Know Thyself - E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Jeff Krasno, the visionary founder of Commune, shares how to unlock your human potential in our modern world.  He and André reflect on the transformative power of surrender, particularly during the harrowing LA fires. Jeff shares his insights on navigating adversity and the importance of embracing "good stress" through practices like cold plunges, exercise, and meditation. As they delve deeper, Jeff discusses the pursuit of health in a world often plagued by illness. He shares his thoughts on unlocking human potential and the practices that can lead to optimal wellness.  Whether you’re seeking to improve your physical health, enhance your mental well-being, or deepen your spiritual connection, this episode is filled with valuable insights that can inspire and motivate you on your journey. Sponsor: Convenient and affordable therapy with BetterHelp. Get started today and enjoy 10% off your first month: https://www.betterhelp.com/knowthyself André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ 0:00 Intro  2:17 LA Fires: Surrendering in the Chaos 12:23 Why We Need Good Stress 20:14 Modern Living Contradicts our Biology  27:43 Ad: BetterHelp 29:21 The Tao of Health: Reclaim Your Sovereignty  43:19 Attaining Homeostasis in the Body 49:07 Impermanence & Interdependance 1:00:08 What Nature Teaches Us 1:06:42 Working With Wim Hoff & Unlocking Human Potential 1:14:52 Mortality and Health Span 1:25:44 Power of Mindfulness 1:33:34 Conclusion  ___________ Jeff is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being. He hosts the Commune podcast, interviewing a wide variety of health experts and luminaries from Andrew Huberman and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey and Gabor Maté. Jeff pens a personal weekly essay titled “Commusings” that explores spirituality, wellness and culture and is distributed to over one million subscribers every Sunday. Jeff is the author of Good Stress, a collection of wellness protocols that he developed to reverse his diabetes, lose 60 pounds and reclaim his health at age 50. Jeff and his better three-quarters, Schuyler Grant, own and operate Commune Topanga, a 10-acre wellness center and production lab where they host regular retreats together featuring yoga, cold plunging, sauna bathing, lectures and story-telling. Jeff & Schuyler have three beautiful daughters, Phoebe, Lolli and Micah. They currently live in Los Angeles, California. Pre-order New Book “Good Stress”: https://www.onecommune.com/goodstressbook#preorder Website: https://www.jeffkrasno.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeffkrasno/ ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

We so often associate health with downward spirals, but upward spirals are completely possible. In this day and age, we're largely choosing the way we die with very, very little thoughtfulness. We essentially evolved for a certain amount of stress, but we've engineered our lives at every single turn, often in the name of profit, for ease and convenience. Doing hard things has incredible benefits. And it also makes doing other hard things easier. It really doesn't take that long for your body to gain momentum, and it is available to people. Health exists along this dynamic spectrum. We have a certain amount of jurisdiction over our trajectory on that spectrum, sort of embracing

this idea that I am process and not product. I'm not even close to the same person than I was when I began this conversation. Hey everyone, welcome back to Know Thyself. It's been an interesting past couple weeks just hopping back on the podcast saddle. And I missed you guys. I'm joined today with a dear friend Jeff Krasno, who is creator, founder of One Commune, which is an amazing, really pioneering organization community podcast. He also is a co-creator of Wonderless, which was a series and is a series.

and is a series of global wellness events. And he also lives in the same town as I did, which we were just talking beforehand about the wild journey of these LA fires and them encroaching, you know, in my case, a few houses away, very close to him as well on the canyon where we live. And, you know, there's going to be a lot of themes,

I'm sure that'll show up throughout this podcast about what stresses, how anxiety shows up, how modern conveniences and comfort, leads to chronic disease and so much. But Jeff, thanks for being here, man. Yeah, great to be here with you, Andre. I so appreciate it. And obviously, I was thinking about you over the last couple weeks as our greater community here in Los Angeles has been grappling and enduring these fires. And, yeah, I mean, fortunately, of course, our locations were spared. And, uh, and, uh,

Yeah, I mean, I have a bit of survivors' guilt associated with it because obviously we both have communities that have lost a tremendous amount. And, you know, when the fires first started, I really surrendered to our place, commune to Panga, potentially being reduced to ash. And this was a moment kind of where the spiritual rubber sort of meets the hard, unforgiving reality, right? And, you know, part of my spiritual practice is non-attachment, right? That I can be here and now with my full, passionate self,

but unattached to result. Of course, this was part of the Buddhist teachings, but then when you're faced with the reality, right, of like, oh, my God, this place. that I've built where I've forged so many deep, profound relationships, this place is at risk. It might disappear. And in a way, like crisis often does, it forces you to really examine, like the nature of things, and say, what is the most important, potent component?

Why would I, why is it, why do I have such sadness inside? And of course, as I meditated on that, it wasn't for risk of actually losing the physical place, per se. Of course, that would be hard and logistically difficult. But it was really more about potentially losing the container for community and connection. And it helped me to actually focus on, really, I suppose, what makes life most worthwhile in the first place. And sometimes, like, crisis helps you do that. Yeah, I was reading funny enough, this caption from John Mayer of all people. One of the things he wrote was, next to the immeasurable loss of life is the loss of proof

of life. And I remember just, you know, moments after getting the evacuation notice for where we live. Coming back into the studio, looking around. here and being like, wow, I'm so grateful to have built this and how this is really an antenna for a much larger community, likewise, where you live. And it's so surreal to see it, you know, and permanently be so held and, you know, literally by which way the wind blows. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a practice in stoicism that could be considered kind of morbid, like many of the stoic practices. But there's, there's a practice in stoicism. But there's a practice. not morose at all, actually, when you really embody them.

And it could be sort of a negative visualization if you categorize it that way. But there's this practice of imagining that you're doing a thing for the very, very last time. That I'll never make this coffee again. I'll never sit here in front of you again. I'll never talk to my mom or dad on the phone again, whatever. Could be small and petty, could be profound. But in that, in sitting in that, there is a profound gratitude, right, that bubbles up from under the crust of consciousness often. And then you come back to the realization that, no, I do get to do that thing again, you know.

And I'm sure that that's related to the feeling that you probably had coming back here, which is like, oh, my God. I am so grateful that this does exist. And often in life, we begin to take things for granted that sort of appear in our cotidian life. And then every once in a while we're reminded, oh my God, you know, the bounty of what I have, I should wake up and be grateful for that every year. Yes. It's so interesting to hold that.

