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

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Jeff Krasno is a wellness entrepreneur, author of “Good Stress,” and co-founder of the iconic global yoga festival Wanderlust.   This conversation explores Jeff’s journey from “wealth and hellness” to authentic well-being. His thesis on hormetic stress offers an antidote to our convenience-obsessed world. We discuss the political horseshoeing of wellness, the metaphysical Tao of Health, and how embracing discomfort forges both physiological and psychological resilience.   Note: In celebration of Jeff’s appearance on the podcast, we’re giving away four signed copies of his transformative book. Subscribe to the newsletter at richroll.com/subscribe for a chance to win.   Jeff's journey offers valuable insights on stress and adaptation. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF 👉gobrewing.com Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL 👉ROKA.com/RICHROLL Prolon/L-Nutra: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift 👉 prolonlife.com/richroll Birch: Get 20% OFF sitewide 👉BirchLiving.com/richroll Bragg: Use code RICHROLL for 20% off your first order 👉Bragg.com  Ollie: Use code RICHROLL to get 60% off your Welcome Kit👉Ollie.com/RICHROLL   Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors

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Unlock 20% off your order with the code richroll at roka.com. That's R-O-K-A.com. The comforts of modern life are actually what are making us sick. About four or five years ago, I had chronic fatigue, brain fog. I was always irritable. I was looking at my phone like every three seconds. I had no ability to

focus or concentrate. I was tipping the scales. And then I got, you know, a bucket of cold water on my head with a diabetes diagnosis. It was a shock to me because, yeah, I was the wellness guy. How could I be part of the American nightmare? I had to wake up and make some serious changes. When the wellness industry began to look more like a business than a movement, Jeff Krasno chose to chart a different path. A former music manager turned entrepreneur, Jeff is the co-founder of Wanderlust,

which was basically like Coachella for yoga and wellness. An endeavor so all consuming, it took a pre-diabetes diagnosis for him to realize that the business of wellness had made him, well, unwell. What followed was a different commitment to wellbeing, one that let him down the rabbit hole and back, restoring his health along with a desire to serve others, which he does through a platform he founded called Commune,

which is a podcast as well as a online learning platform on which he hosts courses and events on everything from spirituality to regenerative agriculture, along with personal essays, which he shares weekly with a growing audience in excess of a million people worldwide. What makes Jeff's perspective worth considering isn't just his insider knowledge,

it's his willingness to challenge an industry he helped build. While others market quick fixes, Jeff offers something different, a return to what our bodies actually need. So today we discuss all of this and more with a focus on the how's and why's behind inviting more strategic discomfort into our daily experience as the solution

that we need. All of which Jeff elaborates upon in his wonderful new book, Good Stress. We evolved these adaptive mechanisms that served us extremely well. And now abundance is never balanced by any degree of scarcity or repair. But we know that in that scarcity and repair, all of these pathways in the body are activated to promote longevity and resilience. in the body are activated to promote longevity and resilience.

Jeff, so nice to have you here. I think this is probably a long overdue, but well-timed given the fact that you have this new book, Good Stress, which is wonderful. I think you did a fantastic job. On top of which, I love your writing style. You're quite the writer. So thank you for writing the book.

We're gonna talk about that, of course, but it's just good to kind of break bread with you here today. Yeah, thank you, Rich. We've had a lot of informal commiserations, if you will, and compared a lot of notes on what it's like to sit behind a mic for a living. Perhaps we'll do a podcast where we pull back the curtain

on that reality someday. You think people would be interested in that? I don't know, I have to test them. Yeah, well, I do think at least for now, it's worth kind of taking a bit of a state of the union on the wellness industrial complex. You and I are of the same age. I'm a little bit older than you,

but we've both kind of been in this world for a long time. And I look to you as a person who keeps wise counsel and has a pretty good kind of ethical barometer. And I would say, at least in my own experience, it's been kind of a strange last couple of years to be a participant in an ecosystem that has experienced some tectonic shifts and trying to figure out like where to put my feet

and to kind of figure out like what's worthy of paying attention to, what is worthy of dismissing. And you've always been somebody I turn to to say like, what do you think about this, that or the other thing? So maybe we can kind of start there. Do you have like a manifesto or a thesis on kind of what we're all experiencing right now?

Yeah, well, I suppose I tried to apply some of my spiritual leanings towards sort of my political viewpoints and try to find and cultivate the middle way, if you will, which is a central tenant of Buddhism and where I try to consider all thoughtful points of view and then find some form of centralized coherence around them.

Instead of just dismissing, you know, something as a conspiracy or something as, oh, just another artifice of the establishment, et cetera. You know, I think what we have seen, you know, in the wellness space is sort of a kind of perplexing political migration, if you will, largely as a product of the left's inability to platform conversations in many cases for many, many years.

I mean, really since the beginning, the world of sort of preventative medicine or integrative medicine or healthy food was the province of the left. In fact, really the left was the party of anti-establishmentarianism, I mean, go back even to the 60s, the civil rights movement or the anti-war movement, et cetera.

And then certainly, what we see out here in California which was kind of the early seeds of the hippie movement that embraced healthy food and preventative medicine and sometimes kooky wacky ideas, but ones that were interesting and then sometimes bore out by science and sometimes not. What we've seen, I think starting, well, accelerating really with COVID

was sort of an odd horseshoeing of the left and the part of the left that has embraced many of these kind of wellness or health modalities with a certain element of the right, which has always considered themselves very libertarian. Right? And so sometimes that has manifested in kind of anti-vaccine or vaccine skeptical movements

or homeschool movements or even like raw milk or get your fluoride out of my water, whatever. And then we saw kind of the emergence of, you know, Robert Kennedy sort of soldering the edges of that horseshoe together. And- The horseshoe became a circle. The horseshoe became a circle, yes, well put.

And, you know, we, I think now with, you know, Kennedy becoming HHS secretary, I think it has created a sort of strange tension, both in Washington, you know, with some of the people on the left that have, you know, been leading the healthy movement in terms of policy for a long time, like Cory Booker or Senator Bernie Sanders,

but also has created a lot of conflict for just, thinking people like you and I, who have seen this, the issues related to healthy food, and the same policies related to medicine and healthcare. We've seen those as adjacent issues to same climate policy or same women's rights policy or healthcare or health insurance policy.

And now they appear to be very bifurcated from those policies. And I think it'll be a very, very kind of challenging moment in Washington, too, because, of course, the right has typically embraced deregulation as their sort of primary lens through which they see the role of government. And I think what we would really need

to change the food system and the collusion, if you will, between sort of big pharma and big food and big agriculture is more regulation. So there's going to be that inherent tension there. That'll be, I think, interesting to see how it plays out. I think, you know, for you and I, you know, holding the middle can be, can feel like very lonely, really, a lot of times.

Because you're sort of a man without a tribe when you do that. And you expose yourself to criticism from both sides. I just shared with you before the podcast, I put up an episode with a functional medicine doctor, which is something I've been doing from day one. And for the first time, the comments were very politicized. The left sort of flagellating me

for peddling pseudoscience and the right, kind of welcoming me to the other side and saying, finally, you've seen the light, neither of which are true. I feel like I've been charting this same course from day one, but then I have to, on that topic of like, kind of leaning into being curious, I have to then challenge my own biases

around this. So when I say, how has this issue suddenly become politicized, the truth is perhaps that maybe I've always perceived it or aligned it with a different kind of political lens all along, right? And maybe I'm sort of, you know, trying to navigate the confusion that comes with the inversion of that. And it's suddenly becoming a talking point

for the other party. But it is interesting that tension between this deregulation kind of priority on the right with the hand in hand need for the regulations to advance those policies that suddenly, they're championing, that is interesting. But I think it's, when you think back on its antecedents, yes, the hippie movement, civil rights,

that gave birth to sensibilities around alternative health, which have always been part of that kind of community. So the original distrust or contrarianism is progressive by nature, a distrust of big pharma and big medicine and all of these things were very much of the left, right? And now to see them on the other side creates an experience that feels like you woke up

in a parallel universe and everything kind of looks the same but it's a little bit different. And trying to figure out how to walk that middle path and breathe life into the ideas that you think are important and worthy while kind of trying to sidestep all the minds that are ahead of you as you walk that path is a challenge. Yeah, we're closing a lot of doors behind us.

Almost every thing that I say, I feel like, yeah, I'm kind of modifying it in some fashion in order to keep a lot of different constituents happy to some degree. I think that right-wing media found a tremendous amount of traction in anti-establishmentarianism. Now it has landed, it's put its thumb on health and food. But prior to that, certainly there was a tremendous amount of traction around anti-big pharma,

certainly around in conjunction with COVID, but also against kind of the mainstream media complex, for example, and really all of the other institutions that have long served liberal democracy, sort of anti-government, anti-quote unquote science. And, you know, to be anti, particularly in the age of social media, I think has a lot of potency.

Social media, which is the primary way that most people get their information now, is engineered to algorithmically preference content that is designed to make people mad and outraged and triggered and anti-establishment content does just that. It's not sexy to get up there and say, well, the government fixed your roads

and helps to provide electricity and water. No one's sharing that content, but it is pretty sexy to get up there and say, okay, well, the it is pretty sexy to get up there and say, okay, well, you know, the government is in collusion and subsidizing, you know, big food that's owned by the same asset management firms as big pharma and, you know, the same, you know, investors that are creating the products that are delivering the poison are also delivering the antidote in the form of drugs that never really address the root causes of the problem,

but only the symptoms of the disease, such that people are, you know, you know, on them. And the revolving door between those who regulate these industries and the people that run them. True, and all of that is actually true. You know, those misaligned incentives and that, you know, backroom deals and that revolving door is incredibly

deleterious to, to human health and the health of American citizens. So yes, you know, much of what comes out of the mouths of people kind of within the functional medicine world that have now kind of, you know moved towards the right is actually true. It's the same things that we've been saying for many, many years. I've been making content, for example

on how in the mid eighties, big tobacco scooped up all of the big food companies like Kraft and Nabisco, you know, Philip Morris and RJR scooped up all of the big food companies like Kraft and Nabisco, Philip Morris and RJR scooped up all of these companies and essentially leverage their business intelligence and their marketing savvy and their understanding of addiction to essentially addict a generation of Americans, particularly American kids

to ultra processed foods and, you know, cereals and et cetera. I've been saying, you know, that for a long time, it's just, you know, it has a different sort of currency today. Yeah, there's a different valence to it now. And I suppose, you know, everything is political now. It used to be, you know, don't talk about politics

and don't talk about religion, but essentially, you know, I think no topic is left untouched. And certainly, you know, wellness, food, nutrition, all of these ideas that you and I have been talking about for a long time are no exemption to that. But in the midst of it, like as people who are both, kind of content creators in this space running commercial enterprises,

like how are we not immune to those incentives? So I'm curious around, how you find your ballast amidst all of this to, not fall prey to the click bait or knowing like, oh, well, if I do this, I know it's gonna work. What is the truth and kind of holding to your ethical standards around putting stuff out there in the world that's helpful and aligned with your values

and the message that you're trying to propagate. Yeah, candidly it's a challenge. How do you essentially break through the noise with important, rigorously excavated information while also not playing that click-baity game, not essentially taking an anecdote, laying a bias over it, releasing or deploying a piece of content specifically designed to leverage someone's

human negativity bias. I mean, the incentive is so strong to do that, right? And we see plenty of people within our space that have had a tremendous amount of success following that formula. And for us, it's more about really staying the course and really investing in the long-term and walking in alignment with our highest principles.

