Reclaiming Your Life As A Healthy Deviant w/ Pilar Gerasimo

Summary

Podcast Summary: Reclaiming Your Life As A Healthy Deviant with Pilar Gerasimo

Episode: Reclaiming Your Life As A Healthy Deviant
Guest: Pilar Gerasimo
Release Date: September 17, 2024
Host: Ronan Levy

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Introduction

In this episode of The Ronan Levy Podcast, host Ronan Levy engages in a profound conversation with Pilar Gerasimo, an author, health journalist, podcaster, and self-proclaimed "healthy deviant." Pilar shares her journey of redefining health and happiness beyond societal norms, offering insightful perspectives on navigating modern life's complexities.

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Pilar's Background and Upbringing

Timestamp [00:00 - 04:51]

Pilar begins by discussing her upbringing in a multi-generational intentional community on a 400-acre farm in western Wisconsin. Her parents, described as part hippie, part academic, significantly influenced her worldview. Pilar's father, a sociologist, and her mother, embodying countercultural traits, instilled in her an early awareness of societal constructs and the importance of individual choices.

Pilar Gerasimo [04:16]: "My parents would say they were intrigued by the constantly changing manners and expectations of the society that we were all in. They kind of left it up to us individually to decide which ways we wanted to go."

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Struggling with Societal Norms

Timestamp [09:31 - 18:20]

Pilar recounts her struggles during adolescence, attempting to fit into societal standards of femininity and success. Despite her efforts, she repeatedly felt stressed and depleted, leading to significant burnout by the time she entered the workforce. Her experiences highlight the detrimental effects of chasing external validation and societal expectations.

Pilar Gerasimo [09:45]: "I kept trying and failing to achieve the external models of what I thought I was supposed to look like, act like, be like, do, have. And by the time I was in college, the cycles of trying and failing had really built up a lot of stress inside my system."

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Creating a Healthy Magazine and the Breaking Point

Timestamp [18:20 - 26:25]

Pilar discusses her foray into the publishing world, editing a health and fitness magazine for 15 years. Her commitment to promoting authentic health and happiness led her to break away from conventional approaches driven by advertising and consumerism. However, the intense pressure culminated in a physical breakdown—breaking her foot during a frustrated outburst—which served as a catalyst for her transformation.

Pilar Gerasimo [25:15]: "I realized I'm going to be confronted every single day with a series of decisions that could very well end up working against me. If I'm not conscious of the fact that my default society is unhealthy, and if I want to deviate from that, I have to keep my wits about me."

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Understanding Evolutionary Mismatch

Timestamp [30:45 - 46:09]

A central theme Pilar explores is the concept of evolutionary mismatch—the disparity between our ancient genetic makeup and the rapid changes in modern society. She elaborates on how advancements over the past few centuries, especially post-industrial revolution, have outpaced our biological evolution, leading to widespread health and mental well-being issues.

Pilar Gerasimo [34:14]: "We were living in a culture that has rapidly changed in so many different ways, and the fundamental problem is what I call evolutionary mismatch."

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Renegade Rituals: Practices for Healthy Deviance

Timestamp [59:00 - 76:08]

To combat the unhealthy default reality, Pilar introduces Renegade Rituals, three foundational practices designed to recalibrate one's relationship with society and promote holistic well-being:

1. Morning Minutes Practice
   Timestamp [69:30]
   A simple, three-minute morning routine devoid of electronics, allowing individuals to connect with themselves and set intentions for the day.

   Pilar Gerasimo [73:31]: "The first renegade ritual I call the morning minutes practice... have zero contact with any electronics, any digital devices, or any form of media whatsoever."

2. Ultradian Rhythm Breaks
   Timestamp [73:31]
   Incorporating regular breaks every 90-120 minutes to rest and recharge, aligning with the body's natural energy cycles.

   Pilar Gerasimo [76:08]: "The second renegade ritual is ultradian rhythm breaks... your system begins to experience it as stress... you have to take the break and just keep going, you will come back up again a little bit."

3. Nighttime Wind Down Practice
   Timestamp [76:08]
   Establishing a pre-sleep routine that minimizes digital exposure and promotes relaxation to enhance sleep quality.

   Pilar Gerasimo: "The third one is a nighttime wind down practice... digital sunsets, shutdowns, decelerations are all really important."

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Balancing Moderation and Self-Compassion

Timestamp [78:17 - 85:49]

Pilar emphasizes the importance of moderation and self-compassion in maintaining health. She critiques the binary thinking prevalent in health advice, advocating instead for individualized approaches that acknowledge personal differences and avoid extreme practices.

Pilar Gerasimo [84:19]: "People are often surprised when they'll see me. I'll eat french fries or I'll have something that has sugar in it. And I'm like, this is a tiny percentage of what I'm going to eat in a given day or week or month."

She also discusses the interconnectedness of emotional and physical health, highlighting how modern conveniences and consumerism contribute to widespread anxiety and health issues.

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Conclusion: Embracing a Conscious Relationship with Society

Timestamp [86:17 - End]

In wrapping up, Ronan and Pilar reflect on the necessity of adapting to an ever-changing world with grace and compassion. Pilar reiterates that the path to thriving lies in recognizing and adjusting one's relationship with societal norms rather than outright rejection. She advocates for continuous self-awareness and adaptability as essential strategies for maintaining well-being in a complex society.

Pilar Gerasimo [86:20]: "If you can't change the fact that these are ubiquitous and ever present, you can change the way you relate to them. And to me, that's just a really good symbol. It symbolizes the way I think we need to learn to relate to the rest of our fast changing, accelerating, complex society."

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Key Takeaways

• Evolutionary Mismatch: Modern society has evolved faster than our biology, leading to widespread health and mental well-being issues.

• Renegade Rituals: Implementing simple, consistent practices can help recalibrate one's relationship with societal pressures.

• Moderation and Self-Compassion: Avoid extreme health practices by adopting individualized, balanced approaches.

• Continuous Self-Awareness: Recognizing and adapting to societal norms is essential for maintaining personal well-being.

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Notable Quotes

• Pilar Gerasimo [04:16]: "My parents would say they were intrigued by the constantly changing manners and expectations of the society that we were all in. They kind of left it up to us individually to decide which ways we wanted to go."

• Pilar Gerasimo [09:45]: "I kept trying and failing to achieve the external models of what I thought I was supposed to look like, act like, be like, do, have."

• Pilar Gerasimo [34:14]: "We were living in a culture that has rapidly changed in so many different ways, and the fundamental problem is what I call evolutionary mismatch."

• Pilar Gerasimo [73:31]: "The first renegade ritual I call the morning minutes practice... have zero contact with any electronics, any digital devices, or any form of media whatsoever."

• Pilar Gerasimo [84:19]: "People are often surprised when they'll see me. I'll eat french fries or I'll have something that has sugar in it."

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This episode offers a compelling exploration of how individuals can navigate and reclaim their lives amidst the pressures of modern society. Pilar Gerasimo's insights provide a roadmap for redefining health and happiness beyond conventional metrics, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, moderation, and conscious living.

Transcript

[Pilar Gerasimo]

99% of what makes people healthy is the same. Whether you are a man or a woman, whether you are young or you are old, whether you live in this country or that country, there are certainly variables, but fundamentally, the most basic essential things that basic human beings need to be basically healthy are the same. That does not sell advertising, though. And that's not what gets people to pick up pages and buy the things that are between the pages of the magazine. So for most of our lives, editorial has been driven by advertising. Advertising likes to chop us up into markets. And that's why what we're told is what we're told.

[Ronan]

Hey everyone, Ronan here.

[Chris]

Over the last five years that I've been doing this podcast, I've had the opportunity to have conversations with some incredibly interesting and successful people. Looking back, I've started to notice various themes emerge. And while I'll save the whole list for another time, there is one name narrative that comes up over and over again and that's the willingness to be deviant, to break from the norm, to pilot your own ship, whether that's in business or life or health. And that last topic is where today's guest fits in nicely to the conversation. Her name is Pilar Gerasimo. She is an author, health journalist, podcaster, social explorer, and self proclaimed healthy deviant. Now, Chris, our chief podcast officer of this podcast and I have made a rule that we are fully anti grifter. And so I was a bit hesitant going into this conversation because there are a lot of people these days preaching an anti science health agenda. But as you'll hear shortly, what I appreciate about Pilar is her willingness to blend her first hand knowledge with the depth and research of an experienced journalist to create a life of renegade rituals. And honestly, some of them sound good to me.