And the insights that both of us have also garnered in our personal study and meditation practices and the people we get to have conversations with about this. And then you're faced with the reality of, you know, being evacuated at least for a couple weeks outside of your home, not knowing for sure if it's going to still be standing. And then, like you mentioned, that survivor's guilt of so many, like, you know, dozens of friends of both of ours who have lost their home and don't have the luxury of coming back to it like we have after a couple weeks, you know, where there's over 24 human deaths, over 10,000 homes. burned in LA and the Palisades and Altadena and Beyond fires and 100, 200 plus billion

in damage, however you want to estimate it, just insane, the largest urban fire to have ever existed, right? So surreal. It's very interesting and very testing. It is very testing to put into practice the practice. That's right. Yeah, I mean, we were evacuated from here, obviously, from Topanga and then also from Laurel. So I was evacuated twice in two days, essentially. You know, found myself, I guess on that one Wednesday night, sleeping on the floor in Studio City at one of my daughter's friends' houses, staring up at the ceiling and asking myself, like,

who am I? Who really am I without all my stuff? You know? And, of course, like, texting endlessly with my... brother who lives in Altadena and you know listening to the decimation of that neighborhood which is really sometimes gets short shrift in comparison to the palisades but what happened in the Eden fire over on the east side of Los Angeles in that Altadena neighborhood was just as awful really so yeah I mean

at the same time I mean I lived in New York City during 9-11. And in the wake of that tragedy, I witnessed something that I'm witnessing here, which is really tragedy and collective grief, I guess I would call it, sometimes really elicits people's better angels, right? And the outpouring of generosity

has been something quite, beautiful to watch. I mean, I remember I didn't buy my own beer for like three months in the wake of 9-11. You walk out on the subway and there would be people of all colors and creeds and races and religions, etc. Like giving people hugs, carrying their groceries for them, buying them sandwiches, whatever. It was a moment in time, and of course that faded away. But where people's munificence and philanthropic instincts were tickled and brought to the the surface. Yeah, I saw that so much so and just, yeah, immense gratitude for the firefighters who held the line, you know, outside of where we're at and it's just so inspiring to see

community, at least where we're at and throughout L.A., people activating, you know, because when you find out, okay, you've been spared, now, you know, empathy and, you know, the sympathetic response for, you know, wanting to be there for other people is really amazing. and often what is actually needed is to take action and to, you know, help and organize and raise money and do the things to really support the people. Because, you know, this is a long and during thing, especially the air and water quality here. And I was like, a lot is kind of in the unknown. But grateful, very grateful to be here with you today back in the saddle. Totally.

And this is where our emotional regulation techniques come in handy, right? and being able to, you know, manage stress and see opportunity in stress sometimes. But certainly, you know, your practice and in my practice, though they probably slightly deviate, they share a common goal, which is one of emotional regulation, where we can bring ourselves back to center and leverage our better qualities, our neomomalian brain and our centers of rationalization. and reason to make good decisions and to treat people well. So these are where those practices become probably more important than ever.

It really confronts us with, you know, the inherent nature, which is always already existing, when a crisis happens and you're like the blaring possibility of your house being burned down is like very obvious and kind of gross and dense in that, right? and it is a, and at least for me, an invitation to remember that is the impermanent nature with all aspects of life, you know, with everyone we love, all the things that we cherish, all the memories that we hold, and ultimately our own physical body, you know. And so, again, putting that stuff into practice has been been important. And alongside this time in the next coming months, you have a new book coming out called Good Stress, which I think highlights a lot of the really important reminders that we need currently, societally, culturally, as we've lost our way in so many different ways. And so when you look at stress to start diving in here,

how do you delineate and how much delineation is really worthwhile here between the mental and the physical, the physiological and the psychological stress? Because I think we live in a Western society, which really likes to separate a lot of things, instead of looking at the human body as an integrative holistic system, which I know you love to do. So how do you kind of view what stress is?

is and how it affects our mind and body. Yeah, well, I feel like I'm sort of a public relations agent for stress on some level, because we have a very negative association with stress in our modern age and justifiably. But when you kind of untangle the nature of stress, it is actually a very beneficial, adaptive response at its core. I mean, you live up here in the hills, you probably hike and the hills every once in a while, I hike, you know. And we might come across a whole host of different wild animals, like coyotes or, you know, maybe a rattlesnake, right? So what happens?

That happened to me, very. I was working out outside, naked in the sun one day. And I turn around, there's a rattlesnake, literally a foot away from me. There you go. And so when that happened, you had a physiological response to that, right? And a very adaptive one. You know, your heart rate and respiratory rate started to increase. Like your liver secreted just the right amount of glucose and sent it to the extremities in order to fight or flee. But also all these other things were happening. Your pupils were dilating.

The aperture of your attention was getting super, super narrow. You would become self-obsessed for good reason and distrustworthy of the world around you. And that serves your biological imperative to survive. So this is coded and engineered in the human organism in response to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as a positive, adaptive response.

Now, in your case, what happened to that rattlesnake? Probably just took a look at Andre and said, you know, Andre is probably not going to be on the specials menu today. I'm going to just slither off into the tall grasses. I'm assuming something like that happened, right? Not really.

I captured it. You captured it. Okay, good for you. It released to far away. Okay. But, you know, essentially your immediate reaction might have been one of involuntary response, but then you were able to leverage, you know, your conscious top-down pressure to basically push down on that involuntary bottom-up response and regulate.

And this is what happens. I mean, if you're on a trail and the, you know, snake slithers away, your body returns to homeostasis. And that's totally normal. And that's good. your heart rate and respiratory rate decrease. You know, your aperture opens back up. You become more trustworthy of the world around you. And that's great.

That's adaptive. But I think in this culture, the rattlesnake almost never leaves the path. So we're constantly and chronically stressed. And that's really the difference between how we experience bad, chronic, modern stress. and what I would call sort of paleolithic good stress. And if you begin to actually look at the nature of stress, there are so many mechanisms in the human body that are adaptive. I mean, if you were to go, let's say, to a high altitude,

or if we were just to sit here and to, like, hold our breath for a while, might not be really great for the podcast. But over time, let's say if we held our breath, for a minute, we would have sort of a glut of carbon dioxide. So that's called like hypercapnia and a dearth of oxygen. That's called hypoxia, right? Now, too much hypoxia, and the podcast would meet an untimely end, because too much hypoxia, your brain is not going to get enough oxygen, and you'll sign off one last time here. I know that I sell. But the right amount of hypoxia, actually triggers this unbelievable adaptive response in the human body.

So you have these little chemo receptors right here on the side of your carotid arteries, and they say, oh my God, Andre's got a buildup of carbon dioxide. What are we going to do? Hey, make some more red blood cells down there because we need additional couriers. Stop doing that. We need additional couriers for oxygen because oxygen then gets shuttled to our cells and our mitochondria for energy production. Our mitochondria then becomes hyper-efficient

at making energy in hypoxic situations. Sort of also brilliantly carbon dioxide mitigates like body pH balance. So your body's going to get a tiny bit more acidic if you hold your breath for a couple minutes. And that's totally adaptive because in that acidity, hemoglobin sort of loses its affinity for oxygen.

So human glim is that little protein in the red blood cells that takes the oxygen and goes, okay, here we're going off to the blood cells. And if it's more likely to release it, that's better for energy production. So this is just like one of hundreds and hundreds of sort of pre-programmed adaptive responses to stress that exist in the human body. But we've largely stripped all of those stressors out of the way that we live. So, like, for example, like nutrient deficiency or calorie restriction is actually totally adaptive. It's really good for us.