And sometimes that means giving up on some of that short-term dopamine foraging, you know, from a post that might explode or, you know, might drive extra podcast downloads, et cetera. And really trying to be truly rigorous with how we approach these topics. And really, I suppose in some ways it's sort of like following the scientific method, right? Always asking the question why, and then hypothesizing, and then experimenting and testing, and then reasoning,

and then potentially if needed adjusting and re-hypothesizing, and then trying it all over again. And that's the wonderful thing about science. Science is not really a thing. It's a method, it's a process, and in its best form, it's curious and always humble, and always asking that question why. And so I think we can remain in that space,

curious, humble, always asking that question why. And that I think should guide us well long-term. And then presenting what you find along the way in all its messy nuance, right? As opposed to the reductive finding that applies to everybody in every case and resisting the impulse to present loose findings based on weak data to extrapolate

a sort of quote unquote truth that they don't want you to know. Yeah. quote, you know, truth that they don't want you to know. Yeah, I mean, I find that the truth generally like clusters somewhere towards the middle, almost always, you know, I tend to avoid the thinnest edges of every branch and look to see kind of where the information clusters and it generally like clusters towards the middle.

Again, this is sort of a Madhyamaka Buddhist approach towards epistemology, I guess. But, you know, not that the consensus is always right. Sometimes the consensus is wrong, but that again, it's sort of being open to new evidence as it arises. Let's take a step back and kind of create some context for how you kind of got involved in this wellness world and ultimately kind of made it your mission in life. As I look back, like there seems to be

a couple important inflection points, but, you know, maybe walk us through quickly your childhood and how you ended up in New York. Yeah, sure. Well, I had a very parapetetic childhood. My father was a Fulbright professor and he was getting stationed around

at various esoteric universities, teaching even greater, even more esoteric topics. So, I lived in Northern England and Spain and Brazil, moved around Brazil quite a bit. And this was a sort of wonderful way on some level to grow up culturally, but also had a lot of challenges. I was a super chubby sort of preternaturally chubby kid

and I was moving every six months. So I was getting stationed into a new environment in a new school, in a new language with a new clique of friends. And, you know, the MO of my life became, you know, fitting in really. And I didn't really understand at that juncture, the delineation, I suppose, between fitting in and belonging.

So I was really willing, as I examined it in retrospect, to compromise my authentic self in order to fit into groups of friends. And that really, to fast forward many decades, that really kind of informed the folklore of my life of that I was this chubby kid that would do anything to be liked. That I really judged myself through the eyes of others.

And by extension became sort of an epic people pleaser. And I think many of your listeners can relate to that infirmity. Yeah, I certainly fall prey to it very much. Was it Brene Brown that initially snapped you out of that and helped you to understand that difference between fitting in and belonging? Yeah, certainly it was something

that she was able to underscore, that fitting in was essentially how I describe it, a willingness to change who you are, to be part of a group or belonging was this idea that you can be your authentic self and be completely accepted. But a five-year-old doesn't have necessarily the capacity to really grok the delineation between those things. I think Gabo or Matei also said to me once,

that we will always sacrifice authenticity for belonging, that humans are so deeply wired to connect with one another, that we will almost every time, particularly children, sacrifice our kind of authentic selves in order to establish those forms of connection. And certainly that was a signature of my life. Sure, it's an adaptation for survival that only becomes a maladaptation later in life

when you realize that you don't know what your authentic self is, kind of manifests as a bit of an existential crisis. But prior to that, it's something, at least for me, you sort of think of as a positive quality, like, hey, I can, you know, I know how to slide in and get along with everyone. And, you know, I know kind of what to say

in response to every question so I can be the person I think they want me to be. And it allows you to kind of what to say in response to every question so I can be the person I think they want me to be. And it allows you to kind of navigate your way in and out of a variety of different social circles. And so you come to think of it or rely upon it as a skill, right? Only to later discover like, you have that like,

who am I? Yeah, well, candidly, it's part of what we're doing right now. Yeah. It's like, because, you know, we are master generalists that can chameleon ourselves into almost any situation. And in some ways we have transmuted our greatest weakness into a superpower.

You know, I look back at, you know, when I have space from my life and I try to examine and identify, you know, the threads, you know, which have been woven through the entire fabric of my life. You know, I point to like, well, what are the things, what are the things I've done? You know, well, I was running a record label and a music promotions company doing, you know doing big shows all the time and putting people in clubs and theaters. And then from there, I went and started this wellness behemoth

called Wanderlust, which was these festivals that we put all over the world. What were they? Where they were like assembling like-minded people around modalities and practices. And then I started something literally called Commune. Right. And I was like, and I did all of this somewhat unwittingly.

And then of course, in a moment of Satori, I'm like, oh, wait a minute. What I really do at the core is bring people together. And I put so much primacy on that because it was so hard for me to belong that I treasure it. I sanctify it so deeply that now it's become sort of my superpower. And I think-

Create these things that other people want to belong to so that at which you are of the center. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's funny. It's funny. It's funny, but I think this is a kind of inventory that everyone can benefit from candidly, where you look at these places of Achilles heels

in your own life and you actually then realize, how can I actually transmute those things into superpowers? How can PTSD become post-traumatic growth? It is possible. Speaking of which, 9-11 is sort of that first inflection point for you that snaps you out of kind of one experience of yourself and begins to position you into another.

Yeah, sometimes I think it's rather incongruous that Bin Laden propelled my wellness journey. But in the wake of 9-11, my wife Skylar opened up Kula Yoga Project, which was a yoga studio just north of ground zero. So, you know, prior to 9-11, I was running and operating this music label and management company just on Murray street.

So just like two blocks north of the World Trade Center. And then subsequently on Warren street, which is even just one block north of there. And then that tragedy occurred. And then in that first couple months, we were in that tight little perimeter around ground zero and sort of cordoned off from getting into our office. And then finally we got in and it was completely inundated

with soot and ash and pretty much everyone that had been in that office building kind of flown the coop, it was mostly creatives and photographers and whatnot, so it was a lot of empty real estate. And Skylar did something sort of quite amazing for the moment, you know, she opened a yoga studio out of the ashes of ground zero. And, you know, and mind you,

this was not some multi-story Tony Equinox situation. You know, this was prior to the advent of a, you know, well appointed yoga studio on every corner. This was a funky monkey one room yoga studio with the bathroom was actually in the studio. It was about the width of a bread box and there was a sort of whistling radiator. And you literally had to walk up

these cockeyed lime green stairs through my office to get up into the yoga studio. And a lot of people associate lower Manhattan with the financial district and that is true, but there were, it is a very densely populated residential area and this little funky Kula yoga studio became sort of a center of healing for the grief-stricken and kind of beleaguered denizens of lower Manhattan.

And this is really where I got my first kind of front row seat to witness the power of kind of spiritual and physical practices, but even more than that community to heal. And so, I would walk up from my office and stand in that tiny little funky vestibule and people would be coming out of class all sweaty and open-hearted and open-minded

and collapse on this little futon right there and that vestibule. And I was witness to a tremendous amount of healing and laughing and crying and story sharing. And I said, wow, this is really quite amazing. And that moment bent the arc of both my personal and professional life. From there, you gotta start doing these retreats.

This is, you're starting to kind of get, you know, steeped in a different way of life as a result of that, while also having a, you know, fun and a good time. But like a good entrepreneur, you decide, like, well, the next step is we need to blow this up into like a huge deal. And I'm gonna create the world's largest yoga ritual. Like I wanna make this experience that I'm having

that's so transformative available to everyone. And the way that I do it in my businessman's mind is to create the world's largest version of it. Yeah, in retrospect, I laugh at how utterly male this idea was, right? I was sitting there at a retreat center in the middle of the jungle, the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica,

waking with the sun, meditating, doing yoga, surfing, just eating the local food right there. And of course then yes, I had this idea of like, how do I scale this? Could I put this experience of a yoga retreat in a more accessible place at a more accessible price point and really create the world's greatest

and biggest yoga retreat? And that was called Wanderlust. And it was a grueling, brilliant, wonderful, awful 10 years of my life in which, you know, my three daughters and I, and Skylar traveled like a band of gypsies all over the world in the name of yoga. I love what you wrote about this in the book.

So I'm just gonna read what you said, which is a tribute to your beautiful writing style. You say, for a decade, wanderlust became my entire life. I worked 16 hours per day, seven days a week. My travel schedule was insane and I rarely slept. Naively, we took on private equity investors. Their edict was simple, grow, but the money didn't come for free.

