven octillion self-assembled atoms having 37 billion billion chemical reactions per second. Literally, all we are is change. I mean, I'm not the same guy that sat down here 20 minutes ago with you. And really awakening to the fact that I am process and not product was incredibly empowering because that also means that disease is a process. And so if health exists on this spectrum between sort of wholeness, if you will, and dis-ease, I started to feel a tremendous amount of agency around my trajectory on that spectrum.

I could be moving towards wholeness, that is the process of healing, or moving towards disease, the process of ailing. And we have way more agency over our direction than I think we've ever thought before. go back to some of these practical items that you were doing that you've incorporated that you write about in the book. One of the first ones was fasting. You found that it was helpful for you. In addition to sort of the caloric restriction benefits, it's just hard to overeat when you have a more condensed window. There's also the healing properties that can come along with it. What's something else that you noticed that was a stress that you embraced, that you brought into your life,

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Eco Rest Pillows today. Make 2025 the year of better sleep, better health, and a better planet with Birch mattress. I want to just add one more thing about fasting. Yeah. Because there's obviously physical benefits to fasting, but what I found was the most potent benefit of fasting actually might be psychological. Because even though I condensed my consumption of food in that eight-hour window, doesn't mean that I didn't have a hankering for some chips or something at 9 p.m.

And so, but I became completely committed. And like I said, I was a disciple to that practice. So instead of mindlessly wandering off to the pantry or the refrigerator to get, you know, some crackers and cheese or whatever, you know, I would actually have to stop and witness the nature of the hunger. and actually ask myself, is the origin of this stimulus, of this hunger, a biological need or a psychological desire? And I really had to be honest and untangle that. And 99.99% of the time it was a desire and not a need. I've got plenty of warehouse energy here for existence for a while. I was essentially eating my feelings. And I think this is what actually contributes to our 45% obesity rate that we have

now in the United States is that we are so psychologically triggered so much of the time. And you combine that with the always availability of calories. And then what do you get? You get a really, really disturbing obesity rate. But for me, what I found was the untangling of this, my hunger between this kind of biological need and psychological desire gave me a certain kind of space in which to make better decisions. Like Victor Franco famously said, between stimulus and response, there is a space. Inside that space, there's a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom and our liberation, well, that stimulus, in this case, the hunger and the space I found between that and the response, like just mindlessly going to the fridge, like started to enhance my ability

in other parts of my life and it began to sort of punctuate a certain kind of emotional equipoise that I would have in other situations, like when someone would insult me online or when my children would inevitably try to aggravate me or any other stressful thing that came into my life, I just had a little bit of space, a little pause available to me. And that was a very surprising benefit of fasting. So fasting isn't just physical. It's actually psychological too. You know, your audience, like my audience, is largely, is mostly women, right? There's still a lot of strong men out there, too, but it's largely women. Where have you fallen or sort of seen and you're surrounded by incredible women in your life, your daughters, your wife. How have you sort of seen

that sort of contextualizing recommendation for the female demographic? Specifically as it pertains fasting? Yeah. I mean, obviously there are women who have been incredibly influential on my health journey. In fact, I would say primarily the biggest influences on my health journey have been female, like Dr. Casey Means, Dr. Sarah Godfrey, Dr. Mindy Pels. Mindy, for example, has written a number of very very well-researched books on women and fasting. I think eat like a girl is one of them. And so I would qualify fasting for women. I think that if you're in menopause or if you're menstruating,

I think you need to take to do an extra layer of research around when fasting is appropriate for you versus men who don't experience as much hormonal. instability, I guess I would say, or change, really. So I know Mindy has like a lot of recommendations around when the best time to fast is it's like for women who are still on their cycle. So, you know, probably not towards the end of the cycle. But I mean, I won't qualify her recommendations actually because I'll just let people do their own research.

But yes, I do think that women and men are physiologically different. Really for worse, most research until the 90s has been done on men. And certainly the kind of dosages around medications are always geared towards men. And many of the diseases that disproportionately impact women, particularly autoimmune diseases, have gone kind of very like under-researched and understudied. I mean, the whole world of obstetrics is in some cases quite medieval. So, of course, like, given that I live within what I'd lovingly call it in my estrogen footprint, You know, I'm very, very supportive of trying to create more platforms for women's health.

And obviously we have an event that we have started called Luminense, a commune that is geared 100% towards that. Yeah, I've personally found in my own life, you know, as people are stacking all the different recommendations that are there, specifically talking about, you know, women. And I love all the different perspectives. I truly feel by getting all these different voices like people on your podcast, my podcast. We all learn through that process. But the common thing that I hear from a lot of women in my podcast is, okay, hey, you know, I'm being recommended this amount of maybe, let's say,

protein to be able to hit, which already can be difficult for a lot of people to get. I'm being recommended this level of maybe activity. And there's different recommendations in it, but let's say some level of strength training or walking or other stuff that generally, a more concentrated eating window, but beyond that component, I, and I've seen this with my wife, my sisters, it's like, it's hard to meet all the goals and still then adhere to fasting. And so there's this sort of happy medium that I've seen that a lot of women have found in my own life and some of my listeners too, which is great. We're just talking about, you know, you're having this 12-hour period of when your last

