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

Summary

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

Guest Introduction and Background [03:00 - 05:28]

In this episode, Rich Roll welcomes Jeff Krasno, a former music manager and co-founder of Wanderlust, to discuss his transformative journey and his new book, Good Stress. Jeff shares how his deep involvement in the wellness industry, particularly through organizing large-scale wellness events like Wanderlust, led to personal health challenges that prompted a profound reevaluation of his approach to health and well-being.

Notable Quote: “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.” [03:31]

The Shift from Wanderlust to Commune [05:28 - 07:20]

Jeff explains how the commercialization of the wellness industry gradually compromised his own health and well-being. Despite Wanderlust's initial success, the intense demands and the pursuit of growth led him to a pre-diabetes diagnosis, serving as a catalyst for change. This realization prompted Jeff to create Commune, a platform dedicated to fostering genuine well-being through education, courses, and events that emphasize holistic health practices.

Notable Quote: “When the wellness industry began to look more like a business than a movement, Jeff Krasno chose to chart a different path.” [05:28]

Understanding Good Stress [07:20 - 12:00]

Jeff introduces the concept of "good stress," distinguishing it from chronic, harmful stress. He draws on Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, to explain how deliberate and strategic discomfort can enhance longevity, resilience, and overall health. Jeff emphasizes that good stress aligns with our evolutionary biology, activating pathways that promote health rather than causing burnout.

Notable Quote: “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 that promote longevity and resilience.” [04:59]

The Political Landscape of Wellness [07:20 - 14:18]

Jeff delves into the shifting political dynamics within the wellness industry. Originally dominated by left-leaning ideas focused on preventative and integrative medicine, recent years have seen right-leaning elements infiltrate the space, merging libertarian ideals with anti-establishment sentiments. This blending has led to tensions and challenges in maintaining ethical standards and effective regulation.

Notable Quote: “The horseshoe became a circle.” [09:54]

Additional Quote: “We started seeing almost everything from functional medicine being influenced by right-wing deregulation priorities while healthier policies require more regulation.” [12:00]

Personal Health Crisis and Transformation [14:18 - 22:54]

Jeff recounts his personal health struggles, including weight gain and a pre-diabetes diagnosis, despite his active role in promoting wellness. This paradox underscored the disconnect between industry practices and genuine health needs. Determined to reclaim his health, Jeff embarked on a rigorous self-experimentation journey, integrating scientific research with spiritual insights to develop a holistic approach to well-being.

Notable Quote: “I had to wake up and make some serious changes.” [03:31]

Additional Quote: “A lot of the fun was actually psychological and emotional resilience.” [22:54]

Integrating Eastern Wisdom: The Dao of Health [22:54 - 45:49]

Jeff discusses how Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, profoundly influenced his health protocols. Concepts like impermanence and interdependence became foundational to his understanding of human physiology and well-being. He explains how these principles mirror biological processes, emphasizing the transient nature of our bodies and the interconnectedness of all systems within us.

Notable Quote: “The Buddha intuited this concept prior to any electron microscope or gene germ theory or even the notion that the earth revolves around the sun.” [45:49]

Additional Quote: “When you start to superimpose this notion of interconnectedness on what it is like to be human, you find it everywhere.” [45:49]

Practical Protocols for Good Stress [45:49 - 125:02]

Jeff outlines various protocols designed to introduce deliberate stressors into daily life to enhance resilience and promote health. These include:

1. Cold Water Therapy:

   • Mechanism: Triggers thermogenesis and fat oxidation when the body responds to cold exposure.
   • Benefit: Enhances metabolic efficiency and emotional regulation.
   • Quote: “What you can measure, I could improve.” [22:54]

2. Sauna Use:

   • Mechanism: Activates heat shock proteins and promotes cardiovascular health.
   • Benefit: Improves circulation, lymphatic movement, and overall detoxification.
   • Quote: “Our core body temperature, for example, plummeted, and my body engaged in thermogenesis.” [67:45]

3. Intermittent Fasting and Ketotarian Diet:

   • Mechanism: Reduces glucose levels and promotes fat metabolism.
   • Benefit: Stabilizes blood sugar, supports gut health, and enhances metabolic flexibility.
   • Quote: “It was a low glycemic, high fiber diet that then I combined with kind of intermittent fasting.” [83:07]

4. Mindfulness and Emotional Regulation:

   • Mechanism: Practices like meditation and mindful eating create space between stimulus and response.
   • Benefit: Enhances emotional resilience and reduces impulsive behaviors.
   • Quote: “I had to witness the source of the stimulus and ask myself, is this hunger a biological need or a psychological or emotional desire?” [126:12]

5. Red Light Therapy:

   • Mechanism: Utilizes specific wavelengths of light to promote cellular repair and reduce inflammation.
   • Benefit: Enhances skin health, reduces pain, and supports cellular function.

Notable Quote: “Science is not really a thing, it’s a method, it’s a process. Always asking the question why?” [18:58]

The Importance of Difficult Conversations [65:32 - 125:02]

A significant portion of the conversation centers around the value of engaging in hard conversations as a form of good stress. Jeff shares his experiences of facilitating dialogues between conflicting groups, such as Palestinians and Israelis, emphasizing how these interactions foster empathy, understanding, and collective problem-solving. He highlights that enduring emotional discomfort through meaningful dialogue can lead to personal and societal growth.