These cigar smoking plutocrats perched atop a glass midtown panopticon scrutinized our every move. Wanderlust consumed me and eventually it expelled me out its anus like insoluble fiber." I was like, how long did it take you to craft that? That's pretty good, man. Thank you. Yeah, right there, it's sort of a snapshot into-

You're bringing it all together. All of the interests, all of my various inquests from the business to the physiological to feeding my gut, which was as leaky as a rusty old pipe, I found out. which was as leaky as a rusty old pipe, I found out. Yeah, I mean, you know, about four or five years ago, I got a, you know, well, I was presenting in all sorts of ways that are so common

that we sort of accept them as ordinary, but really what we've done is we've normalized the abnormal. So I had chronic fatigue, brain fog. I was always irritable. I was looking at my phone, like every three seconds, I had no ability to focus or concentrate. I was tipping the scales at 206, 210 in that range. That's so hard to imagine.

I had a hard time picturing you at that weight. I mean, I did an excellent job camouflaging it. But then, you know, there were also, you know, just odious insults to my vanity, which I talk about in the book. I mean, yeah, I kind of jelly belly and kind of the dad bod complex. But I think the worst was what I clinically known

as gynecomastia, but otherwise known as the boobs of man. I think the greatest insult was when my youngest daughter, Micah left a training bra on my bed. I was like, that's not funny. And then I got a bucket of cold water, which at that juncture was not a deliberate protocol on my head with a diabetes diagnosis about five years ago, four and a half years ago.

And really it was a shock to me because yeah, I was the wellness guy, I was running a yoga festival, raising three daughters, shopping at Whole Foods, an upright citizen, paying my taxes, et cetera. How could I be part of the American nightmare? How could I be one of these statistics of, 50% of Americans are now pre-diabetic, 11 to 13% are diabetic.

And I was well within that American nightmare. And a lot of that was really just the product of my lifestyle. I was yes, in service of a well-intentioned goal to bring wellness to many, many people, but I was not well. And in fact, yeah, my forays into health and wellness took a U-turn into wealth and hellness.

Yeah, that's so great. I was like, why didn't I think of that? You can have it. Wealth and hellness. All this wellness, you know, made you unwell in the pursuit of wealth and hellness or arriving you in a place of hellness as a result. Yeah, and then, I had to wake up and go on a really significant journey,

both physiologically, psychologically, spiritually, really. That sounds a little pompous, but true. To really take a deeper inventory of who I was and how I was living and make some serious changes. And part of me is because I'm, I have a very cognitive and sort of intellectual approach to many things. Skyler was sitting there as a sort of a specimen

of a human being, all sort of ripped doing yoga, drinking her raw milk and eating her greens and whatnot. I mean, I had everything right in front of me, but I actually had to- This is another thing we share. Yeah, right. True. I mean, we certainly married up

or at least sideways most of the time, but I had to understand it intellectually. I took initially a very, yeah, cognitive or intellectual approach to understanding human physiology. And originally it was out of curiosity. And then, like I said, and then it became out of necessity. And so I wanted to understand sort of the empirical values associated with heart rate variability

and glucose levels, et cetera. And what I began to kind of attach to is like what I could measure, I could improve. And that slowly led me to essentially jumping into my own Petri dish and becoming a end of one experiment and doing a tremendous amount of me search and like you interviewing hundreds upon hundreds of doctors and health experts and mystics and sages

and trying to distill that wisdom in a way that worked for me and also like you had to do a lot of sifting through the grifting is what I call it. Of this space is full of kooky, crazy, kakamemi ideas and what mode and modality and mushroom and pill and praxis is actually gonna work. And so it's been largely an enjoyable journey to, instead of being sort of on a downward spiral of health,

I found an upward spiral and now I'm still mostly there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Prolon.. If you're a longtime listener of this show, then you already know that I've devoted many, many episodes of this podcast to the evidence-based health and longevity benefits of fasting. But what if you could reap those benefits without actually doing a full blown fast? That kind of sounds like it's too good to be true, like a sales pitch, but it's actually the question that three time podcast guest Dr. Volter Longo, one of the world's preeminent

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to back up the role that it plays in every facet of well-being, from heart health to mental health, recovery, cognition, and just being able to show up as your best self. Getting a quality eight hours per night is a personal non-negotiable that I go to great lengths to ensure. It's sort of a commitment not only to myself but to my career and to those that I go to great lengths to ensure. It's sort of a commitment, not only to myself, but to my career and to those that I love that all begins with when I'm sleeping on. Now, I've tried many mattresses, but the one that's really won my heart is Birch,

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and realizing your blood sugar is out of whack, right? This is kind of like the epiphany in which you realize like, oh my God, like I thought it was healthy, but I'm very much not. You go down this rabbit hole and being like myself, somebody who can only be convinced when there is, you know, science and rationality to back it up, right? Old enlightenment values.

The strength that we have, I know that you're somebody who is very happy when you're sitting with a stack of research in front of you and you're reading it and you're educating yourself and the like. And as a result of that and all the conversations that you've had, you can talk about mTOR and all the stuff, right? Like you can throw all the conversations that you've had, you can talk about mTOR and like, you know, all the stuff, right?

Like you can throw all the buzzwords out there and you have the understanding to, you know, kind of back up your use of them. But at the same time, and also what I think makes you in this book so unique and compelling is this doesn't come at the cost of understanding like the why behind it, which is very much rooted in matters metaphysical, right?

There's a whole spiritual aspect to this that's so important that you make it the first part of the book before you even get to all the fun, mTOR, cold plunging, sauna, red light, kind of, sulfurophane of all of it, right? You know what I mean? And I love that you did that. So maybe share a little bit about how the lights came on

in terms of like how you came to understand that this is such an important aspect of all of it without which the protocols perhaps aren't really going to matter or stick. Yeah. Well, this is a bit of a knife fight with my editor candidly, because as you can imagine, the books that sell out there, the give me the eight protocols for this or that.

And I'm like, yeah, but what about the philosophy and the mysticism? Oh, well, put that in a PDF bonus or something. I'm like, yeah, but what about the philosophy and the mysticism? Oh, well, you know, put that in a, in a PDF bonus or something. I'm like, no, I can't. Because, you know, to be honest, my journey was as much metaphysical as physical. And in the end, what I saw was the metaphysical patterned in the physical everywhere that I looked.

But I guess I'll just say that, you know, my entree into really improving myself was not reading Peter Atiyah or Andrew Huberman or figuring out the difference between anabolic and catabolic pathways and whatnot. It was really studying mysticism, particularly kind of Eastern thought. I'm completely addicted to Alan Watts.

In fact, as a caveat, I will say, when I'm talking about this, I often drift into a bit of a transatlantic accent. The people please are in you. You begin to chameleon so fully that you start to inhabit the sensibility of Alan Watts himself. Yeah, I really-

Do you need some vodka? Like you can- Right. Well, I say it's ironic that a man so committed to tumblers of vodka precipitated my hellness journey, my wealth and hellness journey. No, I mean, you know, well, I'll just say this. I blame the Buddha because, you know,

the Buddha is saying that I'm changing moment to moment in relation to my environment. All I do is listen to Alan Watts and Christopher Hitchens. So, it won't be the last time that I blame a spiritual figure for my shortcomings. But yeah, just, you know, if I veer into an upper received pronunciation, like I wish I was British, kind of like.

I'll take note. I'll call you out if I hear it. Well, we were just hanging out with Rangan Chatterjee, right, you know, that brilliant doctor, British doctor. I mean, that guy, he could read the phone book as far as I'm concerned. It's just his accent is- His melodic accent, yes. Yeah, just like read the phone book as far as I'm concerned. It's just his accent. His melodic accent. Yeah, just like on the edge of my seat

while he's like John Dooley, Tim Doolingsworth, whatever. Yeah, and he's a tall glass of handsomeness along the way. Anyway. I wish I was British, oh well. So, but, you know, Alan Watts and Ram Dass, you know, I licensed both of their catalogs for commune. And so I listened endlessly to their lectures on Eastern mysticism.

And my inquest into Eastern thought and human physiology kind of converged and I was having these kind of moments of Satori and I kind of wove up this theory of health called the Tao of health, very much kind of built on the shoulders of the Tao of physics, which was a very influential book

that I read by Fritz Hofkaepra. But there's tenants without spending the next eight hours doing a sort of Buddhism 101 course here with you, but there's tenants in Buddhism that you can see then patterned in human physiology. So I'll just kind of roll through some of them. As the Buddha sort of canoodled around Northern India and then experimented with fasting.

I mean, it's one juncture, it's claimed that he was eating one grain of rice per day. I don't know if that's true. That sounds good. But finally, you know, he found his way, you know, to the Bodhi tree and under this tree, you know, had his great awakening. And one of the primary tenants that then informed

what became the Four Noble Truths was this notion of impermanence. So he called it in Sanskrit, Anika, which is that everything is transitory. Everything's always in flux, always in change. So attaching to anything is fruitless because everything's always changing. And in fact, that attachment to things

is the source of clinging, that clinging, that craving to things is the source of suffering or what he called dukkha. Of course, this notion of impermanence punctuates every single thing that's happening here in the human body. And that's what really violates our sense of identity. It's like Rich gets up in the morning and feels,

looks in the mirror, handsome man that he is, and sees like a stable, reliable self, through this sense of physical continuity. We feel like a fixed thing day to day, but when you actually open up the hood here in human physiology, what we see is total impermanence. Glucose being catabolized to pyruvate being then used for ATP,

electrical signals zipping across synapses between neurons, you know, or look at the microbiome, for example, that perhaps is like one of the greatest examples of impermanence when you start to look at human physiology, we have these, I mean, the human body is about 70 trillion cells, 39 of the 39 trillion aren't even human, right?

And they reside and now are found in every organ on our skin, even in our aura. It's like we're no longer even buried by our skin, right? But primarily they're found in sort of this, the den of our colon. And, you know, these prokaryotes, these single-celled organisms mitigate and regulate almost every system of the body.

In fact, we've outsourced a tremendous amount of processes like digestion, but also they sit right there near the immune system. And because so much of the immune system for good reason is in the gut and they're moderating inflammation levels, insulin sensitivity, all this different stuff, they are disappearing,

they're coming and going every four minutes to 24 hours. And so literally the guy that sat down here with you to start this podcast is a completely different human. If you're talking just about my cellular makeup, all I do is change. And the Buddha intuited this concept prior to any electron microscope or gene third gene germ theory,

or even the, you know, the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. So that idea of impermanence was something that became kind of very potent to me. Then, another very central axiom of Buddhism was this notion of interdependence. So the Buddha had this wonderful image of the universe as a spider web. And at every junction of that spider web was a crystalline diamond that reflected every other diamond.