[Ronan]

So grab a quench or if you.

[Chris]

Don'T have one, head to quenchhidration.com and use Levy 20 for a 20% coupon code to get some and enjoy the conversation.

[Ronan]

Where in the world are you right now?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

I am in my studio, which is in the backyard of my house, and I'm in western Wisconsin, which is about an hour straight east from Minneapolis St. Paul.

[Ronan]

Okay.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Which is the cap. St. Paul's the capital of Minnesota.

[Ronan]

Yep.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

So yeah, Midwest, which is not that common in the world that we live in. A lot of people are on coasts. Increasingly they're in Nashville or in Austin places they don't have to pay income taxes. But, but where are you place to start?

[Ronan]

Have you considered to move into Nashville, Miami or Austin? Recently?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

No, I have not.

[Unknown]

Come on, come on.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

I might want to come visit. I don't know. I've gotten some lovely invitations, particularly Austin and Nashville. But no, I have never been really. I've lived a lot of other places including New York and San Francisco, Bay area. New York, Paris, south of France. Yeah. And I just keep moving back here for whatever reason. This is my place. I live on a farm with my. Is a multi generational kind of intentional community.

[Ronan]

Okay.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

It's about 400 acres of farmland and spring pond, fields, flowers, pastures, orchards, things like that. And then we just have a lot of little different things going on here. And my whole family and my kind of. I feel like my psychic home is based here. I love lots of other places, but no, I haven't considered moving in a while.

[Ronan]

Did you grow up in that area?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah, I did, yeah. I was born near Chicago, but spent most of my life between Minneapolis, St. Paul, my dad was a college professor there. And then this farm in the middle of nowhere, western Wisconsin. Wisconsin, which was my mom's kind of domain.

[Ronan]

Okay.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

And I think I read that your parents were hippies.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Well, yeah, my mom never has liked that, but yeah, I think anyone else would have looked at her and said hippie mom for sure. My father was a little bit more of a beatnik than a hippie and was sort of more of the contemporaries with like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago during that period where positive psychology was just coming into being and human potential, human development, all of that stuff was sort of rising in cultural interest now. And I think in a weird way, I kind of ended up with a foot in both of my parents worlds. One academic and one very practical one interested in why do we live the way we live and one interested in like how could we live better. So I still feel like I'm interested in both of those questions. But yeah, somewhat hippie era parents for sure. Experimental late 60s, early 70s was my. My kind of the kettle in which I was initially simmered.

[Ronan]

That's a nice way to talk about that. I'm reading a book right now, actually. We're going to have him on the podcast, I think next week. So I'm rushing to try and finish it. Called the Triumph of the Yuppies. All about how the baby boom generation, and I probably always knew that, knew this, but I never really connected the dots. But the baby boom generation was the hippies became the yuppies. And what's remarkable, as he describes the essence of Yuppiness. Even though we don't talk about yuppies so much anymore, we're so yuppie in our generation right now. We're such yuppies focused on optimization, achievement, experience, you know, food. It's like, oh, this has been the same story for 40 years. I understand why, you know, that, that part of America, just speaking of America, even though I'm here in Canada that is so anti liberal elite thinking is so vitriolic about it now because like 40 years of that, that's a long time to suffer that kind of indignity if you don't like what the other side is doing. So it really is fascinating. But it sounds like your parents stuck. Stuck closer to their roots than embracing. Yep. Demons. Is that an accurate statement?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

I think so. I think both of my parents, well, my father was a sociologist, so he was always very interested in culturally, who were the different kind of factions and who was reacting to whom, and, you know, kind of intrigued by things like social class and politics and religion and how they affected people's positioning of themselves and their presentation of self, as he would call it, the sociological term. I still love that presentation of self. How do you present yourself, you know, your style, your, you know, what do you want people to read from your appearance and how you talk and all of that? I do think that there is. Well, I don't know if this is exactly a response to the question that you asked, but I think because I grew up aware of that type of construct and aware of my parents making pretty conscious choices about what they did not want to be. You know, they did not want to be conventional. They were counterculture in their own individual ways. And they were not the same. My father and my mother went different directions, but I, I sort of understood maybe earlier than a. Of other people that you get choices about where you want to play, how you want to sit, how you want to work, what, you know, your perception of things like consumer culture is for better or for worse, you know, And I guess that just pervaded my childhood. You know, my, my parents were making different choices from each other and talking about that. And then their friends and family and networks were very different culturally. So, yeah, I guess it's just. I think my parents would say they were intrigued by the constantly changing manners and expectations of the society that we were all in. And they kind of left it up to us individually to decide which ways we wanted to go. And I played a lot at trying to be what I thought was more normal as a kid. I wanted to Fit in really badly. And neither of my parents were fit in types. My father was often mistaken for a janitor at the college where he would teach because he would wear coveralls and a watch cap. And sometimes, you know, there's a kind of an apocryphal story where the dean asked him to, like, hey, while you're in here, would you empty the trash? Not realizing my dad was a tenured professor, but that was kind of it. My mom would do crazy stuff like bring, you know, erotic shaped breads to the PTA meetings just to kind of mess with people. So I was horrified by all of this and just wished both my parents were normal for a long time. But it's funny because I wrote a book called the Healthy Deviant, which is really celebrating that conscious choice to differ from a society that you see as being not healthy or very happy for you. Which sounds like you might be one of us. One of the.

[Ronan]

I am. Lots of places to go there. But let's start with you, which is, you know, I mean, the first question I always ask is, tell us your story. And you've kind of alluded to it a little bit and gave us some samples. So you grew up, in growing up, you always wanted to be normal and you had very abnormal. Abnormal and like the most generous sense of the word parents. And at what point did you kind of realize, I guess what was. What were your attempts to fit in? And at what point did you realize, man, I don't know if this is really worth the effort.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

I think I repeatedly tried and failed. I don't think I gave up for a very long time. And to some extent, I guess I still haven't. You know, I. I remember as an adolescent realizing that the culture around me was demanding that I comply with a lot of images about feminine attractiveness and acceptability and, you know, that the models that you get confronted with as a young woman, what you're supposed to look like, how you're supposed to act, how you're supposed to attract. Typically, at least at that time, everybody assumed everybody was heterosexual except those really weirdos. So it was really about, you know, gender based attractiveness. And that was really the beginning of probably the most stressful period of my life. And I think that extended through a lot of my early adulthood. So for me, a lot of what happened was I kept trying and failing to achieve the external models of what I thought I was supposed to look like, act like, be like, do, have. And by the time I was in college, the cycles of trying and failing had really built up a lot of stress inside my system. And I was also now in college being extra stressed by academic pressures and expectations that I mostly put on myself. Very high achieving, very much pushing myself. And I think what happened to me is what happens to a lot of people. You know, the harder you're working to try to succeed, often the more you feel like you're failing and the more depleted and exhausted you get. By the time I entered the work world, I'd been through a few more rounds of, like, really crushing disappointments and confusions. I'd gotten a Fulbright scholarship to go and teach in France. And while I was there, really realized I didn't want to be a teacher. I thought I was going to be a professor. And suddenly it was like, I don't think this is what I want to do. So I came back from what everyone was thinking was going to be like, oh, well, Pilar's just got it all figured out. I was, like, totally clueless. I had no idea what to do with myself. And I think it was probably almost 10 years from the time I graduated from college until I felt like I had a career that was a track, you know, I really felt like I was on a track. And that was when I got into publishing, custom publishing. I was an editor for a custom publishing company. But it was sort of ironic. I started a magazine called Experience Life in partnership with a company called Lifetime, and then it was called Lifetime Fitness. It's a big health and fitness club company. And now it's all over the world, well, many countries anyway. And it was in some ways an incredibly gratifying job. Like, I had been doing a lot of work over the previous five or six years, trying to reclaim my own health and happiness during this period of really intense stress and realizing that a lot of what I've been told to do wasn't working for me. You know, the diet and exercise programs were mostly just really making matters worse. And the images of health and fitness magazines were really making things worse. So when I started that magazine, it was a very conscious choice to offer an alternative kind of a new model healthy living magazine that would appeal to both men and women and people of multiple ages, you know, from their 20s to their 80s. And really looking more at a psychographic of folks that wanted to be healthy and happy, even though they might be facing challenges from just so called real life, you know, like I had faced. And what's funny about it was that. That trying to. The striving that I embraced to achieve the nearly impossible, which is to create a magazine out of nothing, put me into such a freak, out of stress that one day, this one big day, I got so frustrated with myself that I couldn't figure out how to make all of this stuff happen. I couldn't make it all work that I stomped my foot on the floor of my wooden floor of my house and I cracked my own bone. Yeah, shit. It was a fit of frustration with so much self directed violence that it really did scare me and Ronan. It was like that moment where you realize you're, you know, you're speeding on the highway because you're angry and you're just like, wait, this is a stupid thing to do. This is not good. I had to pull myself back in. And that was, I think this moment where a lot of things changed from my life and I really shifted my own personal prescription for health and fitness and wellbeing to a much more flexible model. And that was probably the start of the insights that began, you know, fomenting for me and turned eventually into my book, the Healthy Deviant. But I was at that magazine for 15 years total and I learned a ton, I mean about, you know, researched a ton about health and fitness and wellbeing and physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual health. But I really had to live it. And walking my own talk has been the really the strictest discipline of my life.