meal is and your meal in the morning. and then there might be periods of time if people want to take it more aggressively. But I think the challenge sometimes for women can be you can lose weight very quickly when you fast, but then you can gain it back very quickly if it's not sort of set up in a habit that works for you in your own lifestyle. And now with more studies coming out about the benefits of just adhering to some sort of caloric restriction or caloric maintenance, it seems like some of those things are starting to equate, even though I'm sure there's way more to the fasting story than we even know,

where, hey, if you find a routine that works for you that helps you hit all these goals and leaves you not feeling so hungry all the time, you can still be in a place where your body can get a lot of those benefits. So, yeah, that's the personalization that everybody's looking for on their own journey. Totally. And I think the more you can understand about the mechanisms of your own physiology, the more you'll be able to play with these protocols on a bio-individual basis. This is why I think it is important to understand a lot of the underlying mechanisms. I know a lot of people are just like, shut up, Jeff, just tell me what the hell to do, you know? And sure, I get it. But I think when you understand actually what's happening under the hood and, you know, you're doing a little bit of measuring here and there, I think you start to actually understand your own physiology better and then you can play with the edges of a lot of these protocols.

I agree that kind of there's this other side of the equation, which is called orthorexia, where you become completely, Neurotic and fundamentalist about hitting the goals of all of these different voices that you're hearing out there. And that will, of course, just drive you absolutely crazy. It's not possible. There's always going to be debate about like, well, you have to fast this many hours to get ketosis and this many hours for autophagy. And this many, you know, and great. Like those people with that level of expertise should be talking about that to understand the more basic, broader 40,000 foot concept, which is that we are over consuming food and growth needs to be relegated. It needs to be balanced by repair. We have, we kind of sanctify growth in our culture at

every turn, you know, the GDP, the Dow Jones, whatever, the size of your business. You know, but really, we need to balance growth with restoration and repair. and, you know, that applies to food, that applies to sleep, and it can apply to other practices, too. Amazing. So you wanted to go a little bit deeper into fasting. Is there another one of these positive stressors that you've embraced that you think would be important for our audience to hear about? Totally. And this one, again, I think has, there's a gender, a little bit of a gender debate around this one too. But what I found for me was a particular protocol stack was unbelievably effective at helping me lose weight and balance blood sugar levels. And that's this stack. So intermittent fasting,

we talked about. I was combining intermittent fasting with a low carbohydrate diet. So initially, that was kind of what I call the ketotarian diet or what Will Cole wrote a book called ketotarianism. And that was fairly plant heavy, but low glycemic. Subsequently to that, I started to actually introduce more like regeneratively grown, pasture-fed, or finished meats, et cetera, to up my protein bolus, particularly in the morning. But let's just say this. Intermittent fasting protocol, low carbohydrate diet, and then introduced a cold water therapy cadenced at a very particular time of day.

So I'll unpack why this was so impactful for me. About 10 o'clock in the morning, I would have been fasted for about 15 and a half hours, right? and I would also be on a relatively low carbohydrate diet. So my blood glucose levels by extension would be quite low. Now there is a little bit of spike with cortisol in the morning, and that's adaptive to get you out of bed and get you alert, get you to a podcast.

But mostly like my blood glucose levels would be quite low at 10 a.m. due to intermittent fasting and low carb diet. at that juncture, I would get into an ice bath before I put the first bite of food in my mouth. And I started seeing, like, unbelievable results with my just metabolic function and my weight loss. And I started to think about it. So at 10 o'clock, my blood glucose levels would be really, really low. I'd get into an ice plunge and what would happen? That would be the first thing that would happen.

I'd take a big gasp. but my core body temperature would plummet, right? And then my mighty mitochondria would go into overdrive to heat my body back up to thermoregulate back up into that warm porridge of 98.6. Get back into the Goldilocks zone. That's what the body is engineered for all the time. Homeostasis, homeostasis. But then my mitochondria would look around and say,

I need an energy substrate in order to make heat to get Jeff back up to 98.6. but there's not a lot of glucose around. So what are my options? Fat. Oxidized fat, convert triglycerides into free fatty acids to use in my brown fat, particularly to upregulate my body temperature. And I started to just burn fat like crazy. And, you know, as I started to stack those protocols together,

just purely for weight loss, I lost really 40 pounds in a couple of months. So I know that cold water therapy has pros and cons for different people. I know some people absolutely abhorre it. Count me in that group, even though I do it every day. I mean, I was one of these people that would go into like paroxysms of anxiety, just like looking at a cold lake, you know, whatever. But over time, I acclimated myself to that practice. There's all these other benefits to it, psychological benefits that I think are quite astonishing.

there's also like mood regulation, there's a secretion and production of a lot of dopamine, et cetera. But I found that for me, this was a very, very highly effective protocol. I think I love the psychological benefits. Like when I do go and do cryout therapy, cold plunge, and you come out, you literally feel, it's like it could be late in the afternoon. You feel like you just drink a double shot of espresso, but without all the side effects that come along with that, like the caffeine crash.

feeling jittery and other stuff, you just feel so alert through that process. Susanna was just in town. Cool. Dr. Soberg was in town. I think we asked her about fat loss. She said there's no studies yet that cold water supports that. But I'm hearing from you that that was your experience, that you saw at firsthand that that stack made a difference.

Right. Well, again, because I started to understand the underlying mechanism of what was happening. I mean, I could measure my blood glucose at 10 a.m. It was low, you know, 70s, maybe 80. And so I'm just trying to put one and one together and just report on my own. I get it. I think that we should do those studies. No, I mean, there's plenty of things that I do in my life that there's no studies for.