And it's just a beautiful image. And this gave birth to these theories of dependent origination that everything is reliant on everything else. And then this was echoed across all many other Eastern fields of thought at Gigi Mouje and in Japan and Zen and even in Africa with Ubuntu, this notion that I am because we are.

And again, if you then start to superimpose this notion of interconnectedness on what it is like to be human, you find it everywhere. And again, this somewhat violates our sense of identity because we feel, we experience life most times as a loci of consciousness, kind of crouching somewhere behind the eyes, sort of separate from the world around us, confronting the world around us as something external.

But that, under any rigorous examination, that becomes a complete delusion. And so like, for example, like you're a runner, what is your experience of running on flat ground versus up a steep grade, right? Well, they're very different things, but the common denominator of which is this experience that I am doing it, you know?

And it is, you know, me and the decisions that I'm making that are individuating me and propelling me through the world, which is, you know, very confronting to this notion of oneness. You know, it's easy to say like, we're all one. And like, we're part of a community and all of that, but to really kind of fully grok the fact that there is no separation under this rigorous scrutiny

that you're talking about is something that's deeply uncomfortable to us. Yeah, and I think, I mean, I think about it this way is that, that the behavior and function of an organism is inseparable from the behavior and function of its environment. So, you know, you run slower on sand,

you run even more slowly in water, let's just say. It's like the you that is doing it is inseparable from the environment that is around you. And so that's a very sort of like banal example but we grok this sort of by dint of, you know our everyday experience, right? You know, like a car cuts us off in traffic or, you know, you're running through the hills

and you come across a coyote or a rattlesnake and what happens? You have this kind of involuntary stress response, right? Your HPA axis is activated and that's telling your adrenal glands to create a glutocorticoid called cortisol, which is then synthesized from cholesterol all of a sudden. And then that courses through your veins

and your respiratory and your heart rates start to increase and glucose then gets flushed out to your extremities to fight or fly. And the aperture of your attention becomes super, super narrow and your pupils dilate and you don't trust the world. And you become very self-obsessed. And that's actually serves the biological imperative. All those things are happening around you

just because you actually see something that you perceive as a threat, or someone screams in the other room that a sound wave can literally become a hormone in the matter of seconds, that energy becomes matter, that we are completely inseparable from our environment. in a matter of seconds, you know, that energy becomes matter, that we are completely inseparable from our environment.

And so when you merge these two concepts of impermanence and interconnection, what you find is that we are changing moment to moment in relationship to our environment. And that might seem somewhat obvious, but for those of us like me, who were stuck in their old story of like, I am just this fixed Jeff,

whose destiny is written in the stars, I'll never be good enough, I'll always be fat, no one will ever like me. The idea that I'm always changing in relation to my environment and that I have some agency to change my environment, that was candidly incredibly liberating. Yeah, the agency piece is the kind of leap that you take

once you notice that you are a function of your environment. And then the extension of that is to exert it to create this balance, right? Which is kind of the final principle in this style of health. And what's so cool about this is that all of these truths are evident in nature, in our environments. And what is true for our environments is true for ourselves and our bodies, right?

Like it's just, you know, this is how nature made it, right? And we're quick to see how these patterns are so important in terms of like the ecosystem of a forest or a, you know, or whatever it is, right? A high plane or the desertification of a certain piece of land over a great period of time. But we're reluctant to notice those patterns within ourselves or admit that they are equally true. Yeah, well, we don't see ourselves as nature.

We see nature as something outside of us that is a threat that we must confront. And we've been taught that by our Abrahamic traditions, right, it says that, we were made out of a ceramic figurine in which God blew a soul into, this is right out of a ceramic figurine in which God, you know, blew a soul into, this is right out of Genesis. And that, you know, matter is kind of the province of the devil and it's dumb.

And of course it must be sublimated because it's susceptible to vice and pleasures of the flesh or whatever. And, you know, that nature is something that must be subdued, right? And that we have dominion over, you know, because it's not trustworthy, because it's out to get you,

because it's gonna show up as pests and weeds and whatnot. And certainly there's a part of us, human nature, that's certainly not to be trusted because it's sinful. And without some sort of old bogey in the sky with a moral abacus sort of monitoring our sexual transgressions, we'd rape our best friend's sister or something like that. Some crazy notion like that.

And this is candidly why I put this blade of grass growing through the concrete on the cover of the book. And I'm sure this is an experience people have had, but like, have you ever walked through a concrete jungle landscape? It's just sidewalks and roads and buildings everywhere. And you look down and all of a sudden, there's just like a dandelion or a blade of grass

coming through the concrete. And you're like, oh my God, it's just, nature is irrepressible. And this is a place where we can truly put our faith, not as the typical understanding of faith of like belief in the absence of evidence, but actually trust in nature's eternal reliability. It's actually why we exhale.

It's like we exhale because we trust deeply profoundly that there is another breath waiting for us, right? That's interesting. Yeah, otherwise, why would you ever let go of this precious oxygen? That's it. I mean, that is actually the definition of nirvana, near, out, fauna, blow, blow out.

Let go, let go. Because you must trust in nature. And, you know, nature will sometimes let you down. It's perfect by design. It makes mistakes in its execution. You can find that in biology. Sometimes there's mutations, single nucleotide, polymorphism, SNPs, right?

That predispose you to some disease, or sometimes it's actually dispositive towards some diseases. But what are you gonna do? Not trust nature and always be fearful of it and live kind of with this paroxysms of anxiety of like, I don't trust myself. I don't trust the world around me. No, I mean, that doesn't seem like an adaptive way to live.

But fundamentally, isn't that distrust not only real, it's what kind of created the modern society that is moving us towards ill health, right? Because as a defense mechanism, some part of us doesn't trust nature or ourselves, which creates this scarcity brain that Michael Easter talks about. Like, if we have enough resources,

we don't trust that maybe nature is gonna provide us more around the corner. So we need to gather and collect as much as we can when we can and to consume as much as possible because nature is an unknown that maybe isn't going to provide if we exhale too much. And so gather we must. Yeah, true.

I mean, I think that, I mean, if you look at like the cycles within nature that exist like abundance and scarcity, nature in some ways provides for both and we adapt in relation to it. So for example, if you can imagine, Jeff and Rich on the Serengeti of the East Africa, some 10,000 years ago, off we go to forage

and hunt and gather. And in the late summer, early fall, we might arrive on this cops of ripe fig trees, right? And you and I, what would we do? We're just gonna like gorge as many figs as we can and become a little bit fat. And that is completely adaptive and by nature's design, we were actually designed to be a little bit fat in the fall

because nature innately knew they engineered us for the paucity of winter's fallow that was right around the corner. And this is where we get into, you know, the etiology of chronic disease because we live in a world now where quote unquote, from a food perspective, winter never comes.

So the way that we live, our lifestyle, our culture is hijacking our biology. It's actually using our adaptive mechanisms to store fat, which is just warehouse to energy. It's using our adaptive mechanisms against us and making them maladaptive. And so this is where you get into these evolutionary mismatches and all that.

Right, but this is the portal into the subject matter of the book, which is this notion of stress and distinguishing, good stress from bad stress. So the overabundance of our hyper convenient world is a recipe for the chronic level of stress that's driving all of these ailments that are making us unnecessarily sick

and unnecessarily killing millions of people. The antidote to which of course are these acute forms of stress that nature kind of took care of in and of its own, to provide to us, to keep us healthy, but which we've kind of eradicated from our daily experience. Yeah, we're not making good use

of our hard-wrought adaptations. For tens of thousands of years, really 200,000 years, as it pertains to homo sapiens and millions of years of hominid life. We evolved these adaptive mechanisms that served us extremely well. And now essentially in a very, very short period of time, really since the industrial revolution,

but accelerating in the last 50 years, what we're seeing is all of the artifacts of modernity are hijacking those adaptations. They're upending our adaptive advantages, if you will. And so, you can isolate and identify a whole bunch of them, our continuous eating cycle. I mean, I went to Denny's, I don't often end up at Denny's,

but I noticed on the little sandwich board, you know, this was a couple of years ago, on the wall they had breakfast, right? Served all day, thank God. They had lunch, dinner, and then they had a fourth meal of the day late night. You know, it was like- That's probably where they make most of their money.

When the bars close, it's Denny's time. It's Denny's time. And I was like, oh my God, we just never stop eating. Abundant is never balanced by any degree of scarcity or repair, but we know that in that scarcity and repair, all of these pathways in the body are activated. or repair, but we know that in that scarcity and repair, all of these pathways in the body are activated that promote longevity and resilience. And this is where we get into some of those

like autophagy and ketosis and, you know, activating AMPK, right, and stifling mTOR, et cetera. And those, you know, those enhance the body's ability to be resilient. And so now what we really need to do in order to align ourselves with our biology, with our engineering is superimpose some of these old paleolithic stressors back onto our life.

And that's really what informed this amalgam of protocols. Right, the onus is now on the individual to take responsibility for ushering in these things that just happen as a matter of circumstance of living your life in the days of yore, right? And this goes to like the agency piece, like this is where we need to exert that agency all the way down to an epigenetic level, right?

To get certain genes to express themselves as a result of taking actions that are uncomfortable to invite a stress that you would call is good and promoting of health and health span and all these things that, you know, we're coming to understand and lean into for maybe the first time out of necessity because they've been so eradicated from our lives. Yeah, well, if you go back

and you really ask this seminal question, this is the question that I started to ask myself all the time is because it's very difficult to kind of navigate the wilderness of wellness. We're getting so much deluge of information all of the time. But if you ask this one simple question, how did I evolve? How did I evolve in relation to what I ate and when I ate

or how I moved or my relationship with nature or my relationship with temperature or my relationship with temperature or my relationship with light or my relationship with the people around me. Just ask that simple question and the answers will really appear candidly. So if we can pick any one of those, we were exposed to constant large fluctuations

in temperature for the overwhelming majority of human history. So on the plains of the Serengeti or elsewhere, there would be 60, 70 degree fluctuations in temperature who would be freezing cold at night. It would be scorching hot during the day. We were largely living outside or maybe in little tiny huts.