[Ronan]

I feel like there's a book to be written about having a mental breakdown trying to launch a Zen magazine.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah, yeah, it's all right there.

[Ronan]

That's, that's the universe in a nutshell. Yeah, just about that. Um, yeah, no, I only bone I've ever broken in my hand was when I was so angry I put a pillow on the floor and started punching it because I had no other way to get the rage out. Uh, and my friend Mike Schauss and I always, he tells this great story about when he moved from Calgary to B.C. and he was just like coming over the crest and coming into Vancouver and then got the call from the moving company saying they were like three weeks late. Uh, and he was just arriving and he got so angry he punched the rear view mirror off the front of his car. And it's like, yeah, that's how I'm going to show that moving company, by destroying my own shit. That is logical.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

It's like, well, what you're describing is basically, you know, that that phenomenon of eventually doing your self damage or violence in response to the pressures that you feel from living in a world kind of gone mad effectively, I call it the crazy that passes for normal, where we have all of these relationships with institutions and systems that are so complicated and so depersonalized and we're asking the impossible of ourselves and others and you know, at the same time kind of pretending that everything is okay. And it inevitably, what ends up happening is we end up doing damage to our own body minds, sometimes from punching or kicking or stomping, sometimes just from full blown runaway inflammation inside of our bodies and the kind of mental constructs that have us criticizing ourselves and finding everything wrong. You know, I described it sort of at the time, it really did come for me as like a series of insights. First that began with me feeling very sorry for myself because like, I broke my foot, I'm in pain, and this is stupid. But the things that struck me very quickly afterward was first of all, yeah, I had broken myself. I broke my body, literally broke my skeleton, you know, and that was just like, well, that's not good. But the second thing was that it was like, that was really a scary thing to realize that I could break myself that way. However, not actually a new phenomenon because when I thought about it, I realized, looked back over the last 10 years and I could see so many prior signs of damage and break self breakage really. You know, I had broken my metabolism by yo yo dieting. I had broken, I mean, I had runaway inflammation. I had rashes, I had eyelashes falling out, I had stomach distress, bone pain, night sweats, crying jags. My body was sending signals that I've been breaking it for probably 15 years, if not longer. And that really then made me feel like, wait a minute, I must be a total freak to be such a wreck. A lot of us feel that way. Like, what is wrong with me? And then I looked around and I just realized, no, no, no, no, no. Almost everybody I know is experiencing some version of the same dynamic of breaking themselves down and high blood pressure, high cholesterol, you know, migraines, other depression, anxiety. And this was back in the early 2000s. All of these things have gotten much, much worse in the meantime. But that made me realize, you know, wait, maybe this isn't a me problem. Maybe this is an us problem. And maybe the real issue is not me trying to fix myself and manage my appetites and deal with my own little exercise challenges. Maybe the issue, maybe the opportunity is me learning how to relate differently to the society that seems to be having me do all of this stuff and programming me this way. Because if I keep listening to the societal expectations, it's only going to get Worse and worse. And I could see where that road went. Did not want to go there.

[Ronan]

So, so how did, how did you change that relationship? Because I think the default reaction, certainly for me, but even in the, in the name, the healthy deviant is like two score big middle fingers up and fuck this and walk 180 degrees in the other direction. And it's like, you know, that's not the answer either. Yeah. And so I'm curious to know how you did that. And I'd also like you to comment on, you know, the notion of deviance and separating from, you know, the crazy we describe as normal. How do you, how do you prevent like that all out rejection of it? Right. Like most of the time my senses were not 100 wrong that like truthfully, like maybe like a 3% shift in what we're doing, giving up attachment to certain goals, being a little less teleological, being a little bit more focused on the journey or the people we're on the journey with, as a nod to Sanjay Singhal, is just on the. We just recently released this podcast yesterday. It's like it doesn't and doesn't have to be a massive shift. It can be fairly minor, but there's an instinct to just be all out rejectionism and just go the opposite way on every thing. And one last thought was like we've talked about in this podcast and Chris will have heard this, but especially because I rip on Dave Asprey, I don't know if you know who. Oh yeah, you know, and it's like when, when Dave, I Met Dave in 2012 or 13 when I was still doing bulletproof coffee. And I'm like, that's a really interesting idea because I remember being in grade 12 biology and my biology teacher, Mr. Gallant, who did not give a flying fuck about teaching, was talking about how, you know, our body takes sugars, excess sugars, and turns them into fat. And I'm like, okay, well if that's the case, then it seems that the way to lose weight is to cut out carbohydrates and sugars so we're not turning into fat. Like I was coming up with a Miami beach diet or whatever keto, whatever it was, you know, just in, in my own like that seems very logical kind of way. But. And so when Dave was talking about like, oh, fat and coffee, it keeps you satiated without spiking your gluten. I'm like, oh, that makes a whole lot of sense. But then all of a sudden, in this influencer based world, the things you have to say to be interesting becomes so progressively more and more absurd that the next thing you know, you see all these people trying to expose their buttholes to the sun because somehow that's better to get vitamin D. And I'm like, how do. How does it go so far wrong? I know there's a lot in those questions, so I'll stop. But take perspective you want.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