Not only does it keep Andre nice and lean and live and a wonderful figure. Thanks, brother. Yeah. But also, it's activating certain metabolic pathways and other enzymes, et cetera, within your body. You know, there's a lot of scientists and measurements. and medical wanks talk about like AMP Kines or whatever. These pathways for restoration and repair in the human body that stimulate these processes like autophagy and cellular cleanup

and all this kind of stuff. These processes were developed in relation to sort of paleolithic stress because in the olden days, you know, back in our hunter-gatherer days on the Serengeti, there would be a calorie paucity as part of winter, right? But now we live in this age where winter never really comes. So it's all calorie abundance all of the time. So the body is just really doing what it's meant to do. It just stores fat away, you know, for a rainy day. But then there's a no rainy day. And so

this is like, I think one of the greatest tensions that exists, in modernity are these evolutionary mismatches, where we essentially evolved for a certain amount of stress. But since the Industrial Revolution and really accelerating over the last 50 or 70 years, we've engineered our lives at every single turn, often in the name of profit, for ease and convenience and that ease is creating a lot of dis-ease and that convenience is creating candidly a lot of inconvenient truths that we have to grapple. with. Yeah, you've said that chronic disease is the cause of chronic ease or the results of chronic ease. And in so many ways, our biology has been hijacked by modern living. And there is that evolutionary

mismatch on so many different levels, right? Yeah. The big max. I love you, I loved you reading about that because there's so many different ways in every area of life of how we're living. So if you were to take a a big overview because of course we could go into every individual system and you know that would take forever but like starting with the overview of it all what would you say are the most important things to remind ourselves of how our current living is directly at odds with how our biology is evolved yeah so i ended up coming up with this little acronym called the big max not just the ones that you buy at the evil m but uh i really i call it the big modern american convenience conveniences, so MAC. And, you know, there's, again, there are so many of them. But if you look at, like,

I think the primary culprits that then create these mismatches, you know, I would say the number one is our food system. So starting in really after World War II, we started to see these massive escalations in obesity, right, in this country and then other obesity-related diseases. That was this time where we started to essentially apply sort of a military industrial mindset to agriculture and to food. This was known as the Green Revolution. And, you know, candidly, it wasn't inspired for McAvelliian purposes. We needed to make enough calories to meet the needs of a very, very growing and escalating population. The problem was, is that we started to create shelf, stable, nutrient-deficient calories and in a surfeit of them such that all that in the palm and then you fast forward now sort of

in the palm of our hand before this podcast would even finish we could literally order up any kind of food stuff in or out of season to your front door and have a feast but this is of course like hijacking our own biology because we were meant to you. endure periods of scarcity, like we talked about before. That kept us healthy. There's so many other examples. I think the other primary one would be just our sedentary lifestyles. Most of us sit at desk jobs.

I think in the United States, 80% of all jobs are desk jobs. So we're sitting, we're having these eight, nine, ten hour periods of sedentariness, right? So we're not moving our body. This flies completely in the face. of how we evolved. You know, we evolved moving all the time. We walked somewhere between, on average, seven to ten miles per day.

So for people sort of managing steps on their eyewatch, that's somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 steps per day. Sort of just baseline level. You know, often against our will, we were forced into a full sprint, right? sometimes being chased by an ungulate or whatever. And then we lifted and carried heavy things, right? We, you know, chopped wood and carried water, etc.

Those were the two activities that first came to mind for you. Reverence is my Buddhist acolysm. But, of course, now we've essentially denuded that from society. And so we sit at these desktops. 94% of our time is spent indoors. You know, again, the body is just doing what it is programmed to do. So there's this, and even, you know, our approach to exercise is very, I guess, sort of reflective of this kind of our productization

or a commodification of everything. So we have 45,000 gyms in the United States. yet our obesity rates continue to raise year over year. Like now, there's somewhere around 44%, 45% obesity rates, not just overweight, obesity rates. So despite having 45,000 places to sweat and grunt, right, on a regular basis, we keep getting more and more unhealthy. So what's going on there?

Well, we tend to productize exercise. And I did this for years where there was. was like a little blip, a little fluorescent blip at the bottom of my Google calendar that says, Jeff will sit, you know, all day, and then he'll go to the gym from like six to six 45 and sweat it out on the treadmill, you know. And that's just, that approach to exercise simply does not work. It obviously does not work. We see, we see that. So as I started to kind of unpack, you know, all of these different evolutionary mismatches, candidly by necessity, because I got very, very, very sick. And somewhat out of curiosity, too, but really I had to address real serious issues in my life.

I began to really examine all of these different aspects of life. And I started to come back to one simple question. How did I evolve? How did I evolve? because this organism is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, millions of years of hominid evolution before that. You know, I am really just the sum total of the intelligence of the universe experiencing itself as me here and now. You know, I am the intelligence brought forward of eight billion years, you know,

know, or 13.8, if you want to go all the way back. So, and I started to try to live in alignment with how I evolved. And that started to, from there, I started to populate kind of an amalgam of what I call good stress protocols, or sometimes the protocols of inconvenience, like putting myself out, testing the edges of my comfort zone. So whether that related to lifting heavy things or temperature regulation or fasting or exposure to light, all those physiological things became very, very central to my practice in life. And then I also started to apply some of those stressors or adversity memetics to my psychosocial life and really started to leave. And really started to lean into really like stressful conversations and pushing myself to have conversations that I really

would have generally avoided. And what I realize is that that doing hard things has incredible benefits. And it also makes doing other hard things easier. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. It's the start of a new year. And isn't it fascinating how so many new year's resolutions are often abandoned by February. If you're in a chapter of life where you're craving more accountability or someone to talk to who can support you from a holistic sense, finding the right therapist or guide can be an absolute game changer. I believe that real growth often comes from unlearning. It's counterintuitive. We tend to think that to achieve what we want in life, we just need to change our actions. But when we dig a little bit deeper, we realize that

so many of our behaviors are just the tip of the iceberg. At the root of it all is our identity that shapes our beliefs, which influence our thoughts. Our thoughts affect our feelings. Those feelings drive our actions, ultimately determining the results that we're going to experience in life. And so if we want to see different results in our life, we need to dig deeper beneath this surface

and explore what's truly at the core of who we are and who are not. That's where the real transformation happens, in my opinion, and I think having a personal guide can serve as a powerful mirror, helping us unlearn old belief systems, heal, and ultimately build a life we desire. And that's where BetterHelp can help. It's entirely online, convenient, and designed to fit your schedule, write your story with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Know Theyself today and get 10% off your first month.

That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com slash Know Theyself. I hope you enjoy it back to the show. Yeah, so from the perspective of sedentary lifestyle, ultra-processed foods, the illusion of social connection through our phones, which aren't actually feeding the needs that we have there and have evolved to, from the information deluge that we get and we're, you know, have access to every terrible thing that's happening on the planet at once. The, like, overwhelm of information processing. I think most people are pretty aware that those are the things that are not built to create more harmony, vitality, and well-being for the human system. And yet, as the saying goes, to know and not to do is not to know. And so you have sort of a philosophy, kind of the Tao of health, that I would love to go over as well, because it creates a powerful framework to reclaim sovereignty. Like, as you say, we are the culmination of billions of years of evolution, this kind of cosmic intelligence cultivating to this human body in mind that is vastly intelligent.