So we established mechanisms within the human body to manage and not only manage, but thrive in these conditions of stress. And so instead of resorting to the nice digital thermometer or thermostat over on the wall, So instead of resorting to the nice digital thermometer, a thermostat over on the wall, we actually had an internal thermostat right here, kind of above the mouth, below the nose,

in the preoptic kind of area of the brain that communicated with the hypothalamus that when our core body temperature, for example, plummeted, we would have an adaptation to that stress. We would start to shiver. We would start to oxidize fat, stored triglycerides in our fat cells to then use them in our mitochondria to make heat,

to up-regulate ourselves back into that Goldilocks zone of 98.6. So getting cold on a regular basis was actually incredibly adaptive. You know, the same thing for getting really, really hot. You know, we have mechanisms to cool down, perspiration and sweating, but also there were all of these other proteins

that were activated when we get really hot. There's these things called heat shock proteins that kind of maintain the three-dimensional shapes of proteins and the functionality of proteins, particularly in the brain. They also stimulate what's now known as BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, right? That actually maintains the functionality of neurons

and potentially the creation of new neurons. So there's so much benefit in getting extremely hot and extremely cold, but now we live primarily indoors in thermo neutral environments. In fact, we don't even really generally have to get up off the couch to maintain a 72 degree little snuggly nest because our thermostats actually learn our own proclivities.

And so, you can see how this endless march towards convenience and comfort actually create a lot of inconvenience and uncomfortable truths later down the line because no exposure to fluctuations in temperatures makes us weak, it makes us unresilient, it lowers metabolic function, it lowers emotional resilience.

And so, you know, you can find these areas almost everywhere, you know, you look. It's like most of us now wrap our feet in kind of big casts of vinyl and plastic, talking about shoes, right? That's not how we evolved. We evolved with minimal shoes or we went barefoot, most of human evolution.

And so in the last 50 years, particularly, but even kind of going back, actually the history of shoes and high heels is actually fascinating. It actually started with the Persian cavalry. This is a piece of interesting trivia. So the Persian cavalry, like in the 10th, 11th century, they had domesticated horses and they had stirrups.

And so they were wearing boots and they developed the first heel because they wanted to be able to stand up straight in the boots to shoot arrows and to maintain their stability. That's the origin of the heel. That's the origin of the heel. And then they brought it, like there was a Persian emissary that brought it to Europe

and the European nobility just like loved the heel. And so the heel was initially established by, some of the kings of King Louis XVI, I can't remember which one he was, who then brought it into the court and the men were all wearing heels. And then eventually it caught on with the women. And then the French Revolution happened

and it wasn't too cool to be part of the aristocracy anymore. So men ditched the heels, but then women ended up inheriting them. And obviously now we see that kind of in the high heeled shoe and the high heeled shoe undermines the health of the human foot in so many different ways. And so part of good stress or my good stress protocols is trying to be more barefoot more of the time,

align ourselves with how we evolved or wear minimal shoes with bigger toe boxes and minimal soles. So you're actually leveraging the biomechanical masterpiece of the foot, all of the muscles and nerve endings and joints instead of letting your shoes do that work for you. So, yeah.

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you will get your money back. That's OLLIE.com slash richroll and enter code richroll to get an astonishing 60% off your first box. How do you distinguish what's valuable from these lessons around like how we evolved from what we are understanding is in promotion of thriving? So for example, I'm not sure that it's all that helpful to look at what we ate over the course of our evolution

as a predictor or a proxy for what we should eat now because human beings were evolved to be, you know, very adaptable to their environments. And as a result, you know, we can kind of eat anything, right? And we needed to in order to survive. So how informative or helpful is that in terms of like trying to figure out what we should eat now?

Analogously, you know, I guess you could say, well, this is what we did to adapt to survive, but is this really what we need to do now in order to kind of overcome our current, you know, sort of malaise to better thrive. So I guess distinguishing those two things and trying to elucidate like the truths within them. Yeah, I mean, we evolved as opportunistic omnivores,

I would say. We ate a massive variety of food in terms of what was available, you know, maybe 800 different plants and seeds and nuts and tubers. And then, you know, if Rich's luck was good on a particular day, his stone spear might, you know, puncture the belly of an odd toad ungulate

and we'd have some wonderful like lean wild game around the fire. And this is, I think, primarily how we evolved at least in Africa. There was no obesity. I mean, we don't have any census data right from this time, but I think it's safe to say that there was very little obesity.

There was very little metabolic dysfunction. There was very little metabolic dysfunction. There was very little heart disease. There was a little bit of cancer. There was virtually no dementia or Alzheimer's or other neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, there were very few of those diseases even as late as 1900. I think the obesity rates in the United States in 1900

were about 3%. And moving forward through kind of the dust bowl and the depression, which were times of significant scarcity in the United States, the obesity rate really didn't move very much. It wasn't until really after World War II when we started to industrialize food that we started to see obesity issues

and other kind of metabolic issues creep into the American landscape. And so, I think it is fair to say that nutrient deficient shelf stable ultra processed foods that have been introduced over the course of the last maybe seven decades, but certainly accelerated in the last three or four are a very, very significant contributor to the scourge of chronic disease right now. Our genome really hasn't changed much, right?

Evolution is awful slow and culture in this particular case is very, very fast. So, I would say we know what not to eat. I mean, if we had a million years, could humans evolve to sustain themselves on Twinkies? Maybe, maybe. I'm not sure what we would look like. We would look like sort of like a blob or something,

but the problem is, is that evolution is that slow. And so, you know, for me, cause I had significant metabolic dysfunction issues, you know, I know what worked for me, which was kind of the adoption of this kind of keto-tarian approach towards diet, you know, which was essentially low glycemic, which flies in the face of like ultra-process refined grains and sugars and starches, right?

Which predominate the standard American diet. But it was also plant focused because I really needed the fiber to feed my gut, and to take care of my gut bug friends. So there was this kind of low carbohydrate, high fiber diet that then I combined with kind of intermittent fasting, which again, really is just like a reflection

of more or less how we evolved or I consolidated the consumption of food more or less into an eight hour window. And that little tryst, that little combination yielded tremendous results for me. How long did it take to really reverse all the metabolic dysregulation? Not really that long.

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

and that was six and a half or something. So that was reflective of what I was seeing on the CGM. And then about, it took me about four months to get down into sort of more of an acceptable range. And then about six months to really more or less reverse my pre-diabetic diagnosis. And so, this was really due to a kind of fairly fundamentalist approach towards my health at that juncture.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend now that people become sort of neurotic fundamentalists about health, because there's other risks associated with that. There's this whole kind of world of orthorexia, right? Where you can become over-obsessed with being healthy. But in the early days, you know, I did need to take some relatively severe measures to address a relatively acute problem.

So, it was the stacking really of a number of different protocols that really yielded kind of the best results. And for those of people that just like really kind of like want, hey, just tell me what to do, Jeff. I will first give the asterisk that everybody is different, everyone's a bio individual. But there was a stack of protocols that I self-applied

that had results that I found almost miraculous, which was, you know, really these. So I kind of pointed to a couple of them already. It was really the adoption of a low glycemic diet. So I was essentially reducing my consumption of carbohydrates which would become glucose essentially. And then an intermittent fasting protocol. So I consolidate all the consumption of food

in an eight hour window, more or less between 11 and seven. So 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Although if you really want to get optimal about it, probably shift that window earlier because we're a little bit more optimized to metabolize food a little bit earlier in the day, but it's not very friendly. And I have three daughters who like to eat dinner with me.

So that was my window. So it was kind of this ketitarian approach to diet and intermittent fasting protocol. And then where I really saw the kind of incredible results was layering in a cold water therapy component to this in a very particular time of day. So this will make total mechanical sense for people that kind of understand

just general rules about metabolism. But because I had a low glycemic diet, I had low glucose, I was limiting my glucose. Because I was on an intermittent fasting protocol at about 10.30 AM, you know, I wouldn't have eaten for about, you know, 15 and a half hours. So I would have relatively low glucose levels, even though you generally have a little cortisol spike

in the morning that will stimulate some glucose. I had pretty low glucose levels at about 10.30 AM. And then before breaking my fast, I would get into the treacherous ice bath, right? And you know, what would happen? So my core body temperature would plummet and my body would just engage in an adaptive response. It would start this process of thermogenesis

to up-regulate my body temperature back into that Goldilocks zone. Cause my body is always trying to find homeostasis, right? In order to up regulate my body temperature, it would start to look around for an energy substrate because it needed that energy substrate to make heat in my mitochondria, but there was not a lot of glucose around so then it had to opt for an alternate energy substrate

and that was fat, right? So basically I was just burning fat because that was the only substrate around for my body to make energy, to make enough heat, to thermoregulate and get me back into that Goldilocks zone. And the combination of those protocols was crazy. I mean, I went from 206 to 142. Wow.

And how long? Like not that long, like six months. I mean, people thought I was sick. And what was the exercise regimen along the way? Yeah, I mean, It was candidly like, sometimes I call it my Jesus protocol, which is, or Jehovah's fitness. Jehovah's fitness?

Yeah. That's funny. Sorry, dad jokes all day over here. A lot of zone two walking in the desert. Come back on a Friday, eat some fish, do a little crossfit. The Jehovah's fitness. This goes on, a little crossfit.

You can probably get that one too. By Saturday, I'm totally dead. By Sunday, come back to life, Jehovah's fitness. There you go. There you go. I see, yeah. Sorry. If you, look, if you ever are like hard pressed,

you know, to put a few nickels together, I think, you know, I think you could sell that. Yeah, I'm keeping that in my back pocket, Jehovah's fitness. Yeah, the CrossFit references is a little off color. But in any case, no, it was like a lot of zone two walking candidly. I mean, look at Jesus, the guy was live.

He had a great body composition. I mean- At least is- At least in a way that we conjure him. You know, like depicted. Yeah. But yeah. So it was a lot of zone two walking

and then resistance training for the first time in my life. You know, I was sort of a disciple to what I call now chronic cardio. So I would like sit around in front of a computer all day and then go and like huff it out on the elliptical or the stair master for 45 minutes. And then, you know, back to my life. That was not a profitable regimen for me.