It's just when you're on a podcast, you know, just clarifying for the audience. Thank you. This is your experience. It's there. You're not saying that there's some big component. Like with fasting, there's all these different studies that are out there about its ability to, you know, clean the body and be. supportive for even things like people are using like Walter Longo using chemotherapy plus fasting to be a

more effective way to target cancer. Those studies are out there. That's super fascinating. Yeah, Sid Mukherjee, who wrote the Emperor of All Malities, and if anyone wants to read a book about cancer, which is not always the most uplifting. It's topic is one of the most beautifully written books ever, really, on any topic. but yeah this idea of the warbrook effect with with cancer so you know which is like essentially a dysfunction around glycolysis anaerobic respiration that leads to the proliferation

of these malignant cells and a lot of moustacetasticis if you can quote unquote sort of starve that of glucose there could be something there so I think it's like doing some of these studies that combine you know fasting techniques with chemo or fasting with other forms of immunotherapies You know, I think these are fascinating and much needed. Have you interviewed Thomas Safried? Did you have them on your podcast? So he's one of the big researchers from Boston University that found that I believe it's glutamate. And one other, there's two things that he identified that if you can kind of cut off the sources.

So he has this whole C-Fried protocol. There's this place that's from Texas called the Keto Pet Sanctuary. And basically it was a group of people that were involved with. Quest, Quest Nutrition, that then were getting super into like ketogenic diets and were actually taking dogs, like literally dogs that were about to be put asleep, aka killed, because they had cancer. It's too hard to treat them. They had massive tumors on the side of their body.

They were bringing them in and they were putting the dogs on basically like a biologically appropriate, you know, raw food diet for dogs. It's called barf, biologically appropriate raw food. And they were giving them plenty of exercise, a lot of sun, other stuff, and getting them away from all like the processed pet food that was out there. And they had this loose theory, which was if they put the dogs into ketosis, you know, can there be something that comes from it? And then all these dogs were being saved.

And it was called the Ketopet Sanctuary. And then that turned into like, hey, if this is working for dogs, is there something that's out there for humans? We did a whole episode with their whole team. Oh, I got to listen to that. And then we had this guy from Vancouver. Again, this is his own journey, but he basically was diagnosed. with a rare type of cancer that was sitting on,

was a tumor that was attached to like the top of his heart. He didn't know what was going on. He had shortness of breath, other stuff. Young, health, like healthy guy in the sense of no other history, was overweight, you know, stressed out, other things. And then he went into the doctor's office and they basically said, you have this tumor on your heart and this is what's going on. And he was like, what's the option?

And they said, well, you don't have a lot of options. And we can even do this surgery to try to see if we can save your life. for the next 48 hours because his shortness of breath was increasing. But even then, you only have maybe six months, eight months to live. The guy's name is Den Stacy. Anyways, the surgery worked out and it was a miracle. But then they were like, okay, we saved you, but you still only have like six months to eight months left to live.

And he kept doing some digging and he found the Seafrid Protocol. And he walked us through this whole thing of its combination of a very specific type of diet, controlled macros. It's not just like, oh, let's go on the ketogenic diet. we'll forget about it. It's like a hyper-specific diet that then also introduces certain prescription drugs and then hyperbaric oxygen, the hard chamber hyperbaric oxygen. And so anyways, it's a little out there, but people can listen to it. And it's so much we don't know about what works and knock on what he's doing well today. And again, it was like the whole C-free

protocol. But this goes back to your idea of just like how much is out there first testing with ourselves. In this instance, he likes to tell people, I literally was only given months to live. So I was willing to take the risk of doing something, even if it didn't work out, because they're already telling me that I was going to pass away anyway, if nothing ended up happening, which, you know, gave him and his wife the confidence that's like, let's just try this. It might be a long shot, but let's try this. That's not my medical advice. We're not telling you to do those sorts of things, but it's just fascinating that exist out there. Totally. I mean, these are very important anecdotes because sometimes it is these outliers that then lead to more clinical study, right? So,

like, for example, Jimmy Carter, I believe had like brain cancer, some sort of glioblastoma. He had this immunotherapy, which I believe was with the application of like a Ktruda, but then in combination with a particular probiotic, I believe this was true for Jimmy Carter, but it is definitely true now for treating some forms of cancer that immunotherapy plus, like, you acrimancia, which a particular strain of bacteria, a beneficial strain, actually yields better results. And so now I think they're starting to do more studies about combining immunotherapies with the right kinds of probiotics, et cetera. So this is like, you know, this is the new frontier. This is actually where AI can become very, very interesting too. That's not my, obviously,

my field of expertise, but I think when you start to be able to, you know, use these large models to crunch that kind of data. This is, I think, one of the most exciting sort of precipices of where we are. Yeah, yeah. How excited are you about the future, right? How do you feel about all the things that are happening right now? Like zooming out a little bit in the health space, we have the Maha movement. You know, we have a lot of different things going on.

You mentioned AI. Like, how do you feel about the future? Yeah, I mean, I'm generally an optimistic human being. So I'm trying to leverage that part of me. you know, I'm worried more about, I think, general epistemology and sort of the erosion of reason and rationality and the ability to have kind of nuanced, thoughtful conversations. We live in this attention or persuasion economy, I guess you might call it, where essentially we've taken Drew's time and focus.