Notable Quote: “What we have to ask ourselves, what is the opportunity that sits on the other side of them? Because it's often these very thorny conversations that stand between us and the world that our hearts imagine is possible.” [122:34]

Additional Quote: “Trying to inhabit that other individual's unique experiences can begin to understand it 100%.” [119:36]

Personal Growth and Ongoing Challenges [125:02 - 142:10]

Jeff candidly discusses his ongoing journey toward self-improvement, acknowledging that he is far from his ideal self. He reflects on balancing family dynamics, caring for aging parents, and grappling with his own mortality. Jeff emphasizes the continuous nature of personal growth and the importance of integrating both physical and emotional well-being practices to navigate life's complexities.

Notable Quote: “I’m working on trying to reframe my relationship with death.” [129:21]

Additional Quote: “Day to day, you can be on the trajectory towards wholeness that's healing, ailing, or you can be on the trajectory towards disease that's ailing.” [95:11]

Conclusion

The episode with Jeff Krasno offers a profound exploration of how deliberate discomfort and intentional stressors can enhance both physical health and emotional resilience. By integrating Eastern philosophical principles with evidence-based practices, Jeff provides a holistic framework for achieving authentic well-being. His emphasis on the importance of difficult conversations underscores the interconnectedness of personal and societal health, advocating for a balanced approach to modern living.

Final Notable Quote: “What started honestly as a physical inquest became a psycho spiritual inquest.” [125:02]

Key Takeaways:

• Good Stress vs. Bad Stress: Deliberate, strategic stressors can activate beneficial biological pathways that promote health and resilience.

• Integration of Philosophy and Science: Combining Eastern wisdom with Western medical practices offers a comprehensive approach to well-being.

• Importance of Difficult Conversations: Engaging in challenging dialogues fosters empathy and collective growth, essential for personal and societal harmony.

• Continuous Personal Growth: Embracing the process of self-improvement requires acknowledging ongoing challenges and integrating both physical and emotional practices.

Resources Mentioned:

• Good Stress by Jeff Krasno
• Commune Platform: commune.com
• Alan Watts Lectures
• Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication Techniques

Note: For a deeper dive into the topics discussed, listeners are encouraged to read Jeff Krasno’s book, follow his platform Commune, and explore the practices of mindful engagement and deliberate discomfort in their own lives.

Transcript

[Rich Roll]

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[Jeff Krasno]

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. I be part of the American nightmare. I had to wake up and make some serious changes.

[Rich Roll]

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 well being, one that led 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 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 hows and whys 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

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 that promote longevity and resilience.

[Rich Roll]

Jeff, so nice to have you here. I think this is probably 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 going to talk about that, of course, but it's just good to kind of break bread with you here today.

[Jeff Krasno]

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.

[Rich Roll]

You think people would be interested in that?

[Jeff Krasno]

I don't know. I'll have to test them.

[Rich Roll]

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 both kind of been in this world for a long time, and I. 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 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, you know, 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?

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, well, I suppose I try 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 tenet of Buddhism, where I try to consider all thoughtful points of view and then find some form of centralized coherence around them instead of just dismissing 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. In the wellness space is sort of a kind of perplexing political migration, if you will. You know, largely as a product of, you know, 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. You can 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 is kind of the early the. 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, you know, the left. And the. The part of the left that has embraced, you know, 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 Robert Kennedy sort of soldering the edges of that horseshoe together.

[Rich Roll]

The horseshoe became a circle.

[Jeff Krasno]

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 with some of the people on the left that have 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 sane policies related to medicine and healthcare, we've seen those as adjacent issues to sane climate policy or sane women's rights policy or health care 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 mom 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 gonna be that inherent tension there. That'll be, I think, interesting to see how it plays out. I think for you and I, holding the middle can feel like very lonely really a lot of times, because you're.

[Rich Roll]

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, 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, you know, kind of welcoming me, you know, to the other side and saying, finally, you know, you've. You've seen the light. Neither of which are true. I feel like I've been charting this same course from, from day one. But then I have to, you know, on that topic of like, you know, 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. And maybe I'm sort of trying to navigate the confusion that comes with the inversion of that and it suddenly becoming a talking point for the other party. But it is interesting that tens 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, we're closing a lot of doors behind us. Almost everything 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 in conjunction with COVID but also against 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 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 government is in collusion and subsidizing Big Food that's owned by the same asset management firms as Big Pharma. And the same 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. Yes, you know, on the revolving door.

[Rich Roll]

Between those who regulate these industries and the people that run them.

[Jeff Krasno]

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 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 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-80s, Big Tobacco scooped up all of the big food companies like Kraft and Nabisco, Philip Morris and RJR scooped up all of these companies and essentially, you know, leveraged 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 cereals and et cetera. I've been saying that for a long time. It's just. It has a different sort of currency today.