I love the way those are all coming together, though, Ronan. Okay, so let me say this first. I'll give you my perspective just spontaneously. Where I co is like, okay, so I edited a health and Fitness magazine for 15 years, and a lot of the time, what I found myself fighting was the temptation that everyone in the health and fitness media world, conventional health and fitness media world, has, which is like, how do we make something new? How do we create some new fangled. Never heard, you know? And the truth is, 99% of what makes people healthy is the same. Whether you are a man or a woman, whether you are young or you are old, whether you live in this country or that country, there are certainly variables. But fundamentally, the most basic essential things that basic human beings need to be basically healthy are the same. That does not sell advertising, though. And that's not what gets people to pick up pages and buy the things that are between the pages of the magazine. So for most of our lives, editorial has been driven by advertising. Advertising likes to chop us up into markets. And that's why what we're told is what we're told, and that keeping your eyeballs, keeping your ears, keeping your fingers glued to the medium is how people sell us on stuff. And I worked at Huffington Post for a very hot minute. And I left Huffington Post because for all of the reach that it seemed I would have and the influence I thought I would have, it was just a lot of it was clickbait. And it felt to me like a disservice to humanity to create more and more reasons for people to click on things that weren't going to help them. This is the way I'm wired up. But I think when you get into the sort of that influencer world, particularly, I guess it's a whole class of influencers and podcasters I think of as like kind of a brotherhood. The bro podcasters, they just keep borrowing each other's 12 million members of their audience to sell them on more stuff. And whether you're listening, you know, I throw in this category. Huberman Labs and Joe Rogan and Dave Asprey and to some extent, Tim Ferriss, and to Some extent Mark Hyman. And it's like they just kind of keep circulating on each other's shows. Now what's not coming through in my mind are a lot of messages that would be fundamentally much more helpful to people and just confusing them and scattering not just their attention, but their dollars and directions that are disempowering to the very people that they're supposedly meaning to help. That's a very broad based criticism. I won't throw all people under the bus with that. But I think one of the greatest chance challenges if you're doing what I see you doing, what I've done is to keep yourself focused on what you actually believe to be helpful rather than giving into the temptation to just capture people's attention for your own good or for the for profit at the expense of their being able to do what they really need to do. So just to back up, how did I do it? That was one of your questions. Yeah, I think one of the most significant changes that I made was that I realized that my attention and my motivation were being co opted by my society in just this way. New and improved five things you're doing wrong. Instant results. You know, and those things were not only not helping me, they were hurting me. Because the try fail cycle I mentioned earlier is sort of a part of a larger cycle that I illustrated from my book. Happy to send the illustration to you called the vicious cycle of the unhealthy default reality. And the default which you mentioned, default, thank you for using that word earlier. To me it's just like if you don't make a series of very conscious attempts to deviate from the norms that are set up in front of you, you're going to follow those defaults. The defaults will make you less healthy, less healthy and less happy. And then the default structure will offer you solutions to your so called problems. Those will not actually work. They'll disempower you. They'll deplete your energy, time, money and other resources and leave you even more vulnerable and more reactive to accepting the next default solution, which right now are things like it was MPIC and CBD and you know, like they're not now these things are bad in and of themselves, but they're attempts to make better a series of problems that our culture introduced in the first place. So what worked best for me was thinking what I actually need to do every day is not get on the treadmill and run 45 minutes, it's not eating. The perfectly balanced combination of carbohydrates and Fats and bulletproof, whatever. It's me staying sane in my own mind and realizing I'm going to be confronted every single day with a series of decisions that could very well end up working against me. If I'm not conscious of the fact that my default society is unhealthy, and if I want to deviate from that, I have to keep my wits about me, starting first thing in the morning. That meant I had to change what I was doing from the moment I wake up to doing everything I thought I had to do. Right to doing. What do I need to do to enter the world as a sane, autonomous human being and not have myself made crazy by the unhealthy default reality, which is out to get me. Absolutely every day. It's a game, though. I like to think of it as a dance, not a war. So tango.

[Ronan]

I wish. I wish I could dance properly. I'm a terrible dancer unless I'm drunk and then my Mick Jagger comes out. A couple of questions, top of mind. I'm going to spit them out before they disappear. One comment was a guy I had on the podcast before, Ben Askins. Great guy. I think you'd really get along with him. We were talking about biohacking, and he had this great line where he's like, I used to biohack. Now I just trust my intuition.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

Oh, that's good.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

One question I have is, you know, there's a lot of people who say, like, oh, Big Pharma's out to get you. You know, they're trying to make you sick and all that kind of stuff. And I've worked with a lot of people on Big Pharma, and I've never met a single person who's actually out to get you. So, like, one question I have is like, how do you. Why do you think we got here? Because without really understanding how we ended up here, it become harder to know how to get out of this position. Yeah. Secondly, when you had that epiphany of I have to be conscious, it's really easy to reject something, but it's a lot harder to know what to accept after that. Right. You know, it's like, okay, this way is bad, but that leaves an infinite number of other directions in all areas. Up, down, sideways. It's like, okay, then what is like is the default. And that. That's what made me think about that Ben Askins quote is like, do I just trust my intuition? Which I've probably not trusted for a long time.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah, well, that's really a Good combination of questions. So the first question, how did we get here? I'd love to answer that and I'll come right back to it. The question of whether or not you can trust your intuition and whether that is a replacement for what we call biohacking, I think depends a on how far through your awareness cycle you've come. I think biohacking things like tracking biomarkers, you know, and like oura rings and heart rate monitors and sleep monitors and all of those things can be helpful in giving people biological feedback about a system that they have actually lost track of, lost sensitivity to as the result of living in the unhealthy default reality. It takes a while though for a lot of people to recover, reclaim that awareness. So I think of it as the simplicity that's on the other side of complexity, as Einstein would talk about it. And your friend Ben probably has been through enough experiences to be able to say, ah, this is how I feel when I'm low blood sugar. This is how I feel when I'm overstuffed. This is how I feel when I haven't gotten enough REM sleep. This is how I feel when I'm exercising beyond this heart zone I want to be in and on and on. But we live. How did we get here? Well, we live in a culture that has so rapidly changed in so many different ways that I. The fundamental problem is what I call everyone, I think calls evolutionary mismatch. But I often like to. And again, I illustrated this in my book. I used a lot of illustrations in my book. I drew a lot of illustrations from charts and graphs and cycle and flow maps to characters because I thought it was really important for people to move beyond this, just this kind of endless list of information and dates and facts to a more empathetic, self compassionate view of how they fit into this story. If I think about it this way, for 2.5 million years of human history, human beings lived mostly one way. Like whether they lived in this continent or that continent. Mostly they lived in one continent. But for 2.5 million years of human history, hunter, gatherer, nomadic tribe society, that was it. So you had people who were outside and living in relationship to nature every single day, every single thing that they ate, they hunted or gathered, they hung out in very small, typically 50 or so people, tribe level communities. And they were deeply invested in each other's success and interdependent on each other and to some extent surrounding tribes for cooperation. They lived according to cycles of light and dark, seasonally changing diet and exercise habits and they had a very strong sense of the sacred as there was no difference between them and the world. The world and whatever forces made nature work.

[Ronan]

Yep.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

So that all changed a top 10,000 years ago at the time of the agricultural revolution. Again, not on the spot 10,000 years ago, lots of different places at different times, but gradually what started happening with the domestication of plants and animals was surpluses of reliable foods and shelter and more people moving into villages rather than being nomadic people, getting broader based networks of social interaction, not quite so interdependent. And lots of differences between haves and have nots evolving as people went from cities, some villages to cities, and those grows. That was 10,000 years. That was a long time, but not very long in the blink of an eye really level time for the longer evolution of humanity. So if you think about it, up until 10,000 years ago, everything that developed in our DNA, everything that developed in our metabolism, our neurology, our digestion, was based on that previous kind of hunter gatherer society. And then it changed rapidly 10,000 years ago, but massively, massively more rapidly since the industrial revolution, which is only about 200 and some years ago. That's when we started getting a lot of processed flours, processed sugars, machine made things, and a massive change in income equality and all of that other stuff. The technological changes that happened in the past 200 years, again extremely fast, way too fast for our DNA to develop or change around that. So the preferences that our body minds have for one kind of reality and the reality of what we're living are very different. And that only became more so at the time of the technological revolution 60 years ago, where we started having computers and more electronic appliances. And then just in the past 25 years that we've had things like, you know, mobile devices that are ubiquitous and just like whatever, 10 seconds ago, AI which is now, you know, everyone's like, well this changes everything. So there's no way for us to cope with the changes in our society. That the real issue is how can I provide programmed DNA in a society that is nothing like that at all. Like I call it the ape in the arcade scenario, where it's like if you took a jungle ape out of the forest and stuck it in a pinball arcade, wouldn't take long for it to get very unhealthy and unhappy. And that's really what we've done to ourselves. So I think how we got here was us responding to a society that very rapidly became focused on consumerism and promoting consumerism. I don't think most people in the pharma industry are evil. I think most of the people in the agriculture, pharma and energy and almost healthcare, you name an industry, they're interested in growing and unfettered annualized growth, short term profit goals. Those are completely diametrically opposed to the values that work for human beings in nature. It just is not working. And that's what we're seeing is this experimental, let's just grow and spend and earn more and more and more and get faster and more optimized. Optimize everything. Your metabolism, your brain, everything. And I think it's making us nuts. I just think that's not what we're wired up for. So that's a long and winded answer of how we got here. But that's 2.5 million years of human history in just a few minutes, Right? And then the question of intuition. I think you can trust the caveman DNA intuition. I don't think you can probably trust the intuition that says, I smell Cinnabons. I want a Cinnabon. Oh, come on.