And our behaviors undermine it every single day, often without us realizing how good we can feel. And I think at least the intention for this podcast is to really remind people that being human feels. awesome when our system gets what it's designed to. Yeah, I mean, we so often associate health with downward spirals, but upward spirals are completely possible. And it really doesn't take that long for your body to gain momentum. And the feeling around that is so vibrant and addictive. And it is available to people. But, you know, a lot of my health journey really started with a more of a spiritual quest, if you will. In some ways, there were two inquests converging, sort of a mystical one and a medical one,

because I was deficient in both, candidly. And the more I studied the physical candidly, the more metaphysical truths were revealed. In fact, for anyone listening who is interested in the metaphysical, study the physical, because that is where the foundational intelligence of the cosmos is patterned. So my beginning really required me to take kind of a bio-psychosocial intake of my own life really, kind of an inventory. And, you know, so many of us become the story that we tell

ourselves about ourselves and we get anchored in that identity that I am sort of this fixed Jeff whose fate was poorly written in the genetic stars, right? I'll just be that chubby, kid that was moving around from country to country, I'll really never be quite good enough. I'll never be liked. And because of that, I will compensate and essentially compromise my authenticity at every single turn in order to be liked. That was the story that I told myself about myself for almost five decades. So.

So realizing having the awakening that change was actually possible was essential to my journey. And I think it's essential to many people's journey because we have been taught as part of kind of 20th century science that essentially our genes determine our fate. and this was, you know, in some ways, quite an incredible revelation that Watson and Crick had in the early 1950s where they like say, oh, we found the secret to life. It's called the double helix. It's the structure of DNA. And this is how genes replicate, you know, so efficiently. And if we can just map that genome, we can discover every source of an origin of every disease. And that we can address that by addressing those particular genes and those underlying nucleotide sequences. Of course, once we actually mapped the human genome, finished in about 2004 with the human genome project, we realized that we had the same amount of genes as a guppy. We had less than a grape.

We had about 22,300 non-redundant protein-coding genes. And so it's not really the genes, really. It's the expression of the genes. and this is where a lot of my kind of more scientific study started to sort of bleed into revealing of some of the greater mystical truths about what it is like to be human. So, and this started to populate this concept called the Tao of Health, which has a number of different axioms or tenets to them. One of them is impermanence. So we kind of briefly referred to that at the beginning of the podcast. But this was a revelation that, of course, the Buddha had, you know, 2,500 years ago sitting under the Bodhi tree.

In Sanskrit, I think it's called Anika. But the fact that everything in the universe, including you and me in this rug, this camera, etc., is impermanent. It will eventually decay. So clinging onto anything and craving anything is just futile, and it will lead to a tremendous amount of suffering. because we are all impermanent. And that really violates my sense of identity, right? Because, like, I wake up in the morning. Andre wakes up in the morning.

We tutel into the bathroom. We sort of like flex a tiny bit and be like, there's Andre. Don't jump me in here. Okay. Jeff does that. And I look more or less the same as Jeff did yesterday. So our sense of identity is often anchored in this physical continuity of like, there's Jeff, there's a stable and reliable Jeff, you know? But, you know, any even brief excavation into human physiology reveals that that's like complete bullocks, you know, that is a complete and utter total delusion.

you know, we are nothing but change. We are seven octillion self-assembled atoms that were originally forged in the crucible of some supernova eight billion years ago, experiencing 37 billion billion. That's not a typo. Chemical reactions per second, per second. I am, I'm not even close to the same per person.

right now than I was when I sat down and began this conversation. And if you look kind of deeper into my organism, what you will find is 39 trillion prokaryotes, these little bacteria and archaea and fungi, these single-celled organisms. You know, they're on my skin, they're in my aura. Increasingly, we're finding them in every organ, but largely they're kind of partying down in the den of my colon. and these little bacteria, these gut bugs,

regulate almost like every system in my body. And if you were to sum total of their DNA, it's like they have 150 times my DNA. And they're turning over like every four minutes to 24 hours. So I am in complete flux all of it. of the time. And sort of embracing this idea that I am process and not product was really empowering for me because if I am processed, then my diabetes that I was diagnosed with five years ago was also just process. And so is every other disease. And that health is really exists

along this dynamic spectrum, and that we have a certain amount of jurisdiction or agency over our trajectory on that spectrum, that we can moment to moment day by day be moving towards wholeness, that's the process of healing, or moving towards disconnection and disease. It's the process of ailing.

And I had agency. And so that sense of impermanence that was born kind of out of my study of Buddhism, as applied to my physiology, was empowering and liberating. I think the next sort of like part of the Rubik's Cube for me was also very much kind of within the Buddhist mindset. I mean, around my body and my organism

as being completely interconnected and interwoven with the environment. And you've probably come across us before, but the Buddha had this wonderful analogy through an image for the interconnected universe. And he called it Indra's Net. So he saw the universe as this endless cobweb that went on forever. And at every juncture of that cobweb was a crystalline diamond

that reflected every other juncture. sometimes it's a dew drop you know and this is just a beautiful image for the nature of the universe and it gave birth to this concept of dependent origination or in um in sanskrit i believe it's like pratitia sumatata but that everything is reliant on everything else and to be alive is actually to be in relationship that you cannot separate the function and behavior of an organism from the function and behavior of its environment. And again, this violates our sense of identity

because I won't put you, I won't say Andre feels this way, but I'll say I feel this way. Most of the time, I feel like I'm this singular locus of consciousness like crouching like a tiger somewhere behind here somewhere in between my eyes like separate from you separate from the rest of humanity separate from nature often in competition with it right but again any look remote excavation of human physiology completely dispels any notion of us being kind of these separate selves. I mean, if you have plants in this room at the very, very most basic level,

I'm in an interdependent relationship with these plants. They're creating oxygen. I do not create my own oxygen. Sorry. I create their carbon dioxide. We're in this beautiful carbon cycle together. But we see it everywhere as part of like our daily experience. You have a very, very steep driveway. It is pretty sweet. It is pretty steep, right? If I was going to walk up that driveway, I'd walk much slower as if I was walking on like this sort of flat ground right here. I cannot separate my function from the function of the environment. Right. So like my walking, it's completely dependent on the topography of your particular driveway in this case.

But, you know, and these are very anodyne sort of proteic examples. Once you start to think about like our relationship with the air and environmental toxins or our food and our food system or our loneliness and our separation from each other, then you and you realize that you are completely interdependent with the world, then the light goes off where it's like if your environment is shaping your experience of reality then you need to adopt the behaviors and shape the environment that fosters health and well-being. What do you think about the utility of being in a less than ideal environment as the metaphor of the lotus flower goes? Yeah.

Yeah, no mud, no lotus, right? But I think this is the interesting thing. It's a very astute question. because what are you trying, what's the goal, right? What is well-being and human efflorescence, really? And what I began to put my thumb on is that every healthy system clusters towards the middle, Every imprimatur of well-being is an ability for an organism or a system to find balance or the middle. So again, this is very Buddhist in some ways.

Like the philosophy of Buddhism is Madyamaka, the middle way. Now, initially, that was sort of like a middle way between asceticism and hedonism, but really was the avoidance of extremes. Now, if you look at like economics, for example, I'll get back to your question. I'm headed there slowly. But what is the healthiest economic system? It's one with a thriving middle class. It looks like a bell curve where the distribution of wealth is somewhere in the middle, right?