[Rich Roll]

Yeah, There's a different valence to it now. And I suppose everything is political now. It used to be don't talk about politics and don't talk about religion, but essentially, I think no topic is left untouched. And certainly 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, as people who are both kind of content creators in this space running commercial enterprises, 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 clickbait or knowing, oh, well, if I do this, I know it's going to 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 profligate?

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah. Candidly, it's a challenge. How do you essentially break through the noise with important, rigorously excavated information while Also not playing that clickbaity 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. 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 from a post that might explode or 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 you know, that's the wonderful thing about science. Science is not really a thing, you know, 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.

[Rich Roll]

And then presenting what you find along the way in all its messy nuance. Right, as opposed to the, you know, the reductive finding that applies to everybody in every case and, 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

I mean, I find that the truth generally 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.

[Rich Roll]

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, there seems to be a couple important inflection points, but maybe walk us through quickly your childhood and how you ended up in New York.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, sure. Well, I had a very peripatetic 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, you know, I lived in northern England and Spain and Brazil, moved around Brazil quite a bit. And, you know, 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.

[Rich Roll]

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?

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, certainly it was something that she was able to underscore, you know, that fitting in was essentially how I described it, a willingness to change who you are, to be part of a group. While belonging was this idea that you can be your authentic self and be completely accepted. But, you know, a five year old doesn't have necessarily the capacity to really grok, you know, the delineation between those things. I think, you know, Gabor Mate also said to me once, you know, that we will always sacrifice authenticity for belonging, that, you know, 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 in my life.

[Rich Roll]

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 and 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 positive quality, like, hey, I can, you know, I know how to slide in and get along with everyone. And, you know, I 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 navigate your way in and out of a variety of different social circles. And so you. You come to think of it or rely upon it as a. As a skill. Right. Only to later discover, like, you have that, like, who am I?

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, well, candidly, it's part of what we're doing right now. You know, it's 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 of 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, big shows all the time and putting people, you know, in clubs and theaters. And then from there I went and started this wellness behemoth called Wanderlust, which was, you know, these festivals that we put all over the world. What were they? Well, they were like, assembling like minded people around, you know, 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, you know, in a moment of satori, I'm like, oh, wait a minute. What I really do, you know, 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.

[Rich Roll]

And I think create these things that other people want to belong to so that at which you are of the center.

[Jeff Krasno]

Right. 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, you know, PTSD become post traumatic growth? It is possible.

[Rich Roll]

Speaking of which, 911 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, sometimes I think it's rather incongruous that Bin Laden propelled my wellness journey. But in the wake of 911 my wife Skylar opened up Kula Yoga Project, which was a yoga studio just north of ground zero. So prior to 911 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 there was a lot of empty real estate. And Skyler did something sort of quite amazing for the moment. She opened a yoga studio out of the ashes of ground zero. And mind you, this was not some multi story Tony Equinox situation. This was prior to the advent of a well appointed yoga 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 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 in that vestibule. And I, 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.

[Rich Roll]

From there you gotta start doing these retreats. You're starting to kind of get steeped in a different way of life as a result of that, while also having fun and a good time. But like a good entrepreneur, you decide, well, the next step is we need to Blow this up into like a huge deal, and I'm going to create the world's largest yoga ritual. Like, I want to 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, you know, the world's largest version of it. Yeah.

[Jeff Krasno]

In retrospect, I. I laugh at how utterly male this idea was. Right. I was sitting there at a retreat center in the middle of the jungle of 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 my three daughters and I and Skylar had traveled like a band of gypsies all over the world in the name of yoga.

[Rich Roll]

I love what you wrote about this in the book, so I'm just going to 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 pan Opticon 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 paragraph? That's pretty good, man.

[Jeff Krasno]

Thank you. Yeah, right there. It's sort of a snapshot into.

[Rich Roll]

You're bringing it all together.

[Jeff Krasno]

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

[Rich Roll]

I have a hard time picturing you at that weight.

[Jeff Krasno]

I mean, I did an excellent job camouflaging it. But then there were also just odious insults to my vanity, which I talk about in the book. I mean, yeah, 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 you know, really it was a shock to me because, yeah, I was the wellness guy. I was running a yoga festival, you know, raising three daughters, shopping at Whole Foods, you know, an upright citizen, paying my taxes, et cetera. You know, how could I be part of the American nightmare? How could I be one of These statistics of 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, my forays into health and wellness took a U turn into we and hellness.

[Rich Roll]

Yeah, that's so great. I know. I was like, why didn't I think of that? 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah. And then, you know, I had to, you know, I had to wake up and, you know, 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 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.

[Rich Roll]

This is another thing we share.

[Jeff Krasno]

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 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 an N 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 you know, this space is full of kooky, crazy cockamamie ideas and what mode and modality and mushroom and pill and praxis is actually going to work. 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 I'm still mostly there Foreign.

[Rich Roll]

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[Jeff Krasno]

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, no, I can't. Because 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 my entree into really improving myself was not reading Peter Attia or Andrew Huberman or figuring out the difference between anabolic and catabolic pathways and. 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.

[Rich Roll]

The people pleaser in you you begin to chameleon so fully that you start to inhabit at the sensibility of Alan Watts himself.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, I really.