[Ronan]

That's really good intuition. Those things are delicious.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

I know, I know. And they are not going to hurt you if you have one every once in a while. But that's not what they're designed to do. They make you want them all the time.

[Ronan]

They totally do. So how did you navigate that? Like, take us back to that day when the next day, after breaking your foot and realizing I got to break my addiction to the system. And how did you start choosing differently? Where did you start? You know, do you remember being like the first time, being like, oh, old me would have done this, but new me is doing this instead?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to be 100% transparent. It was not a one day thing. Those insights that I shared earlier came in one day, but it was sort of like I had to learn a whole bunch of new skills. I called them the skills of the healthy person. And what was being told to me about skills was like, you have to know exactly how many calories to eat, how many sets and reps to do, how long you need to be in this heart rate zone, and a lot of that crap. I realized I had to just let go of that. I mean, all true, helpful stuff to have, but it was like I was learning the minutiae and trying to keep track of all the minutiae and I wasn't handling the fundamentals. So I went back to this. The way I put it, is this the real issue that we're facing? In almost every crisis that we have in terms of human health, physical and mental, is that our most basic human needs are not being met during the course of our so called normal daily lives. When I ask what are my basic needs? I need whole food, I need water. I need a balance of whole foods and access to clean water. I need to sleep, I need to rest, I need to move my body. I need to be around other people who I see as supportive, who I trust. I need to have some sense of meaning or purpose that is bigger than me. These are basic things. But that's not. I mean, if that's. If so, you know how Michael Pollan has this like now very famous food advice, like eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

[Ronan]

Yeah.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

My advice is simpler than that. It's like, eat mostly whole food most of the time. Enjoy. That's it.

[Ronan]

Yeah.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

And that's what I found I had to do is that every single time I was tempted by a new diet or a magical new exercise program or a new drug or a new thing, I would be like, have I got my basic needs met? And most of the time the answer was no. I had to radically change my emphasis, for example, around sleep and rest and recovery, building in things like what I call. They're called ultra rhythm breaks. They're one of three of the non. I call them renegade rituals that were for me, like morning minutes, renegade rituals, nighttime wind down. Very simple daily practices that gave me a chance to check in with myself. Are my basic needs being met? Am I doing the fundamentals before I'm tempted? And you know, I guess that has been for me, the religion of healthy deviance is insisting on returning to the evolutionary imperatives that I know are programmed into my own body, mind, and appreciating that they are connected to other things, other people, my society, the natural environment that I'm in, the larger, you know, forward march of humanity. Like, we're all a living experiment right now. By the way, that's the title of my podcast that I host called the Living Experiment. And I'm not actively recording them right now, but my, my podcast partner and I, Dallas Hartwig, he was the founder of the Whole30. Co founder of the Whole30. We would just talk about that. Like figuring it out is you are a living experiment. You're trying different things all the time because society is changing so fast. So it's not one and done. And I really do see it as a dance. I see it as an opportunity for a flow experience. I mentioned before that vicious cycle of the unhealthy default reality. There's also what I call a virtuous cycle of healthy deviance which we can talk about. But one of the most important components about it is seeing it as an experiment, having a beginner's mind about it and being like, today I'm going to wake up. Challenges are probably going to be different than yesterday. How can I stay conscious enough in my own body mind that I can take care of the fundamentals without being made crazy and tempted and being separated from my energy, attention, money, time by nonsense, right?

[Ronan]

So I had three questions that came to mind. One is, I'd love to hear about the three rituals, but we can talk about that later because I'm sure you'll remember that one. The second one is about. So we had the artist Mike Posner. I don't know if you know Mike Posner, but like I Took a Pill in Ibiza and Cooler Than Me or a couple of his big songs. And one of the things he realized was, you know, he had this amazing success as an artist and then kind of came on the other side and found his mental and emotional and spiritual health and tatters. And then he realized that seeking comfort is the cause of a lot was like the cause of a lot of his, you know, mental anguish. And so now he consciously makes himself uncomfortable a lot of the time. And to me, I feel like there's an evolutionary component of it which is, let's be honest, life is pretty easy for most people in the modern western world, right? There's plenty of food, whether you think it's good quality or not. Water, no animals, you know, out hunting, you got a good handle on disease, you're probably not going to pick up, you know, some weird bacteria, like, life is pretty easy for most of us. And so these anxiety inducing pursuits, I think in some ways are a result of the fact that our biology is used to discomfort and we now live in a world of relative comfort. And I'd love to know your thoughts on that. And then the third thing is, I find, and maybe it's true, but I find there's a tendency, particularly in, we'll call it health influencers or those who deviate to say, like, this is wrong for everybody. But the truth is, you know, we still have to take stock of the fact that with the exception of a little blip recently, people are still long living longer on average than ever in history. And I would probably accept that, you know, anxiety is higher, mental health, depression issues are higher. But the solution to those may be as simple as you know, get out and hang out with friends more a lot. And so how, how do you maintain a little bit of objectivity to say that the things you've become aware of, I think are true for some people, maybe a lot of people, but not everyone. And don't flip into like here. I mean, we talked about listicles and not necessarily. It's very con. It's very easy to avoid creating listicles, but starting to become like, this is the answer for everybody.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah, yeah, well, absolutely. I agree that we're very much individuals and that what works for one person won't work for everybody. And also I think understanding where you are in your journey of health change, your health pursuit, your readiness to change your circumstances, your resources, that's why it is experimental and it makes sense to try different things and see what works for you. I think a lot of us reporting back from decades worth of experimenting can be helpful in sharing, you know, what worked for me doesn't mean it's going to work for you. But there's also broad observation of patterns that I guess I feel like I can say with some certainty for most people, most of the time, counting and tracking calories as a primary strategy for weight loss or waste management. Weight management is a losing game. It's too expensive in terms of energy and attention. Put on it for the payback that it has and it can mislead you. That's just one example. So I can. I feel comfortable making those kinds of generalizations to people who have, you know, that I am going to talk to now. There are a lot of other people that are not going to be listening to me. People who are getting bariatric surgery and doing what they need to do, like less release, follow your path. I'm not in a position to advise you if you don't want to hear what I'm saying. But I really think that these kinds of takeaways, like, oh, the problem is that we're comfort seeking and therefore we need more discomfort. I don't know if I see it that way. I guess from my point of view, we were, I think, evolved to handle and to tolerate a lot of discomfort of a certain kind. And that comfort or discomfort level was what was considered acceptable or normal. And everybody had it. We all got cold, we all got hungry. We all had to lay in pokey grass waiting for the gazelle to come along so we could chuck a spear at it. So what we think of as willpower now or the ability to tolerate discomfort, we came through our evolution as hunter gatherers. With an advantage given to those people who could tolerate some discomfort and still get by. Makes sense. Survival, the fittest kind of 101. That said, I think when you take the ability to tolerate that kind of discomfort and you apply it in a world like the one we're living in now, it doesn't really translate very well. I think that there is an appetite that we have maybe to challenge ourselves, to see ourselves succeeding in the face of challenge. Self efficacy, it's often called. Some people would consider that a flow experience. I think that for me, choosing to be healthy in an unhealthy world is an endless series of momentary choices that feel challenging. I don't call it willpower. I call it willingness. Like, am I willing to forego this evident presentation of a comfort like, say, a donut, not because I'm, like, such great willpower, but because I know, A, I've got a gluten intolerance, B, that sugar is not going to do me any favors, and C, I know why I'm being offered this donut, and it's to make the weight at the waiting room feel less onerous. What's really happening is I'm being drained of my time and energy by being in a stupid waiting room. And this is like the candy that's being given to me to kind of like, lead me on. So I'm answering this question a little bit circuitously, but I would say I want to talk a little bit about the skills of the healthy person and the skills that are required in modern life versus back then. We're having to develop a whole host of skills that our ancestors didn't need to develop. It's vastly more complex now to take care of your basics. You can say it's easier. Like, I don't have to sit in the grass waiting for a gazelle. I don't have to dig 400 pounds of tubers. But, man, if I got to go to my local supermarket and be confronted by paradox of choice of 7000 kinds of breakfast cereal and different experts are telling me, this kind's better. No, that kind is better. No, you shouldn't have breakfast at all. You should have an egg. Don't have an egg. You know, like, we were not wired up for that kind of complexity. The skills that our ancestors needed to survive, they learned from their mothers, their grandmothers, their great grandmothers, their fathers, their great fathers. Everybody knew how to do these things, so they weren't necessarily considered difficult. It's easier now in some respects, granted. It's so nice to be Able to like turn on the dishwasher and have it do its thing or turn on the laundry and have it. But we have other problems which is that we do nothing manually and then we need to get on a peloton to get exercise. This was not a problem. I don't know if you saw when our dances today. Did you happen to see the news story in the Washington Post about the previously uncontacted Amazonian tribe that came out of the forest? When loggers came in, they were forced out of their jungle home.