What is the healthiest ecological system? So one with lots of biodiversity, with a balance of different species, right? and they just fight amongst themselves and nature selects for the best of them and they just kind of just continue to proliferate and grow and improve. What is the best healthiest political system? One where there's a middle, right, where you can find common ground and cooperation,

not much to be found at this very moment, right? So again, you look at what is the unhealthiest system, one with very polarized extremes, you know, what's the healthiest system, ones with strong middle. Like you look at your meditation practice. What is the focus of psychological health, the ability to center yourself, to always move yourself back to the middle, to this kind of unstable place in the middle. But if you look at human physiology, the middle is called homeostasis. So the body is riddled with mechanisms that engineer for the middle, for the Goldilocksone.

If you look at like temperature regulation in the body, it's like you get really, really, really cold. What do you do? You start to shiver, right? And your body thermoregulates and you move yourself back into that little warm porridge of 98.6. Same thing if you get really hot. You're pre-programmed to sweat and perspire. And then that perspiration evaporates off of you and you come back. You come back to the middle.

But every other system, I mean, your circadian rhythm is this balance between cortisol and melatonin. Your nervous system is this balance between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system often characterized by different neurotransmitters. So you have these excitatory neurotransmitters on one side like glutamate, like, oh, very alert, let's go. And then you have Gabba, okay, we're chilling now, we're chilling. And look at like leptin and ghrelin, you know, pH balance, you know, everywhere in the human body, health is characterized by this homeostasis.

Back to your question. The ironic thing is that the body gets better at fostering homeostasis through a certain amount. of imposed stress. So oftentimes it does take you to challenge your body's ability to get into the mud, right, in order to grow the lotus. So this is why in an era that is completely denuded of discomforts that's riddled with convenience at every turn, And here we are sitting in these wonderful, comfy chairs, right,

in a thermoregulated environment, you know, with this lovely tea. I mean, you know, whatever. If we sat here, we would just become like those characters in Wally, you know, right? Just bring us food now, like summer squash in the middle of winter. I want it. You know, this is the way we live, right? And so what's I think interesting is that in order to instantiate homeostasis, we actually do have to now press ourselves, press the edges of discomfort.

And whether, yeah, that could look like a physiological stress, like self-imposed calorie restriction or time-restricted eating, fasting that could look like jumping into a cold plunge, it could look like getting into a sauna, that could look like getting up early and getting the proper light in the morning, that could look like, you know, lifting heavy things. in overloading a muscle, but that also could look like pushing yourself into social situations that feel like a little uncomfortable,

that could look like actually having that stressful conversation with people that really, really don't agree with you on something. So it manifests, our ability to kind of lean into discomfort, that opportunity manifests itself in so many different ways. Beautifully said, yeah. So those four pillars being impermanent,

interdependence, agency, and balance. I think we have, and I know you and your podcast and other conversations I have, really explored at depth more of the nuance of each of those categories of how we're out of balance with the evolutionary mismatch. I am personally kind of like it's so important to have that as a foundation and build those habits and routines that, you know, that build that. And for me, I'm also just very interested in kind of those first two pillars, you know, and the impermanence and interdependence

and the recognition of that and putting that into practice in daily life. And Anitja, which is the poly term you referenced earlier about impermanence, is what I really try to continue to cultivate that awareness of. And through my meditation practices and this meditation retreat I just got back from last month, there is a beautiful amount of freedom of equanimity,

recognition of that balance and homeostasis. when you are holding things so loosely because you see how constantly they are changing. And you know, you can look at it from the biological level like you did, but then also getting into the physics of it, you know, and from the Buddhist, I suppose, scientific, but less kind of modern scientific lens describing it as a Kalapa, which are the smallest particles arising and passing away at, like, the smallest, perceivable possible, like you can't even,

and perceive it, which is why we have this illusion of continuity within our experience. We navigate this world as though we are this solid self moving through time and space, and yet that's actually not the case. Yeah, that's really nicely described. I mean, I'm sure you have like special spots in nature that you visit. There's this one little place up in Laurel Canyon and Freyman Canyon where a hike where there's like a little cataract, a little, um, waterfall. And, you know, I go back there quite often on my hikes. And I recognize this waterfall,

this little area in this creek, because it appears the same. I recognize its form. But I'm not under any delusion that it's the same exact water molecules, right? I know that the water molecules have all moved downstream. And what I am doing, I'm literally just recognizing the form of it. Or it's like if let's say you have a lighter that you might use around here for some incense or something like that,

if you were to light that flame, right, you recognize that flame there by its form, but you know that all of the molecules in there have like moved on, right? But we are curiously very, very similar to that waterfall and that flame, right? We recognize each other by our form, but everything that makes us up

has moved downstream, right? It's gone down. And, of course, this underscores that idea of impermanence. And for me, it's always very helpful to look at it through kind of the modern, hard, empirical, Western lens, because that's a way that I can understand of like, oh, yeah, you know, I ate some carbohydrates and that got absorbed in my, through my small intestine into my bloodstream as glucose,

and that glucose got broken down into pyruvate through the process of glycolysis, and my, you know, whatever, my mitochondria turned it into ATP, and it's like constructing and, you know, nonstop all the time. I can't even keep my, you know, I can't even keep my wits on it because it's happening so, so organically. And I think that, again, this is like waking up to the transience of what it is to be alive. It's not only helpful for navigating your health and how you feel day to day and living with a certain amount of ease, but it's also very helpful. confronting your ultimate demise,

that when you understand that all things are impermanent and transient, including yourself, it begins to get at, I guess, what I might call the ultimate target of a spiritual life, which is freedom from the fear of death, knowing that I am this intelligence, animated for a certain period of time that I am this link in a continuous chain of captured sunlight. And that life, as I know it, as circumscribed by these five senses, will be rounded with an ultimate sleep that my ability to be here and have this conversation with you is coterminous with the end of my life. But I also know

that everything that makes me up, all of that nitrogen and oxygen and carbon and phosphorus and magnesium, that will all move on. That will all keep going. And in that sense,

you never really die. And I think this is really quite important in liberating because we are as humans sort of in like this very interesting strange place in the course of our evolution

whereby some miraculous, fortuitous combination of atoms in the brain, I suppose, that we have consciousness, right? That we can sit here and find little vessels of words to capture thoughts and share them with each other and really enjoy it and be here and go outside and look at the marvelous hills of Topanga and enjoy the miraculous beauty of a sunset, et cetera,

that there is a feeling of what it's like to be you and me. And we call that sometimes qualia. But the kind of double-edged side of that consciousness sword is that I also have the awareness that I'm going to die and you are going to die. And every one that I love is going to die. And this has, this mortality awareness has created, you know, paroxysms of anxiety, like, throughout human history, right? And so, kind of waking up to some degree of our own impermanence, I think helps to sort of dull the sharper edge of that mortality anxiety.

I agree. Yeah, well said, man. I feel that so much of the tension that we build is kind of self-wound in life, and it stems solely fundamentally in the tightly held identity and misidentification with who we think we are, kind of really strongly feeling as though we are our thoughts and emotions. And, you know, it's like building awareness and equanimity or like, birds, two wings of a bird, you know, that of equal balance really help the bird fly and the cultivation of that awareness of our essential nature. Suddenly the stress that we are very much so a

participant in building throughout our life gets shed light on because through the conversations that we're having, through the decisions that we make, through the relationships that we have, so much of it is often I feel like we're under the presumption that things are just happening to us. Like we are on the bad end of the stick for so many things that are happening. And the freedom from that, from that tension that we keep on creating is just really important and I think is often overlooked and kind of, you know, the spiritual aspect of stress and anxiety and a lot of these conversations. So. Yeah. I mean, how much of our human stress is based on our fear of death?