[Rich Roll]

Do you need a. Do you need some vodka?

[Jeff Krasno]

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 in this I blame the Buddha because, you know, the Buddha's saying that I'm changing moment to moment 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.

[Rich Roll]

Candidly. I'll take note. I'll call you out if I want.

[Jeff Krasno]

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 just like on the edge of my seat while he's like John Dooley, Tim Duelingsworth, whatever, it doesn't matter.

[Rich Roll]

He's a tall glass of handsomeness along the way.

[Jeff Krasno]

Anyway, I wish I was British. Oh, well. But you know Alan Watts and Ram Dass. 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 Dao of Health, very much kind of built on the shoulders of the Tao of physics, which is a very influential book that I read by Fritzof Capra. But there's tenets, 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, patterns 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 and experimented with fasting. I mean, at 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 he found his way to the Bodhi tree and under this tree had his great awakening. And one of the primary tenets that then informed what became the Four Noble Truths was this notion of impermanence. So he called it in Sanskrit, anyika, which is that everything is transitory, everything's always in flux, always in change. So attaching to anything is fruitless because everything is always changing. And in fact, that attachment to things is the source of clinging, or that clinging, that craving to things is the source of suffering, or what he called Duke. Of course, this notion of impermanence punctuates every single thing that's happening here in the human body. And that sort of really violates our sense of identity. It's like Rich gets up in the morning and feels, looks in the mirror, handsome man that he is, and sees 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. You know, glucose being catabolized to pyruvate, being then used for ATP, electrical signals zipping across synapses between neurons. You know, 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 has 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. And so we're no longer even barriered by our skin. Right. But primarily they're found in sort of this, the den of our colon. And, you know, these prokaryotes, these single celled organisms, mitigate and regulate almost every system of the. In fact, we've outsourced a tremendous amount of processes like digestion. But also they sit right there near the immune system, because so much of the immune system, for good reason, is in the gut. And they're moderating inflammation levels, insulin sensitivity, all this different stuff. 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 to about my cellular makeup, all I do is change. And the Buddha intuited this concept prior to any electron microscope or gene germ theory or even the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. So that idea of impermanence was something that became kind of very potent to me. Then 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 spiderweb was a crystalline diamond that reflected every other diamond. 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, Jiji muje 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.

[Rich Roll]

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. 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, and I think, you know, I mean, I think about it this way is 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 our everyday experience, right? Like a car cuts us off in traffic, or 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 sud. And then that courses through your veins and your respiratory and your heart rate start to increase and glucose then gets flushed out to your extremities to fight or fly. And the aperture of your attention becomes super, super narrow and your pupils dilate and you don't trust the world and you become very self obsessed. And that actually serves the biological imperative. 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. 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 star. 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.

[Rich Roll]

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 dao 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. Or whatever it is, right. A high plain 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah. Well, we don't see ourselves as nature. We see nature as something outside of us that is a threat. 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 Genesis. And that matter is kind of the province of the devil, and it's dumb. And of course it must be sublimated because it's susceptible to vice and pleasures of the flesh or whatever. And that nature is something that must be subdued, right? And that we have dominion over because it's not trustworthy, because it's out to get you, because it's going to 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 COVID 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 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.

[Rich Roll]

That's interesting. Yeah. Otherwise, why would you ever let go of this precious oxygen?

[Jeff Krasno]

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 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 these 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.

[Rich Roll]

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. If we have enough resources, we don't trust that maybe nature is going to 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

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 East Africa some 10,000 years ago, off we go to forage and hunt and gather. And in the late summer, early fall, we might arrive on this copse of ripe fig trees. And you and I, what would we do? We're just Going to gorge as many figs as we can and become a little bit fat. And that is completely adaptive. And by nature's design, we were actually designed to be a little bit fat in the fall because nature innately knew, they engineered us for the paucity of winter's fallow that was right around the corner. And this is where we get into the 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 food fat, which is just warehoused 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.

[Rich Roll]

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.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, we're not making good use of our hard work. 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 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 port, you know, this was a couple 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.

[Rich Roll]

That's probably where they make most of their money. When the bars close. It's Denny's time.

[Jeff Krasno]

It's Denny's time. And I was like, oh, my God, we just never stop eating. Abundance is never balanced by any degree of scarcity or repair. But we know that in that scarcity and repair, all of these pathways in the body are activated that promote longevity and resilience. And this is where we get into some of those, like autophagy and ketosis and activating AMPK and stifling mtor, et cetera. And. And those enhance the body's ability to be resilient. And so now what we really need to do in order to align ourselves with our biology, with our engineering, is superimpose some of these old Paleolithic stressors back onto our life. And that's really what informed this amalgam of protocols.

[Rich Roll]

Right. The onus is now on the individual that's 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 the agency piece. This is where we need to exert that agency all the way down to an epigenetic level to get certain genes to express themselves as a result of taking actions that are uncomfortable to involve, fight a stress that you would call is good and promoting of health and health span and all these things that we're coming to understand and lean into for maybe the first time out of necessity because they've been so eradicated from our lives.