I mean, everybody's time and focus and we've productized it and commodified it and we buy it and sell it. And for better or worse, you know, we all exist on social media or we all consume a lot of 24-hour news, whether many of us try to avoid it. But that is essentially algorithmically preference for salaciousness and scandal on hyperbole, et cetera. And so we have these agitated nervous systems as part of this bigger kind of non-consensual psychological experiment of this attention economy. And that really does worry me. because it tends to amplify the least rigorous voices

and the voices that tend to not really value nuance or common ground or really any effort at sort of finding the middle. So that is a concern of mine because I think what we've seen is erosion in just basic epistemology. Certainly we've seen a lot of erosion in trust of the, institutions of liberal democracy that have long kept us semi-stable. And in many cases,

those institutions have done a lot of insult and embarrassment to themselves. I mean, I'm talking about, you know, media, government, institutions of higher learning, certainly food system, uh, pharma, etc. You know, a lot of these institutions have really done a lot to undermine public trust in them. And yet at the same time, there is so many sort of misaligned incentives or perverse incentives to continue to sort of burn down these institutions instead of actually making them better. And this does concern me because I don't really know what's on the other side of liberal democracy. You know, I don't hear a lot of really thoughtful, cogent alternatives to it. you know, outside of, you know, tyranny and despotism and cliptocracy, etc., which I feel

we're sort of like on the quasi-verge of at this very moment. So, yeah, you know, that's a complicated answer. You know, I'm really dedicated to creating a platform and a true marketplace of ideas where the best and most thoughtful ideas can cream to the top, if you will. support that kind of freedom to have those difficult, stressful, thorny conversations that tend to yield the best and most reasoned ideas. And I'm not sure we're really having them as a culture right now. What I see is sort of a sprint to the thinnest edges of the branch on all sides. You know, we tend to be more and more and more extreme. And when I look at healthy systems, whether they are

economic or political or physiological or psychological, I think the signature of well-being and health is homeostasis, it's finding balance, it's finding the middle. So when I look at systems that are pushing to the edges of the extremes, that seems to indicate to me that there's a lot of dis-ease there. It's going to get your perspective on that. It's interesting because I look at sort of my, the group that I know and all the different places that I've lived in and just what the general sentiment is. I feel like in a weird way, I see just a lot of people, regardless of what side of the political aisle they were on. I've just seen a lot more people come to what I see as sort of like becoming like sensible centrist with a lot of stuff. Cool. Well, introduce me to some.

I even look at like just the media that people are paying attention to. And I'm not saying that there aren't the extreme voices that are out there, I've seen more people being willing to have a conversation about topics in health and things that are contributing to the rate of chronic disease and general problems. Like, health is really like more mainstream than ever. Yeah. You know, and I think that there will always be sound bites and social media clips, but when I just look at like how people feel, what they're paying attention to, what they're highlighting, the fact that an entire new group of people from all different edges are thinking about health, I'm like, wow, this is not really the thing that I saw. It was kind of like weird to be healthy. And then now all these people are

talking about health. And I think that, you know, the fact that that conversation's happening and you have different ways that people could potentially be entering into it, I don't know, that makes me pretty hopeful about stuff. Me too. I can't believe that these kinds of conversations we're on chronic disease that are in the zeitgeist right now. They're fully mainstreamed where like two years ago, three years ago, you know, we were out there picketing like, hey, pay attention to us. It's really cool to pick up, you know, any media, but like I see the New York Times every day pretty much has some, you know, sort of feature on one of these things. And obviously other more independent media is very, very focused on it. And I think that that's

a really a great thing. I just get concerned around sort of Faustian bargains. you know, that all of a sudden, the only way you can actually make change around, you know, food systems is to also think that to embrace people that think that like climate change is a hoax or something. So this is the problem. Yeah, I think that's natural part of it. It's kind of like the flip side is like during the BLM riots that we were sort of seeing that were there, there was a lot of conversation like, we just need to burn the whole system down. Yeah. Right? So you get those sort of things that happen that are out there. And I think, smart people are like, look, we can understand that people are feeling very emotional about

these things, especially people who don't feel like they've been heard or other components. But, you know, when it does, are there certain aspects of any topic? You know, like, I think the challenge always was if we can't have within a topic of, hey, are there parts of, I was somebody like Al Gore, inconvenient truth, I saw that. I'm like, oh my gosh, like, yes. I'm in. I get it. And as you read a little bit more and you see and you go into each subtopic, you're like, okay, great.

Here's the part that like makes sense. Oh, here's the part that I had no idea. Here's all this shit that I had no idea about when it came to the conversation around nuclear, the good, the bad, the ugly. Nobody was even willing to have that conversation in the circles that I was paying attention to because it was like, oh, if we go into that, that's the forbidden fruit. So I'm seeing a lot more sort of forbidden fruits sort of fall to the wayside and at least we can look at everything independently.

looking to say, hey, are you for this thing? Are you against this thing? Let's talk about every single one that's there. Like one that I learned about recently that I have no idea if it's real or not, but I want to look into it. Is like, are any of these excessive beached whale things that we're seeing? Is there any truth at all related to the wind farms that are being created? Like, have you heard this whole theory that's out there? Not really. I don't know. I mean, I've just seen little memes. I've seen the memeified version. Well, one of the guys that was the author of the book, Samfran Sicko, which was talking about how our very progressive approach to maybe drug, dealing with the drug and addiction crisis could backfire on a city and lead to all these

unintended consequences and things like that. I think his name is Michael something. He tackled this whole component. Now, former me drew the Al Gore inconvenient truth is like, how dare you talk about wind, you know? and I don't want to be that way with any topic. It's like, oh, let me learn about that. Like I was reading, you know, a month ago, I was reading this book, the name is blanking me, but it's the history of how Lyme disease evolved and how we were bioengineering,

it, you know, gain a function and we were looking at developing like society, the government, Lyme, as genuinely like a bioengineered drug and that we could use against our enemies and how the theory around Lyme disease in Lyme, Massachusetts, is that this basically ended up leaking. And there's a lot of strong evidence that's there. A professor from Stanford University who was involved in the book was talking about all this stuff. And I'm like, I had no idea.