In fact, that's what, how most people approach exercise is that it becomes this commodified product ties little cubby hold part of their life. And the rest of the time they're just sitting around and you look, I mean, we have 45,000 places in the United States to sweat and grunt and lift and run. And at the same time, you know, we have a 45% obesity rate.

So that whole approach towards productizing exercise, it's just one little part of your day. It's just like, for me, it didn't work. And again, if you ask yourself, how did I evolve? I was moving all day. I was walking like crazy. I was climbing trees and building structures and lifting some heavy things.

And that's more or less what I did. I mean, you could even categorize zone five as like escaping, you know, from a tiger from time to time, whatever, getting your heart rate up. So I kind of combine those. I was walking every day, I was lifting some weights, and then I was probably getting my heart rate up

to zone four, zone five, maybe twice a week. And that sort of elixir of things really had incredible effect. But I mean, you think about good stress and probably like the most obvious example of that is muscle building, right? So you overload a muscle, you tear the microfibers in that muscle,

you give that thing enough rest and enough protein, enough leucine and it grows back bigger, right? So, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. You can see that mapped on a bicep or a, you know, quadricep quite obviously. And then you apply it to other places like, I don't know, have you ever trained at high altitude? Periodically, but not for extended periods of time, yeah.

But this is a very common practice like for Olympic athletes, right? And why? Because there's a form of deliberate hypoxia, right? At high altitudes, because the air is less dense. And so there's less pressure of the oxygen to diffuse into the lungs, to then get delivered to the cells for energy production. So what does the body do under that stress of hypoxia?

It has an adaptation. It starts to make this particular kind of protein called EPO that then makes more red blood cells, which are basically more couriers for oxygen to deliver, you know, to the cells for energy creation and your mitochondria then adapt and become more efficient in relation to the environmental stress. So like hypoxia is like one of the,

like a deliberate form of hypoxia is, is another like obvious stressor that can confer a health benefit. And all these things are, they're all about dosage. I think it was like Paracelsus. He said the dose makes the poison. I think that was that dude. And so, you know, you obviously don't want

too much hypoxia. Yeah. Or you don't want to be hypothermic or hyperthermic. Or too much exercise or too much fasting or too much cold water exposure. Yeah. You don't want any of those things. And, you know, in fact, you know, when people come to me about advice around protocols pertaining to their health,

about advice around protocols pertaining to their health, you know, I always say like, you don't run a marathon after never having run, right? You know, you ease into it. And, you know, this is very much true with like cold water therapy or ice plunging. You know, you can get a tremendous amount of benefit from that, even at a relatively high temperature,

it just has to feel cold for you. And then you slowly can elongate duration and decrease temperature. But these things take time, but what's amazing is that, you know, we often associate health with downward spirals. That's how we generally experience kind of the degradation of health, but upward spirals are equally possible. And you can generate a tremendous amount of momentum

when you get on these upward spirals. And, you know, this is the amazing thing about seeing health as a process is that day to day, you can be on the trajectory towards wholeness, that's healing, or you can be on the trajectory towards disease that's ailing, and you have a tremendous agency over which direction that you're going.

The impermanence of it all on some level, we are all on the spectrum, towards this trajectory of ultimately death, right? So it is degeneration on a macro level, you know, from an absolutist perspective, the agency piece comes in to, you know, kind of direct the depth and level of acceleration towards it, right? Like, and these, you know,

the agency is exerted in the form of these interventions, which you call protocols, all of which are different variations on hormesis, right? Like you're introducing an acute stress to like disrupt this pattern, to kind of introduce something that deregulates whatever your body is doing and causes it to like stop and take notice

and then have to kind of repair itself. And as the muscle gets stronger in that recovery process, so do we, right? It's this, it's Alan Wattsian in the kind of macro sense of like what is true in nature is true in our bodies. And you drill down on these various things. We've already talked about a bunch of them, fasting, cold water exposure, exercise, of course.

But you have a whole bunch more of them here. I guess, since we just talked about cold water therapy, like then there's the other side of that, which is heat exposure. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I have my morning ritual, which involves kind of sauna bathing on a regular basis, it's a little embarrassing, I generally do it nude

and with a Buddhist Nichiren chant, I don't want anyone to have a vision of that in their head. While staring at a mandala, while like burning incense and like you're stacking. Yeah, I was on tour with, well, you're stacking. Yeah, I was on tour with, you know, you have to be efficient. I was on tour with- Holding a crystal.

I was on tour with Herbie Hancock, back in my music days, I was kind of a refugee now with the music business. And he is a Buddhist and he follows kind of the Nichiren school. And so, you know, he would have this inner sanctum kind of the Nichiren school. And so, you know, he would have this inner sanctum kind of beyond the green room and he would invite everyone kind of backstage,

hey, you wanna join me before the gig. And for people that don't know, he's a legendary jazz pianist, just incredibly brilliant guy, played with Miles Davis, et cetera. And so then he would start in with this chant, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

And he would be reading it out of like Buddhist scripture, but really, I don't know what the, I think the literal meaning of it is sort of the, the blooming of the lotus flower or something, but that wasn't even the point. The point was that you actually get consumed in the vibrations of the chant such that you just completely inhabit the present moment.

And he used this as a tool to become sort of And he used this as a tool to become sort of non-judgmentally present prior to every show. This was my- This is your chant in the- This is my chant. This is your naked chant in the sauna. This is my naked chant in the sauna. It really stayed with me.

Because I use it as sort of the sauna, because it's a very safe and closed consistent environment, I use it as my meditation place. And, you know, I don't always chant, but chanting mantra is a very effective gimmick almost, a tool to get you into the present moment. So yes, I'm in the sauna, you know, generally for about 20 minutes, you know,

the suggested protocol there from, at least from the data that primarily emerges out of Finland, which I believe has like two and a half million saunas in a very small country. You know, the data that's I think organized mostly by Rhonda Patrick, I think she's the one that has- Yeah organized mostly by Rhonda Patrick. I think she's the one that has- Yeah, she was just in here the other day.

Oh, cool. Yeah. She's put together these meta-analyses from all these different studies that have emerged out of Finland. So the going protocol is 20 minutes, about 180 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe a humidity level of like 10, 15%. But yeah, and then, you know,

in terms of frequency four to seven times per week. And then that's where you're really gonna get, you know, the massive cardiovascular benefit, et cetera. And of course, you know, just by kind of dint of your own experience and sensory experience, you get into the sauna and it is a form of sort of low grade exercise, right?

You can feel that your heart rate is going up a little bit. But there's all of these other benefits. It's obviously a vasodilator. So you're gonna start to move circulation, move blood around the body, move lymph around the body. There's all of these other proteins activated. We touched on them quickly before, but the heat shock proteins and the BDNF, et cetera.

And then I combine that and do sort of a counterbathing deal with my cold plunge. And so if you're kind of going between cold and hot, what you're getting is vasodilation, vasoconstriction, vasodilation, vasoconstriction, vasodilation, vasoconstriction, and so that's really beneficial for your circulatory system, so yeah. It also makes it easier to get into the cold place the first time if you're coming out of a sauna.

But I like the going back and forth. I find that to be kind of the most impactful in terms of mood as well. And also later on that evening, my sleep quality. I know you're supposed to end on the cold. End on the cold, yeah. Sometimes I cheat on that, depending on how cold I am. But I do feel the best when I am able to end on the cold.

Yeah, that's really when you're gonna get the most metabolic benefit for those reasons that we talked earlier is that, your body is engineered to find homeostasis. And so if you're lowering core body temperature, your metabolism has to click into effect to up-regulate body temperature. Interestingly, I think sleep is generally hated

by kind of some sort of heat therapy at night because, and it's slightly anti-instinctual because your body, your core body temperature actually decreases in the evening. So if you get it, if you get yourself hot, like in a warm bath or even in a sauna, your body will does do what it's supposed to do. It'll immediately activate mechanisms

to cool your body down and bring it down. And so that's why oftentimes, taking a warm bath actually helps with sleep. Sometimes people attribute that to, you know, epsom salts or magnesium, et cetera, but it's really more to do with your body's relationship with temperature. We don't have time to go into all of the protocols,

but you know, just in terms of kind of flagging them, you talk about red light therapy, which is super interesting. Then of course, the protocol of like interrupting our attention deficit disorder to work on focus. And that comes of course with mindfulness practices and meditation. We talk a lot about that on this show.

The stressed plants, I think is interesting because again, that's another like mimicking of like nature like what nature does and the impact that that can have on our bodies. But I think, you know, one I would like to kind of drill down on, cause it's sort of counterintuitive for a book like this is the good stress of engaging in difficult conversations.

Cause I think this is something, you know, that we're all kind of like, you know, debating in our own minds right now. I think, you know, in this moment of division where it does feel like there's an edge that wasn't there, it's easy to kind of retreat from having challenging conversations, but the community that we're trying to engender

in our lives, that's so much of your thesis and a part of what it is to feel whole and be a human being is sacrificed in our unwillingness to kind of engage in that activity. And I know I feel my own resistance in it with doing that. Yeah, again, if I ask myself, how did I evolve? Well, probably in a tribe of 80 people

where we had to work it out, we didn't have a digital screen to anonymously sit behind and hurl vitriolic barbs at each other. We actually had to work it out face to face. at each other, we actually had to work it out face to face. I sort of unwittingly got myself into a whole series of very, very stressful conversations. So it was a little bit trial by fire for me, because as I freely admitted earlier in the show,

I was a people pleaser. So I was generally- This is the most uncomfortable experience for a people pleaser. So I was generally- This is the most uncomfortable like experience for a people pleaser. Totally, where you're avoiding conflict really at all costs. And that's the way I spent really the first almost five decades of my life. But kind of in March, 2020,

as we anchored into port lockdown, you know, my business partner, Jake, really encouraged me to start to write a weekly essay to my burgeoning commune community because he felt that people were really scared and feeling very alone. And if I could package thoughts in words and share those vessels of emotions,

people might feel less alone. That's a nice idea. And so I was like, okay, sure. I naively agreed to doing this. And so I was producing 1,500 to 2,000 words every Sunday and sending them out to like 1.2 million people. That's a pretty significant list. And for better or worse, I put my personal email

at the bottom of that missive. And, you know, of course I was tackling pretty difficult, contentious issues because 2020 provided plenty of fodder for that, right? So anything from COVID to, you know, the reckoning of social justice in the wake of the George Floyd murder, to the election, the rise of QAnon and every other emanation

out of Trumpistan, et cetera. And I was trying to be thoughtful and rigorous and find some middle ground with these essays. But inevitably over the course of 2000 words in a time that was very, very triggering, I managed to offend people. And Monday morning, I would send this email out on Sundays and the opprobrium would come flowing in Monday morning through cresting the bow of my inbox with recrimination,

if you will. And, you know, I'm slightly exaggerating. arresting the bow of my inbox with recrimination, if you will. And, you know, I'm slightly exaggerating. Much of the response I got was encouraging and thankful, but I got tons, hundreds of emails from people that, you know, didn't agree with me. And some of them were just like, there was nothing I could do with them candidly because it would be like Trump 2020

pasted 5,000 times in an email. There's nothing I can really respond to that. But I also won't paint it as coming from any particular political wing. They were actually from all over the political map. There were people, I was writing about race and there was plenty of people on the left that didn't feel like a white man

should be centering himself in that discussion at that time. Okay, so I was getting that. There were plenty of people on the right that felt like I was a shill for Pfizer, but then I was also a conspiracist at the same time. I mean, it was crazy. So with the more thoughtful detractors, I would send them an email and I'd say,

hey, you know, thank you for your note. I appreciate that. And after a couple of volleys of these emails, I pulled what I call my David Copperfield routine. I would actually ask them to join me on an hour long zoom. And I call it David Copperfield because I made most of them disappear at that juncture. But about 26 people took me up on it.