[Jeff Krasno]

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 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 life 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, there would be 70, 60, 70 degree fluctuations in temperature. It would be freezing cold at night, it would be scorching hot during the day. We were largely living outside or maybe in little tiny huts. So we established mechanisms within the human body to manage, and not only manage, but thrive in these conditions of stress. And so instead of resorting to the nice digital thermometer or thermostat over on the wall, we actually had an internal thermostat right here, kind of above the mouth, below the nose and the 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, 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 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 can find these areas almost everywhere you look. It's like most of us now wrap our feet in kind of big casts of vinyl and plastic, talking about shoes, right? That's not how we evolved. We evolved with minimal shoes or we went barefoot most of human evolution. And so in the last 50 years particularly, but even kind of going back actually the history of shoes and high heels is actually fascinating. It actually started with the Persian cavalry. This is a piece of interesting trivia. So the Persian cavalry, like in the 10th, 11th century, they 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 boot, to shoot arrows and to maintain their stability.

[Rich Roll]

That's the origin of the heel.

[Jeff Krasno]

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. 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 and instead of letting your shoes do that, work for you. So, yeah.

[Rich Roll]

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[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, I mean, we evolved as opportunistic omnivores, I would say, you know, we ate a massive variety of food of, you know, in terms of what was available, 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 toed ungulate and we'd have some wonderful, like lean wild game around the, 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 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, but the problem is that evolution is that slow. And so for me, because I had significant metabolic dysfunction issues, I know what worked for me, which was kind of the adoption of this kind of ketotarian approach towards diet, which was essentially low glycemic, which flies in the face of ultra processed refined grains and sugars and starches, 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 a reflection of more or less how we evolved, where I consolidated the consumption of food more or less into an eight hour window. And you know, that little tryst, that little combination yielded tremendous results for me.

[Rich Roll]

How long did it take to really reverse all the metabolic dysregulation you know.

[Jeff Krasno]

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 125-130mg 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 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, 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 where you can become over obsessed with being healthy. But in the early days I did need to take some relatively severe measures to address a relatively acute problem. So it was the stacking really of a number of different protocols that really yielded kind of the best results. And for those, those are people that just really kind of want, hey, just tell me what to do Jeff. I will first give the asterisk that everybody is different, everyone's a bio individual. But there was a stack of protocols that I self applied that had results that I found almost miraculous, which was really these. So I kind of pointed to a couple of them already. It was really the adoption of a low glycemic to diet. So I was essentially reducing my consumption of carbohydrates, which would become glucose essentially. And then an intermittent fasting protocol to consolidate all the consumption of food in an 8 hour window, more or less between 11 and 7. So 11am and 7pm Although if you really want to get optimal about it, you'd probably shift that window earlier because we're a little bit more optimized to metabolize food a little bit earlier in the day. But it's not very friendly. And I have three daughters who like to eat dinner with me, so that was my window. So it was kind of this ketotarian approach to Diet, an intermittent fasting protocol. And then where I really saw the kind of incredible results was layering in a cold water therapy component to this at 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 10:30am 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 know, you generally have a little cortisol spike in the morning. Morning that will stimulate some glucose. I had pretty low glucose levels at about 10:30am 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 upregulate my body temperature back into that Goldilocks zone. Because my body is always trying to find homeostasis, Right. In order to upregulate my body temperature, it would start to look around for an energy substrate because it needed that energy substrate to make heat in my mitochondria. But there was not a lot of glucose around. So then it had to operate, 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 140.

[Rich Roll]

Wow. And how long?

[Jeff Krasno]

Like, not that long. Like six months. I mean, people thought I was sick.

[Rich Roll]

And what was the exercise regimen?

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, I mean, it was, it was candidly, like sometimes I call it my Jesus protocol, which is. Or Jehovah's Fitness.

[Rich Roll]

Jehovah's Fitness. Yeah.

[Jeff Krasno]

Sorry. And some dad jokes all day. Over here is a lot of Zone 2. Walking in the desert, come back on a Friday, eat some fish, you know, do a little CrossFit. Little CrossFit. You can probably get that one too. By Saturday, I'm totally dead. By Sunday, come back to life. Jehovah's Fitness.

[Rich Roll]

There you go.

[Jeff Krasno]

There you go.

[Rich Roll]

I see. No, look, if you ever are like hard pressed to put a few nickels together, I think you could sell that.

[Jeff Krasno]

I'm keeping that in my back pocket. Jehovah's fitness. Yeah, the CrossFit reference is a little off color, but in any case, no, it was a lot of Zone 2 walking, candidly. I mean, look at Jesus. The guy was. Was lithe. He had a great body composition. I mean, at least in the way.

[Rich Roll]

That we conjure him as depicted.