So I want to just be open. And that doesn't mean that I'm going to be convinced of everything. But at least I'm willing to hear the conversation that's happening. Also, too, I feel like people are not dumb, right? People start to pay attention, especially in our world of like, think about how many things in the health world to bring it back to kind of some of the concepts in your book, right? Yeah. I don't know your full story, but largely, I can imagine some of your stories kind of like mine.

I grew up in a world where it was the plant-based world. I did like the raw food diet for a long time. And some of the things that people would say back in the day that I drank the Kool-Aid on was like, you know, animals don't eat cook food. You know, you got to eat raw food. Like that's what we're biologically designed. I believe that for years. I believe- That makes you fat and sugar is good for you, all these things.

Or that doesn't make you fat. Yeah, right? Right. Or that. Yeah. Like it could be all of those things in between. And along with it, even this feeling on like, I know one of the things that was inside the book, like even prioritizing protein, think about how many people have changed their minds over the last few years, even though that data and evidence was around for, you know, years, the science around protein synthesis. And you can get it from a lot of different sources. You can get it from vegetarian other things. But I literally used to tell people way back in the day before I had a podcast or anything, before I even was

introduced to this whole world of functional medicine, I would tell people like, okay, how does a gorilla get its protein? Right? Yeah, okay, that sounds great. Well, actually a gorilla eats a lot of protein because they eat a lot of quantity of food. They're eating like a, you know, a third of their body weight every single day. So that's how they get it, right? And they're eating all day long. So the idea that like gorillas don't eat protein is like kind of crazy. So, you know, coming back to just even some of the Constance of your book, there's a lot of things that we've all changed our mind on, and then we incorporate it in. And I hear you saying, like, you know, try it on for size, incorporated this stuff.

And I feel like people are a lot smarter than we think they are. And they'll listen to a lot of different sources, and they'll kind of make up their mind about it. Well, one of the stress protocols that I actually walked backwards into is very related to this. Tell me. So obviously, I was very focused early on around, like, physiologic. stress protocols, many of which we've talked about fast and cold therapy, heat therapy, resistance training, light therapy, etc. The most difficult stressor, self-imposed stressor, was actually psychosocial for me. So I'll just set a little bit of context. And this relates to

leaning in to stressful conversations. So at the beginning of 2020 or in March, when we were kind of anchoring into poor lockdown, Jake, who's my co-founder at commune, he's like, Jeff, you should really write a weekly newsletter. It's like people are feeling very frightened right now. They're very alone. And they would really benefit from, you know, having something that was rigorously researched every week, but just also like just little buoys of hope, you know, to navigate the choppy waters of COVID.

So naively, I agree to do this. And it was a pretty big email list at that juncture, probably about 1.2 million people. and I was writing an article every Sunday. And so, but pretty significant article, like 1,500,000 words, something like that. And then like three or four weeks and I was like, I'm over a literary barrel. You know, I've got to produce all that content every week. And fortunately for me, but somewhat unfortunately for that, I guess the rest of the world, you know, 2020 provided tons of fodder to talk about, right, and to write about.

So I was writing about the most thorny issues, you know, COVID, obviously, but also, you know, the reckoning around racial justice in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder and then the election and QAnon and Trumpistan and everything else in between. I was including my personal email on these missives that I would send out every Sunday. And Monday morning I would wake up and there would be this like deluge of a probing. I'm cresting the bow of my inbox. And it wasn't just recrimination. I mean, there was a lot of emails that were just very encouraging and, you know, very thankful and very grateful. But I'd probably get 100 a week of people that just had some problem with me.

That over 2,000 words or some turn of phrase or some concept would have, like, insulted them so deeply that they felt the need to reach out and let me know. And they definitely did not hesitate to let me know. And most of these emails were just like full of expletives and there was nothing I could really do about it. But there was often like very thoughtful ones, you know? And I just kind of ground this in like in a very specific example. So like in 2020, like in August, there seemed to be enough data surfacing that, you know, the people that were contracting the disease most severely, you know, ending in hospitalizations or sometimes fatality,

tended to be people that had multiple core morbidities or, you know, obesity and diabetes prevalence. And obviously that's turned out to be very, very true in retrospect. But even at that time, pretty early on, there seemed to be indication of that. And I was just trying to write a thoughtful essay about where we were. And so I was doing the best research that I could. And I wrote this essay. And, man, I really offended a lot of people with that. that particular essay because, of course, there was also a simultaneous body positivity movement

happening at the same time. And so people felt like I was really shaming them for being overweight. And I was just actually writing about the health implications of obesity as it pertained to this particular disease. And I had also written tons about being a chubby kid and like dealing with it and myself image issues and my self-worth issues. But I offended a lot of people. I would kind of exchange emails with folks. And after like three or four exchanges, I would ask them if they would like to join me on an hour long Zoom call. And over the course- Individually or you were doing it with kind of a group? Individually. It's a lot of time. It was a lot of time. And this is generally what I call my great David Copperfield routine

because I made most people disappear at that point. Most people were like, I'm out. But 26 people took me up on it. So in August and September 2020, I put aside an hour, a couple hours every Monday and Tuesday afternoon to have hour long Zoom calls with people that did not agree with me. And I just gave you one example, but they were also coming from the far right, from the far left, all over the place, you know. And I just really committed myself to this process. And, you know, for those of you who listened to the earlier part of the podcast, you might realize that this might be very difficult for me because I was a people pleaser.