[Ronan]

I, I didn't see it yesterday, but I saw a story about two weeks ago or about something probably that, but maybe a similar kind of idea.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

That's the story. So I reference it only because, well, first of all I wrote a little blog about it that was kind of my perception of like first like, oh my gosh, how cool. And then oh my gosh, how tragic. These poor people. What you saw of course was this group of above, probably 20 to 30 people who came out onto the beach and were filmed by from a, across the water. They're all perfectly healthy looking. They're not skinny, they're not fat, they're healthy. They're gracefully moving in their bodies, just kind of walking around talking to each other. And you're like, this is who we all were, you know, a few thousand years ago, not that long ago, but we were. They're living in the jungle with anacondas, all kinds of, you know, disease vectors. I'm not saying that's an easy existence, but it's an existence for which they are well prepared. They are not prepared to go to hy vee and walk down the grocery store aisles and try to find something to eat. This is the ape in the arcade dynamic I was talking about before.

[Ronan]

So before, before we move off though.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

Listen, I, I'm, I'm not going to by any means state that most people in our society are healthy. Actually I'm going to, I'm going to qualify that in a second. But I don't, I didn't read about this tribe. I don't know the details of it, but my guess is a lot of them are healthy of an adequate weight because they're probably all under 50 because no one lives older than that. And so it's like, I mean, I take the point, but the point has to be qualified with the fact that, well, yeah, it's great that they're all healthy because if they all die at 40, then odds are they're probably not going to get fat. I Mean, again, in our society, it's very easy to get fat at 40. So I recognize that there's a bit of hypocrisy in that statement, but it's a lot easier to not be unhealthy if you die young, right?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

It's true. And it is true that, I mean, at least historically, most of the experts, the academic experts, would say a lot more people. The average age was much lower in part because so many people die in childhood, though the infant death rate is extremely high. But there's also some evidence that suggests that once you get past a certain age, your chances of living in these tribal societies until 70 or 80 are really no more than the other person's. It's like you succeed, and then it's not like people drop dead at 40 or 50 because they just are unhealthy. What happens is people die younger because of accidents and injuries and bad, you know, not great care. But I think that there's some argument about the idea that, you know, life is nasty, brutish, and short in these societies. It's also a question of, you know, how. What do you value? Now we're talking a lot about health span, not lifespan. Is it better to live till 90 when the last 30 years of your life are disastrous and you're getting your legs amputated and on dialysis and depressed and anxious and taking nine kinds of meds? I don't know. I'm not sure, and I don't think there's a right or wrong answer to that either. But I will say I think most of us are seeking meaning. And I think in a life where the constructs that we've created, our society seems to be having people feel more devoid of connection and meaning. Talked in your conversation with Chris about psychedelics, and I think a lot of the excitement about psychedelics is people discovering that they can feel connected to a larger magic in the world, that they can feel connected to nature, that they can feel one with each other. They can remember something about what it means to be human, what at least traditionally has always meant to be human, as far as I know. So I think in, you know, you mentioned the artist. I'm sorry, the Mike Posner. Yes. I think that's a really interesting set of observations. First, I would just like to respond to the idea that a lot of us have been trained to seek fame and fortune as a means for satisfaction or happiness. But you and I have both met a lot of famous, very successful, very wealthy people who have not gotten healthier or happier or More gratified as the result of their fame and their fortune.

[Ronan]

Usually the opposite. Yeah.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Usually the opposite, yeah. Absolutely. And so I do think seeking comfort, maybe. I don't know that I would say it that way. I teach a class called Prioritizing Pleasure, which is actually offering a perspective that when you seek real pleasures, and that can be something like resting when you're tired, you know, or being surrounded by people that are fun. That level of sin and bond. Yeah. No, I mean, sin and bound is a way to get there, but it's interesting to notice. Why is it comforting? Cinnabons are comforting and pleasurable because of sweetness, because of the comfort, the memory of the smell of cinnamon and sugar. Cooking is something that maybe some of us have from our grandmothers, our mothers, or like a different, simpler time in some ways means hearth and home. And that's one of my strategies, is when I start getting tempted by what's being put in front of me by my modern society. I'll often ask, ask, what is the deeper appetite that I'm hungry for? Like, what am I actually wanting? And if I can go for the real thing, I often lose my appetite for the fake. Kind of stand in the cheap substitute, as I would call it.

[Ronan]

Yeah, I. One of the first CDs I ever bought was Dennis Leary's no Cure for Cancer. And he has this line in it. Do you know who Dennis Leary is?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

The actor? Yeah.

[Ronan]

Yeah. So I used to do stand up comedy. And he said, you know, latest research says every cigarette takes three minutes off your life. And he's like, basically that's the point to the. Where he says, like, but it's. It's the years at the end. It's the adult diaper kidney dialysis years. You can have those years. I don't want them. And something you said just totally reminded me of that fact, that line, which is, yeah, there's some merit to it. And I think we need to keep in mind what everybody's interests are. One thought I had too though was I know he just passed away, but Morgan Spurlock, who was the, you know, director and star of Super Size Me.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