[Jeff Krasno]

But, yeah, so it was a lot of Zone 2 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, day, and then go and huff it out on the elliptical or the StairMaster for 45 minutes and then back to my life. That was not a profitable regimen for me. In fact, that's how most people approach exercise, is that it becomes this commodified, productized little cubbyholed 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 swim, sweat and grunt and lift and run, and at the same time, 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, didn't work. And again, if you ask yourself, how did I evolve? I was moving all day. I was walking like crazy. I was climbing trees and building structures and lifting some heavy things. And that's more or less what I did. I mean, you could even categorize zone five as, like, escaping from a tiger from time to time, whatever, getting your heart rate up. So I kind of combined those. I was walking every day, I was lifting some weights, and then I was probably getting my heart rate up to zone four, Zone five, maybe twice a week. And that sort of elixir of things, you know, really had incredible effect. But, I mean, you know, 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? That you can see that map on a bicep or a quadricep quite obviously, and then you apply it to other places. I don't know. Have you ever trained at high altitude?

[Rich Roll]

Periodically, but not for extended periods of time.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, but this is a very common practice for Olympic athletes. Right, and why? Because there's a form of deliberate hypoxia at High altitudes because the air is less dense and so there's less pressure of the oxygen to diffuse into the lungs to then get delivered to the cells for energy production. So what does the body do under that stress of hypoxia? It has an adaptation. It starts to make this particular kind of protein called epo that then makes more red blood cells, which are basically more couriers for oxygen to deliver to the cells for energy creation. And your mitochondria then adapt and become more efficient in relation to the environmental stress. So, like, hypoxia is like one of the, like a deliberate form of hypoxia is another, like, obvious stressor that can confer a health benefit. And all these things are. They're all about dosage. I think it was like Paracelsus, he said, the dose makes the poison. I think that was that dude. And so, you know, you obviously don't want too much hypoxia. Yeah, you know, or you don't want to be hypothermic or too much exercise.

[Rich Roll]

Or too much fasting or too much cold water exposure.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, you don't want any of those things. And, you know, in fact, you know, when people come to me about, about advice around protocols pertaining to their health, I always say, you don't run a marathon after never having run. Right. You ease into it. And this is very much true with cold water therapy or ice plunging. You can get a tremendous amount of benefit from that, even at a relatively high temperature. 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 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 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, ailing, 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.

[Rich Roll]

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. From an absolutist perspective, the agency piece comes in to kind of direct the depth and level of acceleration towards it. Right. And 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 disrupt this pattern, to kind of introduce something that deregulates whatever your body is doing and causes it to stop and take notice and then have to kind of repair itself. And as the muscle gets stronger in that recovery process, so do we. Right. It's Alan Wattsian in the kind of macro sense of 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have my morning ritual which involves kind of sauna bathing on a regular basis. It's a little embarrassing. I generally do it nude and with a Buddhist Nichiren chant. And I don't want anyone to have a vision of that in their head.

[Rich Roll]

While staring at a mandala, while like, you know, like burning incense and like, you know, like you're stacking your.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah. I was on tour with. Well, you know, you have to be efficient. I was on tour with Holding a Crystal. I was on tour with Herbie Hancock back in my music day. Is kind of a refugee now of the music business. And he is a Buddhist and he follows kind of the Nichiren School. And so he would have this inner sanctum kind of beyond the green room. And he would invite everyone kind of backstage. Hey, you want to join me before the gig? And for people that don't know, he's a legendary jazz pianist, just incredibly brilliant guy, played with Miles Davis, et cetera. And so then he would start in with this channel chant. Nam myoho renge kyo. Nam myoho renge kyo. And you know, he would be reading it out of like Buddhist scripture, but really, I don't know what the. I think the literal meaning of it is sort of, you know, the blooming of the lotus flower or something. But that wasn't even the point. The point was that you actually get consumed in the vibrations of the chant such that you just completely inhabit the present moment. And he used this as a tool to become sort of non judgmentally present prior to every show. This was my.

[Rich Roll]

This is your chant in the. This is your naked chant in the sauna.

[Jeff Krasno]

This is my naked chant in the sauna. It really stayed with me because I use it as sort of the sauna because it's a very safe, enclosed, consistent environment. I use it as my meditation place and 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 generally for about 20 minutes. The suggested protocol there, 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. The data that's I think organized mostly by Rhonda Patrick, I think she's the.

[Rich Roll]

One that has, she was just in here the other day.

[Jeff Krasno]

Oh cool. Yeah, she's put together these meta analyses from all, 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%. And then in terms of frequency four to seven times per week. And then that's where you're really going to get the massive cardiovascular benefit, et cetera. And of course just by kind of dint of your own experience and sensory experience, you get into the sauna and it is a form of sort of low grade exercise. Right. You can feel that your heart rate is going up a little bit. But there's all of these other benefits. It's obviously a vasodilator. So you're going to start to move circulation, move blood around the body, move lymph around the body. There's all of these other proteins acting, we touched on them quickly before, but the heat shock proteins and the BDNF, et cetera. And then I combine that and do sort of a counter bathing, deal with my cold plunge. And so if you're kind of going between cold and hot, what you're getting is vasodilation, vasoconstriction, vasodilation, vasoconstriction. And so that's really beneficial for your circulatory system.

[Rich Roll]

It also makes it easier to get into the cold plunge 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

The cold, end on the cold.