I didn't like offending people, right? And at first, when I would get this kind of recrimination, I would feel like very personally attacked, very defensive. I would stay up all night, sort of brooding over like my rejoinder and like, blah, da, da, like holding that little ember of resentment, like waiting to throw it the next morning, of course. The great moral of that story is I was the one getting burned. You know, I was not sleeping.

And I was like, so I was like, you know, over time, I started to actually really build what I call my psychological immune system. So we're very familiar with our physiological immune system. You know, we build our immunity through a certain amount of exposure to pathogens, viruses, and bacteria, you know, such that like our B cells spin up these little proteins and then ding, ding, ding, ding, they hit the right one. And we call those antibodies and those antibodies and then neuter. are the antigens on these pathogens, and then they have memory, and it's amazing. But in a metaphorical sense, you can also build your psychological immune system through a certain amount of exposure to insult. And I had plenty of it.

And so by the time August 2020 rolled around, I was very unaffected by being insulted. In fact, I became like quasi-triggerable in some ways. In fact, I even looked forward to being... you know, not insulted per se, but like I look, I look forward to a little bit of conflict. So when I started to go into these Zoom calls with people, I was very, very emotionally regulated by it, you know, going in. And, you know, if you remember back then, we were still developing our fluency with Zoom, right? So I would get on a call with one of my detractors. And, you know, people would be like, you know, jabbing at buttons.

I'm on mute. I'm still on mute or whatever. And we would exchange, you know, a few pleasantries. And then, Drew, it was so interesting. You know, these conversations took on such a consistent pattern. Is I would sit there and they would tell me their entire life story for 45 minutes. And what I realized in short order is that I was essentially creating a safe and trustworthy set and setting for people to be seen and to be heard. I got better at this skill over time. And I started to actually consider it part of one of my adversity memetics, candidly, is like the importance of actually leaning in to stressful conversations and the possibility of what's on the other side of them.

And so, you know, I didn't have any training at that juncture in nonviolent communication. I subsequently did go get some because I was so interested in this whole world of being able to connect with people that disagree with you. And then I, you know, I started to build my own sort of regimen or protocol around actually having how to have these really stressful, hard, thorny conversations. And so there's just like a couple key tips. Please. You know, because I think we live in a world where we tend to avoid stressful conversations, right? And that's okay.

Sometimes it is best to create space and disengage, particularly when. the behavior is really odious if it's racist or abusive or really neglectful. What sits on the other side of these stressful conversations really can represent a world that our hearts can of imagine as possible. The first key to having a stressful conversation is doing work on yourself, is becoming emotionally regulated. And that could be through building your psychological immune system, as I've described. But it also could be through breathwork, through meditation,

even through the psychological benefits of ice plunging or fasting candidly. So you have to go into stressful conversations yourself emotionally regulated. You have to be what Stephen Porges called sort of inventual vagal activation. You know, you can't be shut down, you know, totally in your parasympathetic, but you can't also be amygdala hijacked because if you come into a conversation all up here, it's never going to go anywhere, right? You're just going to fight. So you come into a stressful conversation regulated.

that creates the opportunity for coherence and attunement. And then one of the key skills to develop is really listening, deep listening to understand, and not listening to respond. And this is really hard because even in our conversation today, you'll say something. And I'm so excited about what you're saying that I'll almost interrupt you, right? And vice versa, just because we're in the, flow of each other. But also sometimes that makes a good podcast. Totally. Right? Like you're here.

I want you to interrupt me if you feel like you have something to say. So there's also that side of it too. But I get the general point of what you're making. When we're sitting with somebody, especially where there's this bridge that's there, if we go in with this idea that I want to get what I want to say in, we're thwarting the energy of the conversation and everybody can pick it up. Yeah. And oftentimes we are concocting a rejoinder or a rebuttal in our heads. before our adversary has even finished speaking. We don't even know what point they're going to make. We're already so obsessed with making our own point.

Well, even the idea that we've labeled them our adversary, that's already a thing, right? Coming in with this idea, there are our adversary. So this was a big one, you know, really listening to understand and not to respond. It actually came out of experiences that I used to have in Japan. I used to go to Japan quite a bit on business. and I was pitching bands. I was in the music industry.

And I'd go into like some CEO's office or Tshibi EMI or something. And I'd pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. And I'd be done. Like, that's the best band ever. They got the best songs. They'd sell more tickets than anybody. And then there would be this long pregnant silence afterwards.

And I was so uncomfortable that I always felt like I needed to fill that void. And then I'd start in pitching again. And, you know, this recurred over and over. Finally, I asked our interpreter. I was like, what's up with this? Every time I go in and pitch my bands, like I get this silent. She's like, oh, no, no, no. That's a sign of respect that they actually listened to everything that you had to say.