You know, and maybe his death is a indication of why shouldn't eat McDonald's that much, but I don't know if you recall, but he went through that. For anyone who hasn't seen Super Size Me, I'm sure most people listening have. But this guy basically decided to eat McDonald's three meals a day, every day for a month. And every time they invited him to. Would you like, to supersize that. He said yes, and he got fat and he gained weight and all of his metabolites got screwed up and all that kind of stuff. And then after that came out and there's all the hoopla about it and how bad McDonald's is, there was another professor who decided to replicate it. And the only thing he did different was instead of limiting himself to the 10,000 steps a day, which is what the. Or like 8,000 or whatever, the average steps per day that an American takes, he took did more than 10,000. That was the only difference, and he was fine. Like, the impact of eating McDonald's every day was almost negligible. Now, there could be a biological f consideration, which is they have different biologies, different metabolisms, who knows? But it seemed to strongly suggest that, you know, just enough exercise can make a huge difference. And I raise that because, you know, certainly I think. And I think it's one of the contexts of what you're saying, but it feels like so much of the unhealthiness physically is a result of unhealthiness emotionally, that if we just got to a place of exploring meaning a lot more and the mystery a lot more. And this is what I found so fascinating about psychedelics, is that just connecting to that, that unknowingness, that something bigger. You know, I don't. I don't know that we necessarily need to rebuild the entire food system. Like, I think if we just give people that one thing back, that would probably go a long way to solving everything else. And yet maybe people would choose to consciously eat dinner, eat differently after that, or maybe not. But reconnecting to that and the anxiety and stress and all that kind of stuff we feel, because we've been so disconnected to anything beyond the nihilistic, what's in front of you is all there is, would go a long way. And I'd welcome your thoughts on that.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Well, to me, they're interconnected. I guess I see that as we changed our food supply and as we became more dependent on prepared and preserved and highly, highly processed foods, it did definitely affect our gut health and our brain health. And there are intersections, you know, from neurotransmitters and, you know, flora and fauna in our systems, things that can cross the blood brain barrier. It's not like it's just one way or the other. We're depressed and anxious, therefore we eat crap. We eat crap, therefore we're also anxious and depressed and inflamed. So I see them as a kind of a. It is A bit of a vicious cycle that way. With regard to supersize me, I didn't see the study or the documentary of the person that all they changed was the steps. But I do know there was another film where the guy took on the same challenge except he wouldn't eat the buns and he wouldn't do soft drinks. Same different, different guy. I'm not sure whether or not he moved more, I can't say. But that was sort of testing the idea that well, maybe it's not the saturated fat and maybe it's not the hamburgers, but maybe it's these highly refined buns with sugar and the soft drinks that have pipe fructose corn syrup, which we know now to be. I think it's widely accepted that these kinds of highly processed, refined carbohydrates seem to be the bigger triggers for weight gain as opposed to just pure calories in, calories out. Same thing with exercise. Exercise that sort of seems to build metabolic capacity is more important than exercise that just burns a set of number of calories. What you're doing is you're shifting the function of the machine. If you want to think of it as a machine, which I don't, it's an organism. I grew up on a farm, I'm still on a farm. And one of the things I see is the idea of comparing human beings to machines is kind of stupid. We don't operate like machines. We are basically more like a, an organism or a garden environment where, you know, what's in the soil matters, what kind of weather there is matters. It's not just you and a machine. So I, I think that I will also say, you know, relative to Marlon Spurlock, I mean Morgan Spurlock, you know, there was a lot going on in that guy's life other than that one food experiment. And we heard a lot, you know, about his relationship and some of the psych emotional dynamics and so on. And I think we often just seem to ping pong and put our focus on this one domain of health or this other domain of health. And we want the single slive bullet. And if you just eat this way magically and like you said, some people probably could do better with a diet that has includes more refined carbohydrates than another person. I don't think it helps to just be like they're all bad or they're all good. I do think learning how to live with moderation in a society like ours that's basically a moderate is also really important. That's why my food Philosophy is eat mostly whole foods most of the time and also enjoy. If you're trying to get through our society with perfect eating. You know, that's really the recipe for like orthorexia. Well, I can't eat that because it's not organic. I can't eat that because it's not 95% pure protein. I can't eat that because. Because it's not in season, it's not local, it's not. Pretty soon you are down to almost nothing. And more than that, you've set up a really toxic environment in your own mind. So people are often surprised when they'll see me. I'll eat french fries or I'll have something that has sugar in it. And I'm like, this is a tiny percentage of what I'm going to eat in a given day or week or month. And my system is doing okay, but I'm responsible for monitoring that. And there are other things I know, like gluten. I can't do it. I got a celiac gene. It makes me miserable. I don't have celiac disease. Now why do I not have celiac disease? Because I've not eaten gluten my entire adult life. But that's another place where I just feel like people get so bunched up. Is gluten bad for everybody? Should you. No. You only know, don't worry about gluten unless you have celiac disease. And that stuff just makes me insane. You do need to understand some of that stuff or you will be exposed to things in this world that will make you sick way faster than you need to become sick. So I.

[Ronan]

One of my big things, it's like part of the reason for the podcast and having long form conversation is to. Is because you read the headlines in the media and they're so misleading. Right. A couple years ago, maybe it's five years ago, there was a study that came out on fish oil and vitamin D. And the conclusion was they do nothing. And then you read the article and they found that there was a 40% reduction in heart attacks for people who didn't eat a lot of fish otherwise. And I'm like, that's not nothing. That's a hell of a lot.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

And it just happened again today or. Yeah, this morning or yesterday there was a study that says, like, moderate drinking confers no health benefits. And I don't think anyone's going to say that alcohol itself as a chemical, biological agent is good for you, but if it has no or minimal negative impact biologically and has A significantly positive impact socially and emotionally.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

Why would you tell people to stop drinking? Like maybe it's a lot worse. Maybe moderate drinking is way, way worse than they're talking about. But the evidence seemed to suggest that there may be increased risk from moderate drinking of certain types of cancer. But the cost of eliminating those risks maybe comes at the expense of, you know, probably a lot of fun and a lot of joy and a lot of connection. And if you think about going back to evolutionary terms, what book was it? I think it may have been. Yeah, it was, it was the Immortality Key by Robert Mirarescue. I don't know if you've read that, but it's a fantastic book. You know, society probably, probably at least the leading theory that exists right now is society. Tribes came together initially to produce alcohol. It wasn't that they were together and they started brewing beer, but they actually came together to start brewing beer. And so alcohol actually has a very central role in human culture overall. And so again, I'm not advocating people should go out and get wasted. I think moderation is the right thing. But again, it requires moderation. It's not like hard discipline. No, no, no. Maybe you can choose that. That is entirely fine, but also be a little bit more reasonable that if it's not really that bad and it does have positive things on a non biochemical pathway basis.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah. Well, then I think it kind of goes back to looking at how did, how accessible were these things in our ancient ancestors days. I mean, it wasn't like you could go to the liquor store and get a 12 pack and drink it in your car. It was, you know, there was no, everything had a more intimate, moderate quality to it by nature of the fact that everything we did was produced by manual labor for the most part. And I absolutely agree with you. I think that when you look back at those hunter gatherer cultures, there's a lot of evidence from archaeology and anthropology that suggests that they had more free time than we do. You know, that they were kind of puttering along, doing what they would do all day. And there were periods of intensity for hunts and there were periods of, you know, but for the most part, there seemed to be a lot more opportunity for them to relate joyfully. I think there is a lot of evidence that everything in nature, every living organism, likes to have a certain amount of fun and play. And one mode of play is altered consciousness. Like, you know, so whether you're spinning like a whirling dervish or kids like getting dizzy, that's fun for them or hanging upside down is kind of altered or whether it's, you know, having a drink or partaking of some kind of mood or consciousness altering drug. There are reasons for doing that that have nothing to do with your biological health. They have everything to do with, like you said, kind of your psycho emotional, mental and spiritual and social health. But I keep thinking about as a person in our culture who's hearing these headlines or reading these scientific studies and being whipsawed by them over and over again and changing. You know, I've seen in my day, I grew up on a farm where we had everything was whole, whole butter, whole milk, whole everything. And then came this whole wash of like skim milk, margarine. That's what's healthy. No eggs, egg whites or fake eggs, fake cheese, fake candy, fake everything. That was terrible too. Turns out that doesn't work. Now we're back to something else. So I wrote in my book a little piece about what the unhealthy default realities perspectives are and I voiced them when I recorded the book. I struggled with how to do this because. Have you done an audiobook before? Have you ever read one for yourself?

[Ronan]

I recorded a very short snippet for our book, the Ketamine Break Through. But Mike, Mike was an actor and has a very nice deep voice. Did the rest of the audiobook recording.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Oh, lucky, lucky you. It's a very exhausting process, I'm sure. But I will share with you just this little tiny part of where I said that the only way to stop going through this unhealthy default reality problem, then unhealthy default reality solution does not work. You get depleted, exhausted and bummed out. You become more vulnerable and then you get the next thing. The only way to stop doing this is to arrest and reverse the cycle. And starts with recognizing an unhealthy default perspective when you see one. Here's a running list of unhealthy default reality perspectives that circulate around us almost everywhere we go, particularly as we strive to better ourselves in our lives. New is better. Faster is better. Bigger is better. More is better. Cheaper is better. Except when it's a luxury, indulgent or exclusive. And then expensive is better. You'd be happier if you were more attractive. You'd be happier if you had all the right things. You'd be happier if you were rich and famous. Celebrities and rich people are happier than you. Celebrities and rich people are better than you. The opinions and ideas of celebrities and rich people count more. So this goes on and on and on. But by the time I get to the end of this, it's like, eat less exercise, more calories make you fat. Carbs make you fat, fat makes you fat. Keep track of everything you eat. Count all the numbers associated with everything you eat. You must follow this diet exactly. If that diet doesn't work, try this one. What you're eating has nothing to do with it. You should be able to eat however you want. It's just your genetics. Keep living the way you always have. You're eating and exercising and living all wrong. Science will solve it, A drug will solve it, and on and on. You could do better, you know, you just need more willpower. This is endless. And I think the thing that I want people to take in if they remember nothing else else, it's like you are just an animal creature living in an extremely complicated world. The only way to avoid being whipsawed by all of that is to get up every morning and we're going to talk about the renegade rituals and understand that your primary goal in life is not to optimize or better yourself, it's to survive the culture in which you've been placed, for which your DNA is in no way prepared to thrive. And I think it's adjusting, changing the nature of that challenge and embracing it with gusto and courage that gives us the best chance of thriving in a world where most people are not.