[Rich Roll]

Sometimes I cheat on that depending upon how cold I am. But I do feel the best when I am able to end on the cold.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah, that's really when you're going to get the most metabolic benefits 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 metabolisms have to click into effect to upregulate body temperature. Interestingly, I think sleep is generally aided by some sort of heat therapy at night because. And it's slightly anti instinctual because your core body temperature actually decreases in the evening. So if you get yourself hot, like in a warm bath or even in a sauna, your body will do what it's supposed to do. 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. Actually helps with sleep. Sometimes people attribute that to Epsom salts or magnesium, et cetera, but it's really more to do with your body's relationship with temperature.

[Rich Roll]

We don't have time to go into all of the protocols, but just in terms of kind of flagging them. You talk about red light therapy, which is super interesting. Then of course, the protocol of what, 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 mimicking of nature, what nature does and the impact that that can have on our bodies. But I think one I would like to kind of drill down on because it's sort of counterintuitive for a book like this is, is the good stress of engaging in difficult conversations. Because I think this is something that we're all kind of debating in our own minds right now. I think in this moment of division, where it does feel like there's an edge that wasn't there, it's easy to retreat from having challenging conversations. But the community that we're trying to engender in our lives, that 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 with doing that. Yeah.

[Jeff Krasno]

Again, if I ask myself, how did I evolve? Well, probably in a tribe of 80 people where we had to work at 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. 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. In the show. I was a people pleaser.

[Rich Roll]

So how is the most uncomfortable experience for a people pleaser?

[Jeff Krasno]

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, 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 emotion, and people might feel less alone. It was a nice idea. And so I was like, okay, sure, I naively agreed to doing this. And so I was producing 1,500 to 2,000 words every Sunday and sending them out to, like, 1.2 million people. It was a pretty significant list. And for better or worse, I put my personal email at the bottom of that missive. And. And of course, I was tackling pretty difficult, contentious issues, because 2020 provided plenty of fodder for that. Right. So anything from COVID to the reckoning of social justice in the wake of the George Floyd murder to the election, the rise of QAnon and every other emanation out of Trumpistan, et cetera. And I was trying to be thoughtful and rigorous and find some middle ground with these essays. But inevitably, over the course of 2,000 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, sort of cresting 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 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, 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, it was crazy. So with the more thoughtful detractors, I would send them an email and I'd say, hey, thank you for your note. I appreciate that. And after. After a couple volleys of these emails, I pulled what I called 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 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, 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, empathetic conversations. I was just kind of going in cold, and I'll give you an example. So 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. People with multiple comorbidities or obesity or diabetes or elderly. Or elderly, yeah. So I wrote an essay about that topic. And this was also right during the body positivity movement, right?

[Rich Roll]

I mean, that was third rail at that time.

[Jeff Krasno]

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, people weren't as good at zoom as they are now. So we'd be like, jabbing at buttons and stuff. And then there would be 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, you know, really kind of what I learned through this experience is that people were just so desperate to be seen and heard and that I was Providing an opportunity for them to be seen and heard. And I was doing that in a relatively like safe set and setting where they felt, you know, trustworthy. They felt like that they could, that they weren't, weren't going to be attacked. And over time, as I got better at this process, I started to kind of annotate areas of convergence in my life as they were telling me their life. And so oh yeah, they have daughters too. And oh yeah, they 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. I was like, oh, so funny. I have daughters too and mine are about to go off to school and I'm not sure how I'm going to manage that and stuff like that. And what I was doing kind of unwittingly was really seeking connection and not seeking solution. And many, many times. Rich, we never actually got around to discussing the original issue that had put us at loggerheads. You know, we just found some sort of deep level of human connection. And you know, I basically built this kind of whole Rolodex of frenemies 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 working two minimum wage part time jobs, not being able to afford their insulin, living in towns with boarded up main streets, shopping for all of their food at 7:11 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. You know, I built kind of a protocol around having these stressful conversations and part of what which was building my own psychological immune system because I was very susceptible to insult for most of my life as a people pleaser. And so when I first embarked on this process, when people would call me a libtard or an asshole or be like, unsubscribe, you dick or whatever, all the emails that I get, I would take that, that quite personally and I would be very defensive and I would be up all night concocting various rejoinders and rebuttals and driving myself crazy, 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, 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 we know as antibodies that then neuter that particular insult, that pathogen. And. 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, 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 led to kind of the development of a protocol around how to have stressful conversations that, 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. Moderating the conversations. And. Yeah, so this was a.

[Rich Roll]

And how did that go?

[Jeff Krasno]

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, you know, the Israelis, and these were Israelis that were raised in settlements in the West Bank. You know, these weren't just like Americans that had visited Israel or something like that. And these, the Palestinians there, 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 was that extra level of intensity that was just coming out of the whole season of encampments that happened on college campuses. So after a couple of days of sharing each other's stories, I 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's story. Can you tell Mohsen's 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.

[Rich Roll]

Yeah. As a way that being like the pathway to empathy on some level. Only by really trying to inhabit that other individual's unique experiences can you begin.

[Jeff Krasno]

To understand it 100%. And by not only understanding each other's narratives, but by telling each other's narratives, it was like a dam 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 going to do about the right of return? What are we going to 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.

[Rich Roll]

Have you kept tabs on them? Like, how has that, like, I'm curious around how fragile that 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?