Then they synthesized it. Then they formed their response. So I started to actually really use that. And even when people on these Zoom calls would stop talking finally, they'd exhaust themselves. I'd always leave a little bit of space before I then started. and that really helped them feel heard. Like I had really heard them. You know?

Another really good technique to having stressful conversations is seek connection, not solution. Okay, so this was another thing that I learned kind of in the process of doing these calls is as people were talking, I started to notate areas of their life. that also converged with my own life. Like I have three daughters, you know, maybe they had daughters.

Oh, they were born in Chicago. I was born in Chicago too. Oh, they used to drive cross country. I drove cross country for nine summers in a row, you know, all these things, whatever they happened to be. And then when it was my turn to speak, I wouldn't start in among, you know,

the best points of my argument. I would be like, oh, that's so cool, you know, I've got daughters too. I know what that's like. And really focusing on these areas of connection, created this sense of really deep human connection beyond whatever frivolous, petty argument that we were having around, you know, one issue or another. So that was another one.

Seek connection, not solution. And then I think the last one that I would share with you, and there are plenty of others, is this technique called steel manning. Are you familiar with steel manning? Yeah. Yeah. So it came about because it's the opposite of straw manning. So a straw man argument is when you basically take someone's point and you basically discard it through an ad hominem like insulting them or you kind of distort their argument.

Like if you might say to like, hey, Jeff, you know, we should really invest more money in renewable energy, you know. And I said, oh, Drew, you just want to put everyone in oil and gas out of business, something like that. You know, I basically just, I didn't really address what you were saying. I just kind of like distorted it because it's very easy to knock down a strong. a man, a man made of straw. So very difficult to knock down a man made of steel. And that's why it's called steel manning. So with a steel manning technique, you listen to someone's point of view. And then instead of rebutting it, you actually reiterate the best portions of their argument back to them. And this has a number of impacts. A, it makes them feel seen and heard again. And, and

And there's more likelihood of compromise there because they're like, oh, that person really did register the best parts of my arguments. But what it also does is it fortifies your own position because you have to actually consider the best parts of an opposing position. And I found that to be just incredibly helpful and yield amazing results. And, you know, the output. of these 26 hour-long Zoom calls that I had wasn't necessarily agreement, but I made this kind of rolodex of what I call frenemies, you know,

of people that still text me today. And they're like, I hate you. They sometimes they do with a smiley face, though. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, but you know, but there is the playfulness now to our rapport, our repartee. And some of them like are hardcore Trumpers and some of them are super BLMers. and they're all over the place.

And they're sending me videos and they're trying to like nudge me a little bit. And it's just, but we've come to a new place because we've found some degree of common humanity in each other. For sure. And man, the world needs that. Definitely. And what makes me feel is also it's like,

you know, for the person who's sitting here and listening to this conversation, you know, asking yourself, have you ever changed your mind about something? Right? Every single one of us has changed our mind about something, right? Are there people in your life

that you really look at it. It could be your kids, you know, piano teacher. It could be their high school soccer coach, somebody that you may not know their full details, but you know that they feel very differently about you, about certain subjects. It could be an old friend from college, whatever. And you still have that person in your life

and you still care about them, right? Just because somebody has a belief about something, a view on something, doesn't discard all these other aspects that are there. And you see this the most when if you had the fortune ability to travel to other countries, there's plenty of other countries where people have very different views about women's rights or this component or that component, but they're being maybe hospitable to you in the moment. They're taking care of you.

They're doing this and people often travel and they say, wow, what a lovely, you know, culture. We are filled in our life with people who have difference of opinions with us. How fragile do we have to become as a human being to feel that that person, belief, which is a thought, you can't even physically hold it, is so strong that it makes us not have equanimity in our own heart about stuff, right? It's like, I want to feel so content, even if I disagree with somebody that I can just still see them for who they are and what they're contributing to this world or even be civil and say, okay, great, you and I don't have the same views on things. I'm going to be civil about this situation. It just makes us much more resilient for

everything that we're dealing with in life. Yeah, well, we also, it also, it also provides a possibility of progress through common ground and compromise. I mean, essentially every success in humanity has been predicated on our unique special ability to cooperate flexibly at scale. Like, everything big that we've built as a species has required some degree of a large scale cooperation. And I mean, I was, running these seminars in the fall, this past fall, on how to have stressful conversations. And at the end, I would get Trump supporters and Harris supporters on stage. And they would essentially look each other in the eye and say, here's my greatest hope.

Here's my greatest loss. You know, here's the most important relationships in my life. They would actually say that to each other. And then I'd flip them. and say, hey, tell your quote-unquote adversary's narrative. And then they would. And then they say, oh, then I'd ask them, like, why are you, you know, supporting this candidate, that candidate?

And then they do the steel manning thing of like, oh, yeah, this is why this person is supporting that candidate. And at the end, they would hug these people, like in the most incendiary time in an era of just intense political vitriol where the invective is so deep that we barely can have a conversation, I mean, I can't even have a conversation, you know, that I would see this before my eyes, people then hugging each other and seeing and recognizing each other's common humanity. I was like, there is something to this. And here's the last bit of this is that if you can have a hard, stressful conversation with someone you don't even really know, could it be possible

to have that conversation with the people that are most dear and important to you? And we tend to avoid those, you know, like your kids, your best friends, your parents, like my parents are in their 80s. You know, this really propelled me to have some of the more difficult conversations with my parents before I can't have them with them anymore. And so I really do think that it is these conversations that separate us, you know, from a better world. And I generally, the build on that, you know, as we're winding down here, I generally feel that your behavior, yours, mine, anybody who's listening, if we're just hyper judgmental on the world, a group of people, an industry, a situation, whatever's there, we're not willing to have the layers of conversations that are there.