I mean, quite a bit, right? Our whole relationship with nature, or I would say our hostile relationship with nature, has its provenance in our fear of death. And also perceived deaths, you know, for example, being wrong in a conversation is a perceived death of sorts, you know? Totally, yeah, it doesn't necessarily have to be, like,

the clinical, like, terminus of, you know, respiratory and cardiac function or whatever. It can be other forms of kind of metaphorical death. But if I look across human history, we spent an inordinate amount of effort in time like killing off all of our predators. For thousands and thousands of years, we basically forced into extinction,

like the most fabulous, wonderful megafauna, like these bwombats, and giant massive 4,000-pound bears and saber-tooth tigers. And we have this hostile relationship with nature because we're so scared of dying. And then Louis Pasteur comes around in the mid-1800s and says, oh, no, no, no, no. It's not just the things bigger than you that are going to kill you.

It's also the things smaller than you, the ones that you can't see. They're pathogens, their viruses and bacteria, Beware. So now we spent, what did we do? Very human response. We spent the last 165 years killing off everything smaller than us. All the bacteria, all the viruses. And in, you know, I'm joking a little bit because in some ways that was a very good thing, for example, to develop like a smallpox vaccine or something. But the point is, is that, you know, we've essentially eliminated all of our predators. And when you eliminate, you all your predators, you only have yourself to kill. In that respect, we seem to be doing a fine job. Yeah. I think that so much of our freedom really is, in some ways,

reframing our relationship with nature. Like our Abrahamic traditions are pretty harsh about nature, right? They're like, okay, humans, you're the CEOs, you know, you are supposed to subdue and have dominion over nature. Because it comes up, in the best case, there's weeds and pests, right? So spray it and kill it. But particularly spray and kill the part of yourself that is nature, because it's sinful, right? We call that human nature. And if we didn't have like a Merlin and a wizard's cap, you know, with a dusty old,

scroll sitting above us with some moral abacists, like, monitoring our sexual transgressions. We might, like, rape our best friend or something like that. I mean, it's fucking crazy. So we're taught to really distrust the part of ourselves that is nature, because it's made out of clay, and it'll go back to dust, you know? And what we're really supposed to focus on is this other part of ourselves called the soul, because God literally breathed it in through our nostril in the book of Genesis. And the soul is eternal and it's divine. So it has to sublimate

the part of ourselves as nature. Because nature sucks. Right? It's mangy. You know? Like, and this I think is like a massive myth,

apocryphal myth about who we are. Because of course we are nature. You know, we are the products of it, and we are, it's not something that pushes us around. You know, we are, as you say, a participant in this grand, massive experiment of the universe. And to see yourself as nature and to trust yourself as nature is, it's so, it's incredibly, it's just liberating. And, you know, like nature, I've kind of thought of it this way,

is a brilliant architect, but an imperfect carpenter. Because the design is fantastic. But the execution is sometimes faulty, like nature will let you down from time to time. In human physiology, there are mutations. There are single nucleotide polymorphisms. SNPs that sometimes predispose us, sometimes dispositively, two disease, like sickle cell disease or whatever, or APO4 alleles, you 10 times more likely to get Alzheimer's and things

like that. But you can't not, not, not trust nature, right? Because evolution is a product of those mistakes. Because every once in a while, that mutation turns out to be adaptive. and then nature selects for the best of it. And we improve. And so that's why, like, even in a conversation like this, where I simply do not know the next word

that's going to be emitted from my mouth, I still have to trust myself because I might land on something incredible inside of the mistake. And this is really how I encourage people to live, to trust themselves. I mean, like, have you, I'm sure you've had this experience.

And this is actually what influenced the cover of my book. But I lived in New York for a long time. But even here in Los Angeles, when you're walking on a sidewalk, you're walking down in Santa Monica or downtown, and it's asphalt as far as you can see. And then you look down in sort of a moment of pause and you see like a flower or a blade of grass, like growing through the pavement of the sidewalk.

And you're like, oh my God, nature. It's just, it's irrepressible, you know? And this is somewhere where we can put our faith. I mean, not faith as belief in the absence of evidence, but like trust in the eternal reliability of what it is to be nature. I believe in the dictionary, it actually delineates humans as separate. from nature. No.

Looking up in Webster Dictionary, like humans are completely separate. And it makes sense with the current mythos and story that we're telling ourselves as a human species and the cascade and deleterious effects that that has on our psyche and beliefs about the world and human possibility. And I know you have found great intrigue in studying both Western and Eastern understandings of human potential. because a lot of the talk about stress can be quite stressful, funny enough. You know, it's like more things to do on your plate of things you don't want to do.

And I have found it quite inspiring looking at what this human system is capable of, much of which we're still barely scratching the surface of discovering. I found it fascinating reading about the Himalayan monks who, through the practice of Tumo. And there's many different examples of, you know, yogis displaying incredible powers over their physiology and biology that are just so far from our Western notion of what it means to be human. And I think things like that really do at least inspire me

as to I want to deeply uncover what the intelligence of life has possible to, you know, birth through me. and that requires me to live my life in a certain way so my fundamental physical is taken care of and I can explore kind of the higher things up and the hierarchy of Maslow, if you will. Yeah, I'm curious if you want to share about that. Yeah, well, those monks, first of all,

I'm nowhere even close to those monks. So I think what you're referring to is this whole practice of like drawing of the sheets. And this was actually the early inspiration of Wim Hof, this notion of building inner fire. Which you spend a considerable amount of time with. Yes, yes, sometimes against my will. Yeah, just as an aside, as a little storytelling aside,

Wim and his beloved brood planted themselves at Kami and Topanga just a few miles from here, which is our funky little wellness laboratory. and for one reason or another, they couldn't find their way out the driveway. But it was wonderful while it lasted. And, you know, we had a commercial ice delivery in the morning, right, for the cold plunge, and then a commercial wine delivery in the evening for other purposes. Anyhow, it was a very jovial, jocular crew of people. But I will give Wim much credit.

is that every morning without fail, I would see him to-do-crossed the little cobblestones and out to the cedar ice plunge. And it would be like naked, first of all. And it would be just above freezing, like 32 and a half degrees, you know, ice bobbing everywhere. And like a Buddha, he would just immerse himself with a little kind of half-smiles. mile across his face and sit in there for a good 10 or 15 minutes. And I'm sure the anti-inflammatory impacts of the ice are very good for hangovers. But of course, there's many, many, many other attributes metabolically and mood regulation

and everything else. And we can go into that at some other time. But then Wim would get out of the ice bath and he would go over and he put on the most diminutive pair of shorts known to mankind. But thankfully, something. And go over and weed the garden. Unasked. Every morning, same thing.

And I would make a little espresso, and I would tutel out and be like, oh, whim, you know, good morning. And without fail, as if he didn't know me. And we spent like 30 straight days, doing this, he would launch in to the same diatribe about extolling the benefits of the ice and the breath with the same vim and vigor that he had done the previous day as if I had never heard them. It was quite amazing.