And so over the course of two months, kind of August and September, 2020, I had 26 hour long Zoom calls with people that really did not like me or disagreed with me about a number of things. And initially like I didn't have any training in nonviolent communication or subsequently I got schooled in that whole field of Marshall Rosenberg who did this

in kind of the most immiserated parts of the world and brought tribes together around this technique for having compassionate and pathetic conversation. I was just kind of going in in cold. And I'll give you like an example. So like in August, 2020, I think I wrote an essay about COVID.

So there was a lot of data coming out at that juncture that the people that were most severely afflicted by COVID that ended up being hospitalized or died tended to be people with multiple comorbidities or obesity or diabetes. And so- Or elderly. Or elderly, yeah. So I wrote an essay about that topic.

And this was also right during the body positivity movement. Right, I mean, that was third rail at that time. Yeah, and so I got just a lot of, particularly women that felt like I was like fat shaming people. And of course, growing up as a fat kid, I thought I was very, very sensitive to that issue. And I was just writing a sort of rigorously researched essay, but whatever, I offended people.

So I started getting on these Zoom calls and it was so interesting, Rich. I mean, the pattern of these Zoom calls basically just repeated themselves over and over again. I would get on the call and at this juncture of like people weren't as good at Zoom as they are now. So it would be like jabbing at buttons and stuff. And then there would be, you know,

the exchange of a couple pleasantries. And then I would generally sit there for 45 minutes and not say anything. And people would essentially just gish gallop their entire life story about me, their relationships with their pets and their children and their spouses. And really kind of what I learned through this experience is that people were just so desperate to be seen and heard.

And that I was providing an opportunity for them to be seen and heard. And I was doing that in a relatively like safe set and setting where they felt trustworthy. They felt like that they weren't gonna be attacked. And over time, as I got better at this process, I started to kind of annotate areas of convergence in my life as they were telling me their life.

And so, oh yeah, you know, they have daughters too. And oh yeah, they, you know, were born in Chicago and they drove cross country and their car broke down or whatever. And so finally, when they had exhausted themselves, I would essentially bring up these areas of convergence. So it's like, oh, so funny, like I have daughters too, and mine are about to go off to school,

and I'm not sure how I'm gonna manage that and stuff like that. And what I was doing kind of unwittingly was really seeking connection and not seeking solution. And many, many times, Rich, we never actually got around to discussing the original issue that had put us at loggerheads. We just found some sort of deep level of human connection.

And I basically built this kind of whole Rolodex of frenemies, you know, because I was talking to people, you know, rural voters who were super Trumpers and, you know, who were really just telling me about the quality of their lives, about, you know, working, you about working two minimum wage part-time jobs, not being able to afford their insulin, living in towns with like boarded up main streets,

like shopping for all of their food at 7-Eleven, kind of this, in some ways, really sad stories that people would tell me about their lives. And so I really developed candidly a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for those people. And from kind of that experience of connecting

with so many different people, I built kind of a protocol around having these stressful conversations. And part of which was building my own psychological immune system. Because I was very susceptible to insult for most of my life, you life, as a people pleaser. It's like, and so, when I first embarked on this process,

when people would call me like a libtard or an asshole or be like unsubscribe you dick or whatever, all the emails that I get, I would take that quite personally and I would be very defensive and I would be up all night, concocting various rejoinders and rebuttals and like driving myself crazy,

like holding that ember of resentment, waiting to throw it and getting burned all the time. But over time, I built my psychological immune system very, very similarly to how you build your physiological immune system. So if you think about that, we build our physiological immune system through low grade exposure to viruses

and bacteria and pathogens, you know, and they enter the body, this floating brain of the immune system sees some sort of insult and starts to wind up different proteins that then we know as antibodies that then neuter that particular insult, that pathogen. And through the miraculous immune system has a memory

such that these B cells can produce these antibodies if they ever come into contact with that pathogen, that virus or bacteria again. And so in a very, very similar way, I built my psychological immune system through low grade exposure to quite a bit of insult to the point where I start to look forward to being insulted. In fact, sometimes people would send me these emails,

I'd skip the laudatory parts and I'd get into the place where, you know, that were recriminatory because I really started to lean into the discomfort of it. And so this, you know, led to kind of the development of, you development of a protocol around how to have stressful conversations that I outline in the book.

And then it kind of came to a head this past August, and this is not in the book, where I hosted a summit at Commune Topanga, which is our retreat center, just not far from here, between Palestinians and Israelis. And in this particular case, I was not the one having the hard conversations. I was actually the one moderating the conversations.

And yeah, so this was a- And how did that go? Oh, man. It was so interesting and very, very emotional. So everyone arrived and obviously they were coming. So they were already open on some level, but the Israelis, and these were Israelis that were raised in settlements in the West Bank.

These weren't just like Americans that had visited Israel or something like that. And these, the Palestinians, there are a number of them had grown up in refugee camps in the West Bank, like in Jenin and near Hebron. And so, yes, they had come and they knew who was going to be there, but they were very, very anchored in their own political identities and certainly in advocating for the

rights of their own people. And there was a really interesting professor there from University of Michigan. He actually zoomed in named Mark Tesler. And he said that the key to successful mediation and peacemaking is through understanding each other's narratives. So really we spent the first couple of days just in storytelling mode,

where the Palestinians present would tell their narratives of growing up, of what it was like to grow up in a refugee camp in the West Bank. And then the Israelis would get up, and these were all students, I should say, these were all students from Columbia, Brown and UCLA. And they were actually the students that were leading the movements on their campuses.

So there is that extra level of intensity that was just coming out of the whole season of encampments that happened on college campuses. So after a couple of days of sharing each other's stories, I got, I started to pair up the Palestinians and the Israelis at a table very, very much like this one, except I was sitting in the middle. And then I would turn to the Israeli and I would say,

now, you know, we spent the last two days, you know, Aharon learning about Mohsen story. Can you tell Mohsen story? And they had to look each other in the eyes just like this and tell each other's story. And it's actually just like emotional talking about it. Yeah, as a way that's that being like the pathway to empathy on some level.

Yeah. Right. Only by really trying to inhabit that other individuals unique experiences can you begin to understand it. 100%. And by not only understanding each other's narratives but by telling each other's narratives, but by telling each other's narratives, it was like a damn broke.

And so that was like the Wednesday and this whole summit happened from a Monday to a Friday. And then by Wednesday night, everyone was sitting around a big table with their sleeves rolled up, writing white papers together. They were like, okay, what does a confederation model look like?

What does a two state model look like? What does a one state model look like? What are we gonna do about the right to return? What are we gonna do about the settlements? They were then able to get into the hardcore political structural work, but it wasn't until the psychological and trauma work had already happened.

And man, it was an incredible learning experience. Have you kept tabs on them? Like how has that, like I'm curious around how fragile that sort of state is. Like as soon as it's disrupted when they go back into their lives, do you just sort of rubber band back into your position? I think a little bit that does happen,

except that the students that were present at this were also, you know, as I was saying, the heads of the Palestinian student unions and movements on campus, and then, you know, other Israeli Jews that are very involved in their own campus. So then they had, they still like are on the same campus together.

So they, and they have this level of bond now that I think is so deep and powerful that they're, that they list towards cooperation and common ground and compromise. And, you know, I think coming out of that experience for me, what one of the challenges that I started to sit in was how hate and violence scale so easily but how healing is such deep, lengthy work.

And how does one institutionalize and scale the kind of healing work that we need in order to solve some of the world's biggest problems in some of these areas. So I started to think about it in terms of actually creating structures for the work to then bring back into these campuses such that more environments like the one that I created for a very short period of time

in Topanga, you know, could be replicated within the campus environment. And the students at Columbia have largely done that. That's a worthy investment of your time, I think, pursuing that. Thankless, probably, and very difficult. I guess the punctuation there is that we tend to avoid these stressful, hard conversations

because they're so easy to avoid. But we really have to ask ourselves, what is the opportunity that sits on the other side of them? Because it's often these very, very thorny conversations that stand between us and the world that our hearts imagine is possible. And if a Palestinian and an Israeli can do that, can you not do that with your sister or your spouse

or an ailing parent? Just think about how important that stressful conversation could be. On some level, all the growth is on the other side of whatever it is that we're avoiding, right? And in the context of a difficult conversation, the avoidance is a function of some emotional wound, right? Then we perpetuate through that avoidance

and we'll never be healed within ourselves until we can compel ourselves to engage in that sort of thing. But the bigger gift is the kind of domino effect or the downstream impact of those conversations, which ultimately, like we avoid them because we think that they're gonna separate ourselves even further from other people,

but it is only in doing them that we are kind of brought closer together on the other side of that, right? Yeah. It reminds me of Susan David's work on emotional agility. She says like, discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life. And it's easy to restrict our idea of that discomfort

to the physical things like the exercise and the diet and all of that. But the real richness is in the emotional discomforts. 100%. We can go down all the stuff that is sexy, but honestly, the real work is in this emotional landscape. Cause it's amorphous and easy to avoid and easy to overlook. And even more so when we're like, yeah,

but I'm look at my diet and look at my, look at what I'm doing every day to like introduce all of these discomforts in my life. Sometimes that is a way of, you know, it's an avoidance technique in and of itself to avoid those other things. I a hundred percent agree agree, 100% agree. I mean, what started honestly as a physical inquest

became a psycho-spiritual inquest. And while I would say that these good stress protocols are obviously incredibly beneficial to human physiology, what they can offer in terms of emotional regulation are way, way, way more important. In fact, what I found for me that fasting, for example, the most potent impact of fasting for me was not autophagy or mitobiogenesis or weight loss. For example, the most potent impact of fasting for me

was not autophagy or mitobiogenesis or weight loss or ketosis. It was actually my ability to emotionally regulate, to find space between stimulus and response. You know, just because I stopped eating at 7 p.m. didn't mean I didn't get hungry at 9.30. Can you sit with your own discomfort? Yeah, can you sit with it?