That's a good indication of how you are with yourself. You know, the most judgmental people I know are not the happiest people I know. In fact, the happiest people I know, even if they have very strong opinions about things, it's not like they're zend out Buddhist monks. Even if they have very strong opinions about things, they don't operate in the world with this sledgehammer of constant outward judgment on situations and things that are there. There's a little bit more of a recognition of the layers that are there. And that's generally how they would approach himself. Yeah, because they have developed an ability.

to emotionally regulate, probably, to move back to center. And again, I would say that all of the protocols that I embrace in my life, that's the one thing that they share. It's like, does this help me move back to center? Does this meditation practice help me move back to some degree of equipoise or emotional equilibrium? Does this physical practice help me move back into some form of physiological homeostasis? Does it actually help me balance blood sugar levels? Balance pH balance, balance, you know, the seesaw between excitatory neurotransmitters

and inhibitory neurotransmitters. Does it balance my circadian rhythm? Am I secreting cortisol at the right time? Melatonin at the right time? Glucigan at the right time. insulin at the right time. Am I balanced between growth pathways and anabolic pathways like mTOR and restoration pathways like AMPK, et cetera.

So you really can think about your organism and your psychology as just an endless pursuit of sort of dynamic homeostasis and then build your protocols on the way you live your life, you know, to pursue that goal. Yeah, when I was reading your book and going through it in preparation of the interview, I thought like either you kick your or life will kick your ass and life will still kick your ass, but you'll be much more prepared for it if you're adopting this good stress in your life, right? Things will happen. We just gotten through this period, depending on when this interview is released of some really horrific fires in LA,

multiple of our friends have lost their homes, all their possessions, other stuff. There's a lot that is going on in life that we will not be able to know and that will catch us sometimes off guard. but the more that we're exhibiting ourselves and dabbling and dipping into these good stressors, no matter how tough they are, like a ice bath or a cold plunge, I truly feel that it makes us more resilient for anything that there is to come. Totally. And what do we really truly want out of life? A lot of money.

Fair enough. But, you know, there is this picture of a life of ease, right? Just collapsed on the couch, binging Netflix, in a snugly 72-degree thermoregulated environment, like eating some hog andaws. Okay, you know, sure, that's delicious from time to time. That's not the true ease that we're really looking for in life. You know, we know the true ease when we taste it.

It tastes like, candidly like the tomato that we grew, not the ethylene gassed one that we bought at the grocery store. And growing that tomato yourself is a little bit inconvenient. You know, you have to enrich the soil. You have to plant the seed. You have to prune the plant just right. You have to water it every day. You have to make sure it's getting enough sun, et cetera.

And so this is really, the ease that we're looking for just doesn't really come for free, you know? And we know it when we taste it. We know it when we're in it. I mean, like right now for the last 90 minutes, we've been completely engaged with each other, sort of outside of linear time and space, we're just completely all here. And that is like a representation of like the life that we're looking for. It's not, it's not like some candy-coded thing. It's actually like when we sort of lose sense of linear time.

It's like oftentimes we experience that in like collective enterprise or in like like some sort of creative endeavor, sometimes in sports, right, where we have perfect awareness of our body and space and time and we might be tired, but boy, we're never going to stop. That's often called flow state. And I think that that is sort of reframing that life that we're looking for. And that life is available to us, but not without of leaning in to the edges of our comfort zone and experiencing some forms of discomfort. some health conferring forms.

Well, Jeff, I super appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking about the beauty and the joy and the strength that comes into our life when we step into a little bit of like that anti-fragilness by embracing good stress. By the time this podcast is out, people can order, pre-order the book. Yeah. Good stress. We'll have the link to it in the show notes below. Anything else you want to say about the book before I also ask you about everything else you

up to, common you and anything else you want to plug? No, that's it. I mean, I was fortunate enough to scoombo. Upup, Goodstress.com. There we go. That's a good domain name. I know. So you can check it out there.

And, you know, really, you know, this book is a distillation of a lot of wisdom from other people. And, you know, you and I have spent a lot of time together over the years. I've been able to really mine the mental gladstones of so many incredible doctors, a lot of amazing female doctors who have been so generous with me. And, you know, I have the honor of being able to platform many of them on commune. And so, you know, for people that aren't familiar with it, it is essentially a masterclass platform for well-being. You can go there and find all sorts of information and courses on integrative and functional medicine, but yoga and mindfulness and chie-gong and Tai Chi and even regenerative farming. And essentially everything you need to be holistically well.

And that's, you know, really the, you know, the work of my life right now. And so I encourage people, if they're interested, go to onecommun.com. That's all any commune.com. And yeah, if you're inclined to support my work, you know, buy my book. I love to write and I will always write a tremendous amount for free. But in order to write a lot for free that I think helps to contribute to people's well-being. Every once in a while, I have to sell something. So help me out.

Well, the link is in the show notes. Check it out. Goodstress.com. Jeff, thanks for coming on the podcast, brother. Thanks a lot, Drew. Appreciate you.