And he went, Jeff, first you get into the ice, then you do the breath, and then you do the horse dance, and you conquer your feels, and you release the anti-inflammatory cytokines. And you build your immune system and the cardiovascular health and the science-based evidence. I mean, you know, on and on. And I'm like, I'd always be like just nodding my head and kind of amazed. And I was like, this dude, first of all, is responsible for spreading this practice that has been very, very central to my health transformation. But he's essentially Taylor Swift. I mean, he's like playing the.

hits, man. He gets up and gives the same performance with the same vibrancy every day. And I really, I really have to hand it to him. He was, he's such a character and so generous. I mean, he was really, really fun to be around. But anyways, his whole practice was in some part inspired by these monks in the Himalayan that would wrap themselves. in these 40-degree sheets, and they would leverage a certain type of breath known as Tuma to essentially create inner fire, inner heat. And, you know, after 30, 40 minutes,

you would start to see, you know, these steam coming up from these freezing cold sheets that they had dunked into a cold river. And then, of course, what did they do? They took that sheet off, and they would wrap them in another cold sheet. And so, like you say, you know, how can we explain with the knowledge that we have at our disposal right now

how that is possible, right? How do we engage in that degree of thermogenesis? Like, I can poke at it. Yeah, we've got, you know, the mitochondria in our certain, particularly in this tissue known as brown fat that is like highly thermogenic. And yes, that can access glucose, but these monks probably didn't have a ton of that. So there's probably some stored fat, but these guys were pretty lean too. So there isn't a ton of triglycerized to convert into free fatty acids for, you know,

the purpose of energy and heat creation. So, you know, what was the lever in the human mind that was able to produce heat potent enough to dry, not one cold cold sheets, but two cold sheets? And this is a great, of course, the great mystery of, of, of, or this is the great sort of kind of sort of kind of sort of, kind of sort of sort of, kind of sources of curiosity of like, oh my God, we've just barely begun to learn anything. It's like when you bring a torch out into the vast night sky, what is revealed like even more blackness. So every time you learn something, it reveals, oh my God, how much do I not know? And of course, this is the, but this is the inexorable march of science. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's, this This is why it's so exciting to be alive and be curious.

Yeah, infinitely humbling. Yeah. It's like, oh, my God. We are just this little delegated adaptability of this massive project. Yeah. Yeah, I really feel like the more your circle of knowledge grows, so it is the perimeter of your ignorance. So, like, you're aware of how much you don't know,

of how much you're unaware of, in a sense. Totally. The more you grow. Yeah, and that's, you know, it's totally humbling. And, you know, science and spirituality have been unduly cleaved as if they're two different things, but they're not. You know, they both at their best evolve and are humble and are always asking why, you know, and challenge and open to modification and new observation. And this is why Buddhism for me and Taoism to some degree and to some degree Zen are my sort of preferred modalities because they're not stagnant. They don't exist in one unmodifiable dusty old scroll, what they're actually, they're built to continually transform and grow with the Sangha.

So it's like, in a way, I find Eastern religions and science to be actually one and the same thing in many cases. I'm curious what your vision of dying and growing through age with grace and consciousness look like, I feel like we often see this push for a further lifespan, but like the last 15 plus years of life just filled with degeneration and like you know not very enjoyable existence and I'm very motivated by living a long lifespan and health span and so I think that's as we all look forward to in who knows what's going to evolve over the next 10 years with you know longevity escape velocity and nature and all the things but you know God willing our imperman nature continues on for a little bit more in this flesh suit until we're 80, 90 years old.

And I want to be able to be very mobile and I will be. And so what is your vision for that? Yeah, I mean, I think you point to some aspect of society right now, which is very, very sad, which is this distension and morbidity that, you know, for the last 15, 20 years of many people's lives. you know, we're essentially limping through life, managing chronic diseases with cocktails of pharmaceuticals that never really address root cause and just sort of mask symptoms for a little bit of time, et cetera. And, you know, that form of suffering radiates out in so many different ways. I mean, it's obviously the individual that's suffering, but family members and caregivers

and the societal expense and the erosion of the importance that we used to put on our elders, you know, these vessels of accumulated experience that we used to look to for wisdom, now we look to our elders as elderly, right? And they're often a nuisance. We just ship them off, you know, whatever. We'd never do that with Confucius or loud soon. So, yeah, I mean, I am not an immortalist.

You know, I don't have escape velocity dreams per se. I think on some level we're pre-coded to die. I think life wouldn't be life without death. There sort of exists within a unity of opposites. But, you know, Atul Gawande with this wonderful book called Being Mortal, I think it was. And in the book, he said, yeah, we only lived to about 48 or 49 years old in the beginning of the 1900s. But when we died, we just went, you know, right off the cliff, you know.

We didn't have this extended, protracted period of misery. So what I, my dream, and, you know, this came about, this sort of vision came about really in relationship to my children. So I have three girls. And when they were growing up, I read voluminously to them at night back when their bedtime was before mine. Now that's flipped, right? Now they're teenagers. But I would read all those books, Chronicles of Narnia

and the Witch of Blackbird Pond, island blue dolphins, like tons of fairy tales. And like the fairy tales would always generally like include like some scholarly made that got three wishes at the end, whatever. So one night I was reading to Micah, she's my littlest one.

And she, She wouldn't go to sleep, couldn't go to sleep. So she finally stopped me and said, hey, daddy, you know, if you had one wish, if you were a prince, what would your wish be? And, of course, at that juncture, I was like, I wish you'd just go to fucking sleep. And she was like, she's a very little, tiny creature,

but she had a very heavy arm, and she would always, like, slap it over me, like a parole officer or something. So I could never like, I'd always skirt to the edge of the bed and she's like, I'm not asleep yet. So I was like, okay, okay, well, let me think about it. So I meditated on that question and then a couple nights later, I rotated back to Micah. And after reading to the other girls, and I said, you know, hey, Micah, I think I have an answer to your question. She's like, oh, okay, well, Daddy, what would be your one wish?

and so I said, okay, my God. So a long time from now, okay, in the year 288, I'll be 117. And your mom, you know how I fancy older women. She's going to be 118. And that will be the year that we celebrate 100 years together. And it's not unfathomable. 37 years under our belt at this point, we were together when we were seven, and 18 years old.

She's like, oh, okay, okay, that sounds nice. I was like, yeah, we'll walk up to this little mountain cabin that we have and kind of the same little trail that we walk up, that we've walked up hundreds of times, and we'll make this, like, wonderful dinner together, this, like, salmon and roasted yams, and I'll unpop this old bottle of Chateau-Margo that I've kept in the basement for years

and we'll sit these little thimbles, and then go to bed and she'll spoon me and read me from that same New Yorker article on Plague tectonics that's put me to bed for like 50 years. And she'll sense my little, you know, parasympathetic slumber breath and, you know, turn off the light. And somewhere in the middle of the night, I like to challenge my kids with science, around 3 a.m. the mitochondria in my cardiac cells and my neurons and the mitochondria and your mommy's cardiac cells and neurons will emit one last plume of carbon dioxide out of their energy-producing chimneys. And our life, the way we know it, will end. And it's totally okay.