And how do you apply that in other areas of your life? Totally, and instead of just mindlessly walking to the cupboard to assuage some sort of, you know, discontent, I actually had to witness the source of the stimulus and ask myself, is this hunger a biological need or a psychological or emotional desire? And when I was forced to actually find the space to witness that, it was almost always emotional or psychological.

I was bored, someone insulted me, and I was eating my feelings, right? And because the calories that are engineered to hit your bliss point are right there, it is so easy just to fall prey to them. But when I was really able to then create that space between stimulus, the hunger and response, either eating or not eating, you know,

that space actually became so useful in other parts of my life. Like when my children were inevitably annoying, how was I gonna respond at that juncture? Was I gonna just yell at them and have a reactive kind of knee jerk response? Or could I apply that same space that I had cultivated from fasting

to the way that I treat my children or the people that I love in my life. And the same is true, honestly, with cold water therapy. What happens when you get into cold water? You have an involuntary stress response, like the adrenaline starts to flow in through your veins. You feel like a sense of panic. And then you have that brief moment

to apply conscious top-down pressure on top of involuntary bottom-up response. You can do that often by leveraging the breath or by leveraging your prefrontal cortex. But again, that space, that ability of putting top-down pressure on top of involuntary response, that can then punctuate your life

in so many other important ways. It's not just about the metabolic benefits or the dopamine of getting into the cold water. Sure, that's great, but what's it like when then you're in a very, very stressful situation? For example, when you walk into a room and you walk into a stressful conversation, can you use that same ability

that you've enhanced yourself with in the cold plunge or with fasting in that situation that requires a tremendous amount of emotional regulation. And that's again, I think you nailed it. That's where I think a lot of these protocols are way, way more powerful. Yeah, beautifully put. What still trips you up?

Like what's the outer edge of this horizon for you where you still find yourself challenged more than you would like? Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm a million miles from my best self, man. And if you don like. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm a million miles from my best self, man. And if you don't believe me, ask my daughter. She'll happily tell you, you know, it's a, like I said, you know, it is a process being healthy

or being emotionally regulated is not a product, you know? You know, I've recently had kind of a falling out with someone, it didn't really have anything to do with me, but anyways, it's happening. And, you know, I've been up at night kind of brooding over it and kind of questioning myself of like, wait, Jeff, you're so evolved here with your emotional regulation techniques.

Why are you up at night really brooding about this? And so, again, life is a process. I think the most kind of challenging thing in my life right now is sort of a product of kind of where I sit just within my family. So I have children who are, well, they're all teenage girls. God help me, my eldest is 20 now, but, and then I have very, I have aging parents.

And so I'm sort of in this kind of in-between stage sort of caring on some level for both of them and confronting elements of inevitable mortality and transience and kind of navigating that as I see my parents get older and older. And I think that this really kind of navigating that as I see my parents, get older and older. And I think that this really kind of speaks, I think to the ultimate challenge or potentially the ultimate target

of the spiritual and examined life is how we manage our awareness of our own mortality, or freedom from the fear of death, I suppose. And that is something that I'm thinking about a lot right now. We sit in a really curious place in the human story, kind of in the evolution of our species, where by dint of some fortuitous combination of atoms

in our brain, like we have this thing that we call consciousness, that you and I can sit here across this table and be totally here and engaged with each other and find words as vessels for emotions and thoughts and feelings and package them up and share them such that we can enjoy that and feel each other. And that's just amazing.

I mean, it's one thing to be connected like this. It's another thing to know that you're connected. You know, it's one thing to be happy or sad. It's another thing to know that you're happy or sad. You know, humans just have this incredible capacity to know that it is something, it is something, it is like something to be themselves.

And we often kind of attribute that quality to this concept of qualia. But, you know, consciousness also has a shady side, which is this awareness that everything that we love and know, including ourselves, is totally transient and gonna die. And this fear of death has caused paroxysms of anxiety across human history.

I mean, we've gone out for millennia and we killed off essentially everything bigger than us. All of the wonderful bears and dire wolves and mammoths and tigers, and all the megafauna of the world. And then, Louis Pasteur came around and said, oh, well, it's not just the big things that kill you. It's also like the little things that we can't see.

And then we spent the last 170 years or so killing off everything smaller than us. And we've been paralyzed by this concept of death for so long, such that we've created these myths that somehow promise eternal life. If we subscribe to a series of edicts, you know, created by some old paternalistic bogey in the sky, whatever, we keep trying to cheat it all

to the point now where a lot of our friends, you know, are into this concept of like escape velocity, right? That, you know, our organs are gonna regenerate faster than they're gonna degrade, and we're never gonna die. We're never gonna do it. We're gonna cheat the whole game. We're gonna become a mortal. I'm really working on trying to kind of reframe

my relationship with death. And there's certainly been practices in various traditions I'm trying to kind of reframe my relationship with death. And there's certainly been practices in various traditions. You've probably had Ryan Holiday and some of those folks, Memento Mori is one of those that's baked into stoicism. Buddhism has Moran Asati. But I think a lot of getting comfortable with death is really kind of reframing our relationship

with the natural world and with nature. And, you know, realizing that, yes, my five senses as kind of circumscribed by sight and sound and my ability to hear and taste, those things may be coterminous with the cessation of my heart and my brain, but there is something about me that goes on. And if you start to, again, kind of delve into the sciences

and the sort of improbability, that eight billion years ago, there was some supernova made of hydrogen gas. And very much like in the sun, these hydrogen nuclei were fusing and becoming helium and helium was becoming carbon and carbon was becoming oxygen and so forth to the point where there was so much pressure

and so much temperature that this supernova exploded and vomited all of its elemental guts all over the universe. And somehow those clouds then reformed and formed a rock called earth in the middle of the solar system. And all of those same elements then self-assembled to become a freaking woodpecker and a bear and rich roll and me.

And in me and in you is one of the seven octillion atoms that was in Lao Tzu and in the Buddha and in Martin Luther King. And when we die, we simply go on and we are just these links in this sort of continuous chain of animated captured sunshine. And when you start to, I think really cognitively understand yourself as part of this greater intelligence,

you can begin to at least cognitively let go of some of that fear of like, as Alan Watts used to say, like look up and see that star in the sky and point at it and be like, look, that's me. That's me up there. And I think what we're inevitably seeking is not the ease in life that comes with sort of a pint

of chubby hubby and a Netflix binge. I think we're seeking like a different kind of real ease in our life. And we tap into that kind of moment to moment, when you're running or when you're in some sort of creative activity or some sort of collective enterprise, sometimes we associate that with flow state, right? Like this true ease of like awareness of yourself and body and space and some sort of transcending outside the fluctuations of time and space and location and form.

And then you're just kind of pure essence for just that one brief tiny moment. You're it, you're all there is. You're the entire universe experiencing itself in the here and now as your organism. You actually feel that and then it's gone. And so, this is the place that I'm trying to inhabit as a part of experience more, not just in here, I can say it to you here, in this beautiful podcast studio, but can I truly feel it?

Can I truly let go, blow out all of that fear? That's the biggest challenge. I can't imagine a more beautiful or eloquent way to capture those ideas. And as much as I have many things to say about it, I think it's best that we end the podcast here because this is what I wanna leave everybody with. That was really beautiful, thank you.

I have tremendous respect for the work that you do, the rigor that you bring to the work, all of the synthesis of which is found in this beautiful new book, I think is incredibly helpful and again, very well written. So thank you for your gifts, my friend. And I think we should point out though, just in the event that people might be confused,

you have this place in Topanga that is called Commune. But I think people might be like, is he running a Commune? Like, who is this guy? He's like doing all this stuff. He is literally running a Commune, this guru across from me. So it is called Commune. Your podcast is called Commune. You have a digital platform called Commune, your podcast is called Commune. You have a digital platform called Commune

where you have courses and you have like, you know, filmed lectures with all of these very interesting people, but it is not in fact a Commune. I can say that as somebody who's been there. Yeah, unless you think that you may be attacked by a wild group of hippies on acid, no, I'm sorry. That's not gonna happen, sadly. Yeah, we use the physical property to host retreats,

generally around yoga and spirituality, or in some cases, longevity and physical health. And I also leverage the property to host these masterminds like the Palestinian-Israeli Summit, but also ones on ecology and sustainability, et cetera. And I know you've been up on the property many times to celebrate some of our friends like Paul Hawken. We've done book releases up there.

And then we also use it as a production facility. So we film all of our courses. I think we've filmed 150 courses up there now that sit on the online platform. And then I do host a number of the podcasts up there. But Rich, I just to say before we conclude, you know, you've really just served as the model exemplar of like a rigorous and thoughtful human being for so many people, but specifically for me,

I've just seen you like hold the course for a really, really long time and eschew some of the more kind of like glittering, tempting ways of being out there. And I really just have tremendous respect and thank you for your footprints in the sand. I've tried to follow them. Appreciate that, thanks man.

Until next time, let's do this again, this was great. Awesome, to be continued. Peace. Peace. Bye. It's. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Boising Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do

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