[Jeff Krasno]

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

[Rich Roll]

That's a worthy investment of your time, I think. Think pursuing that. Thankless, probably, and very difficult.

[Jeff Krasno]

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.

[Rich Roll]

All the growth is on the other side of whatever it is that we're avoiding. Right? Context of a difficult conversation. The avoidance is a function of some emotional wound, right. That we perpetuate through that avoidance and will 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. Because we think that they're going to 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? 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, you know, all of that. But. But the real richness is in. Is in the emotional discomforts, right? 100%. That's really, like, we can go down all the stuff that is sexy, but honestly, you know, the. The real work is in this emotional landscape because it's amorphous and easy to avoid and easy to overlook. And even more so when we're like, yeah, but I'm look at my diet and look at my. Look at what I'm doing every day to, like, introduce all 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.

[Jeff Krasno]

I 100% agree 100% agree. I mean, what started honestly as a physical inquest became a psycho spiritual inquest. And you know, while I would say that these good stress protocols are obviously incredibly beneficial to human physiology, what they can offer in terms of emotional regulation are way, way, way more important. In fact, what I found for me that fasting, for example, the most potent impact of fasting for me was not autophagy or mitobiogenesis or weight loss or ketosis. It was actually my ability to emotionally regulate, to find space between stimulus and response. You know, just because I stopped eating at 7pm didn't mean I didn't get hungry at 9:30.

[Rich Roll]

Can you sit with your own discomfort?

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah. Can you sit with.

[Rich Roll]

How do you apply that in other areas of your.

[Jeff Krasno]

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, that space actually became so useful in other parts of my life, like when my children were inevitably annoying, how was I going to respond at that juncture? Was I going to just yell at them and have a reactive kind of knee jerk response? Or could I apply that same space that I had cultivated from fasting to the way that I treat my children or the people that I love in my life? And you know, the same is true honestly, with cold water therapy. What happens when you get into cold water? You know, 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. 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.

[Rich Roll]

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?

[Jeff Krasno]

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. They'll happily tell you. You know, it's a. Like I said, you know, it is a process. Being healthy or being emotionally regulated is not a product, you know. 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, you know, again, you know, life. 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, you know, get older and older. And I think that, you know, 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, you know, or freedom from the fear of death, I suppose. Suppose. And that is something that I'm thinking about a lot right now. I mean, we sit in a really curious place in the human story, kind of in the evolution of our species, where by dint of some fortuitous combination of atoms in our brain, we have. 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 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 like something to be themselves. And we often kind of attribute that quality to this concept, concept of qualia. But consciousness also has a shady side, which is this awareness that everything that we love and know, including ourselves, is totally transient and going to 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 the little things that we can't sea. And then we spent the last 170 years or so killing off everything smaller than us. And, you know, we've been paralyzed by this concept of death for so long, such that we've created these myths that somehow promise eternal life if we subscribe to a series of edicts created by some old paternalistic bogey in the sky, whatever. We keep trying to cheat it all to the point now where a lot of our friends are into this concept of escape velocity, that our organs are going to regenerate faster than they're going to degrade and we're never going to die. We're never going to do it. We're going to cheat the whole game. We're going to become 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. You've probably had Ryan Holiday and some of those folks. Memento Mori is one of those that's baked into stoicism. Buddhism has morana sati. But I think a lot of getting comfortable with death is really kind of reframing our relationship with the natural world and with nature and realizing that, yes, my five senses as kind of circumscribed by sight and sound and my ability to hear and tasting 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 8 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 this 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, and in Martin Luther King. And when we die, we simply go on and we are just these links in this sort of continuous chain of animated captured sunshine. And you know, when you start to, I think, really cognitively understand yourself as part of this greater, 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 and be like, look, that's me. You know, that's me up there. And you know, I think what we're inevitably seeking, you know, in 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 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?

[Rich Roll]

That's the biggest challenge I can't imagine in 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 want to 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 that 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? Who is this guy? He's doing all this stuff. He is literally running a communist commune. This guru across from me. So it is called Commune. Your podcast is called Commune. You have a digital platform called Commune, where you have courses and you have, like, you know, filmed lectures with all of these very interesting people, but it is not, in fact, a Commune. I can say that as somebody who's been there.

[Jeff Krasno]

Yeah. Yeah. Unless you think that you may be attacked by a wild group of hippies on acid. No, I'm sorry, that's not going to 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 Summer 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. And then I do host a number of the podcasts up there. But, Rich, I just want to say before we conclude, you've really just served as the model exemplar of a rigorous and thoughtful human being for so many people, but specifically for me, I've just seen you 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. I've tried to follow them.

[Rich Roll]

Appreciate that. Thanks, man. Until next time. Let's do this again.

[Jeff Krasno]

This was great.

[Rich Roll]

Great.

[Jeff Krasno]

Awesome. To be continued.

[Rich Roll]

Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode [e-mail] where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra Voicing, Change and the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power meal [e-mail] if you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple, Apple Podcasts on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com sponsors and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the Meal planner and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any [e-mail] Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our Creative Director, Dan Drake, portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Dan, Daniel Solis and thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace Plants Namaste. It.