It's totally okay. It's actually sort of emotional talk about her. And, you know, she was like five or six. And because she was so close to source on some level, she didn't find that wish remotely morbid. She just gave me a big hug. So I hope you get your wish, Daddy. And so that, I think, encapsulates,

the dream that I have for my own health span and lifespan. And the one, you know, that sounds obviously a little Pollyanna, right, a little model, and that death should be so empty of pain and decrepitude and cognitive decline. But it's also just as ridiculous that death should be this, like, inexorable march of bedpans and statins and insulin and worse, you know. And I do believe that that kind of health span is available to most people. Because in this day and age, we're largely choosing the way we die. And with very, very little thoughtfulness. I mean, if you had asked a denizen of 1900, or if you had told them, okay, in 125 years, there'll be no smallpox, no death from cholera or typhoid, very little death from tuberculosis, whatever, and very little death from infection, they would have thought, oh, my God, the human race is winning, right? You figured it out. That's Nirvana.

You know, fast forward, 125 years. And, you know, our average lifespan is actually decreasing. But the time that we're spent alive is becoming increasingly miserable. You know, we are dying not from communicable diseases. We are dying from chronic diseases, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's dementia, and other neurodegenerate diseases, cancer. And in many respects, these infirmities of modernity are preventable and in some cases reversible. And so this is my great dream, not just for my own life, but for humankind, that we can live

these full, vibrant, efflorescent lives that becoming old is actually a wonderful, experience, you know, the way that it actually should be, that you can feel that you are this accumulation of beautiful and treacherous experiences that then you can shed light on life for your future generations. And that is why I'm so committed right now. at this place of my life, to amplifying the protocols, if you will, but the ways of living that can instantiate that kind of full and vibrant life. That was beautiful, man.

That moment with your daughter, too, just stands out so strong. What are those protocols? As we start to wrap up, I think I like to leave things as practical as possible for, you know, what has really moved the needle the most for you and as you've done your hefty research into both the personal mystical and the medical what what would you say having knowledge of our whole conversation here today that would be most effective and impactful for for listeners to leap off with yeah it's always hard to pinpoint one because i've stacked a whole variety of protocols that have been so transformational and

And there's a part of me that is super geeky that loves to talk about like mitobiogenesis and like autophagy and BDNF and heat shock proteins and, you know, endogenous endorphin production, all these things, you know, that are part of a whole series of protocols. But if I have to really boil it down, you know, every experience that we have as human beings is. is through the prism of our mind. Right? And we go to the gym to exercise our biceps and our quads and our abs and... Sure, it's great to look and feel good in that respect. But we have to focus more, I think, on training our minds.

particularly because we live within an ecosystem where the most precious commodity is your time and attention. We have taken Andre's focus and productized it and commodified it and we sell it for profit. I'm not just saying you, obviously. This is part of what we know as the attention economy or the persuasion economy. And what is downstream from that is an inability to concentrate, endless distraction, and in lack of capacity to access the present moment. we can't even give each other the present of our own presence most of the time we are just lost in thought you know we have monkey mind where thoughts are branches and we're just swinging cuckoo bananas riotously from each one you know

we're never here we're obsessing about something in the past and projecting that into the future as some sort of negative anticipated memory. We build this anxiety like a mason with bricks over, we become anxious about our own anxiety, and then that makes us anxious. I mean, this is crazy. And this impacts every other part of our life,

you know, how we eat, you know, how we treat each other, how we feel day to day. And so what is interesting is that a lot of the physiological protocols, stress protocols that I talk about, actually have very, very potent psychological ramifications. And anybody who's ever exercised or a dunasana or a cold plunge with the various things you can do can feel how they're inseparably tied. Totally. You feel high. I mean, being in a sauna creates endorphins, endogenous, inner, Dorphin, morphine, opioids, inner opioid, you're accessing your inner pharmacy, literally,

when you apply deliberate heat to yourself. So yeah, those physiological stress protocols have protein impacts on your psychology. But I do think this is where cultivating some kind of mindfulness practice is perhaps the most. important thing one can do in a world that is just essentially endlessly trying to trigger you. I mean, our whole news and social media ecosystem is algorithmically preferenced to make you mad, or scandalize you through hyperbole and sensationalism and scandal, et cetera. So now we have to actually apply these practices to take back our own mind.

And for me, I mean, that really does look like the simplest of meditation practices of finding a single point of focus that could be the breath, that could be a casino or Drishti, that could be a mantra. And the real opportunity there is in the return. you're inevitably if anyone has ever tried to meditate before thoughts are going to emerge from under the crust of consciousness like that just happens and don't judge yourself the real opportunity there is when a thought or feeling or emotion when any phenomena emerges moment to moment within consciousness can you bring yourself back to that single point of focus and that is actually where the happiness and the skill, if you will, lies. It's actually the ability for you to bring yourself back. It was a fascinating study by these two Harvard dudes like Killingsworth and Gilbert or something like that.

They did a whole study on human happiness. And it said the happiest people were the people that were actually doing what they were thinking about. It sounds so simple, but how often are we doing something, but our mind is just somewhere else? And this is what this practice enhances, is our ability to yoke action and intention to be right here, right now. And I will just color that statement with something that you were talking about before, which is equanimity. So that's part of the Brahma Vihara, which is sort of these four characteristics

of enlightenment in Buddhism. One of them is known as Upeka, which is often translated as equanimity. But I think people have a really false notion of what equanimity is. They think it's kind of like limp and conciliatory and lacking of passion,

but nothing could be farther from the truth. Equanimity is the ability to be all here right now with your full passionate self, but unattached to the result of that. And so if you can train your mind to come here now, to be totally passionate about this very moment and this one, right? That is eternal life right there. Because the only time it's ever been and will ever be is right now. And if you can be there without any other attachment, then that is the great liberation. It's been a pleasure to be here with you now.

Yes, brother. Thank you so much. I so appreciate this opportunity. Yeah. No, man, it's my pleasure doing such great work in the world. and our missions are very, very much so similarly aligned. And, you know, this is a strange start to 2025. Yeah.

And I know firsthand, we both know the power of community and supporting one another, being there for each other during these times. And we both have our physical in-person community here in L.A. And then our wider net through podcasts and the digital space where people are coming together in these shared values and recognition of these important reminders. And in that is something very exciting. You know, it's perhaps the most exciting thing to me, and I know for you as well, because so much becomes possible in that space.

Yeah, people heal in community, period. And, yeah, I just want to say that I've seen you work and been for the last couple of years, particularly. we obviously have a relationship that goes beyond that. But you so generously platform people. And I just want to acknowledge how well and how graciously you do that and with a lot of rigor and a lot of obviously incredible execution, but with tremendous soul and heart. So I'm really just a very appreciative of, you.

your generosity and how much you give. Oh, thank you, man. It's my honor, and I feel lucky being able to just do this, you know? I really enjoy it, and so it's a gift for me as well. And hopefully it's a gift for you all, too. I like to think so. Well, I hope you enjoyed it.

If you made it this far, Jeff, thank you so much, and people can find your book, Good Stress, which is available for pre-order, I believe, right? That's right. And the description, as always, thank you guys for tuning in. Until next week. Peace