[Ronan]

Yeah. The one caveat I throw on the end there, which is, and I think it's important and choose the words or whatever it is, but if you can come back to some sort of spiritual place of, you know, the, the purpose of being here is to experience it all good and bad.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

It gives you a lot more flexibility. Like, yeah, I'm going to have that fucking Cinnabon and I'm going to love it and I'm going to overeat for the next little while and then suddenly I'm going to change my mind and I'm going to do something different. But if it's rooted in a genuinely held desire to explore as opposed to an anxious, anxiety driven need to optimize, avoid, you know, find safety.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah.

[Ronan]

Then, then I think do whatever is kind of where I get back to.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

I agree. And that's, I think that that same experimental imperative, you know, see what happens.

[Ronan]

If around and find out, that went around for a long, long time.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Can I offer a perspective on that too, Ronan, that I think the biggest challenge is staying awake enough to the results of your own experiments to track them. I think most of the time when People eat a Cinnabon. It isn't like, oh, this is going to be interesting. Let's see how this. Let's see how I react. It's often done in a spirit, and this is true of drinking, too. I actually want to lose consciousness. I don't want to feel what I'm feeling. I want to get out of my body. I want to escape the pain that I'm in. And I think experiments along those lines are also useful because you can realize, like, how many potato chips did I eat before I stopped tasting potato chips or even realizing I was eating them? How many of us like to eat in our car or like to eat while we're watching TV or while we're watching movies? Because it is a recipe for being unconscious. And I think that's just, to me, like. Like noticing when you lose consciousness during the course of the day. The renegade rituals are effectively designed to help you with this, though. I'll share them with you. And maybe this is kind of a good place to kind of wrap some of this up with a bow. The first renegade ritual I call the morning minutes practice. It's very different than a lot of the morning practices. I think that a lot of folks, you know, you do meditating for 20 minutes, and then you get on the bike for 15, and then you eat a perfect smoothie, and then you complete your list of things to do. I don't give a shit if you do any of that. I like to see people wake up and for the first three minutes of their morning, have zero contact with any electronics, any digital devices, or any form of media whatsoever. So three minutes in which you check in with your own body, mind, and see what would feel pleasurable and interesting and nice that would come. Let you come to waking gradually. Part of the exercise is actually listening to what your system wants. And it's not the same thing every day for me. Some days I play my guitar. Other days I pet my dog. Some days I go outside. Some days I just sit with a candle and think I might write in my journal. But what happens in that theta state between sleeping and waking is that a lot of people, it's the only time during the course of the day you're going to get an unfiltered connection with your own self as a human being before the unhealthy default reality comes at you. If I can do that, something magical happens, which is that I have a connection to myself and to my own autonomous, sovereign self that otherwise would not have. And once I've had even a Little taste of that. I realize I want to stay connected to this version of myself. I want to set my own intentions about how I relate to the unhealthy default reality. The second renegade ritual is ultradian rhythm breaks. Have you studied ultradian rhythm breaks at all?

[Ronan]

No. In preparing for this, I saw that come up, but I hadn't heard it before.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Yeah, it's really interesting. It's one of my favorite things to teach. I have a whole class on it for anybody that is interested where I walk you through how to do this in the face of real obstacles. But ultradian rhythms are like circadian rhythms, but shrunk down smaller. So instead of once in the 24 hour period, they happen many times ultra many times during the day. Deo or dea. Ultra rhythm breaks so many times during the course of the day, basically every 90 to 120 minutes, your body goes from having a peak of energy and focus to getting into a trough of energy and focus where people feel depleted and brain fogged and tired and stressed. And it's a really ingenious system inside the human body mind that says, I'm going to give you a period of time to be productive and focused. And while you're being productive and focused, your body is going to start to build up the byproducts of that productivity. Kind of like back to the unfortunate machine analysis. But like a car going down the road, there's pollution that comes out the tailpipe. Bodies have also pollution, you know, debris, cellular waste, carbon dioxide, whatever. So when your body builds up the byproducts of all that productivity, your, your system begins to experience it as stress. And it starts to get depleted and inflamed and exhausted. It gets less and less efficient. And you experience this as like, I can't, I have no focus or I'm falling asleep or my eyes are tired, or what your body is doing is trying to get you to take a break. And it starts like slowly shutting your system down. And if you ignore the opportunity to take the break and just keep going, you will come back up again a little bit. Most people go to get sugar or coffee or a cigarette or something or just force themselves to keep working. And what happens is that you get depleted, kind of, what do they call diminishing returns throughout the day. So by the afternoon you're a hot mess. And then you can't understand why you're still stuck at work trying to focus when you can't. People are at this time incapable of having a creative thought. They're very reactive. They get into arguments with their co workers and their partners and their kids when they come home from work. So the military has done really interesting studies on this. Mostly the US and the Israeli military have done like Department of Defense research where they've studied, you know, how long can we keep people doing a given thing before they start messing up or getting in accidents or hurting themselves and others. It turns out it's 90 to 120 minutes of high focus before you need to take a break. If you take the break, what happens is amazing. You just shift gears or if you take a complete break and lie down or do deep breathing or meditate. There's a thousand different ways to take these breaks. But what happens is that you come right back up to where you were. Not a depleted level, but exactly like up back, like you were first thing in the morning. You can be back there mid afternoon. But it requires an incredible discovery, discipline to pull this off. Because of course our society does not condone taking these breaks. In fact, we often encourage people to keep going at all costs. But what is interesting about this to me, among other things, it's a huge impact on blood sugar regulation. So now they're beginning to study this for type 2 diabetics, people with metabolic syndrome and so on. Every system in the body, not just metabolism, digestion, you know, neurology, inflammation, all of these things are affected. So a lot has been studied about this. I write about it in my book and there's lots and lots of studies. But anyway, that's the second renegade ritual is embracing those, I guess.

[Ronan]

I have one question now. My optimization mind is kicking in. Are those ultradian rhythms? I'm trying to find the right word, but it's attached to the clock. Are they pretty consistent like a circadian rhythm that at 9am, 10am, 11, or is it day by day?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

They are consistent in their timing, in terms of their duration and their pattern. Whether you have your peak at 9 or at 8:30 or some other time is dependent on when you went to sleep and what your current, your individual rhythms are. So they'll shift, you know, if you fly to France and start living on that time zone, zone, it'll be different and it'll shift a bit depending on when you tend to get into deep sleep and come back out. But the ultradian rhythms happen while we're asleep and while we're awake. And so far I think the only research suggesting that there's significant changes in them occur in pregnant women when there's a reregulation with the fetus. They sort of have two separate systems kind of in training, but they happen for everybody all the time throughout our lifetime. And kids notice them. You notice them like most preschools had at least. Well, maybe they don't do this anymore. But even through kindergarten, first grade, we had nap time or we had changes, you know, we had like art class and then math class. And then it wasn't just a consistent, you know, one run rate that we expected kids to do. So kids tend to lie down and take naps or they get crabby and throw fits. Yeah. Anyway, that's renegade rituals. Oh. The third one is a nighttime wind down practice which is basically, you can see they have this in common. It's accepting that the system comes into arousal and that it kind of circulates during the day. It fluctuates, it oscillates. And then we need a deceleration period before bed where most people again are back to these things and they're scrolling and there's light and there's clicking and there's swiping and it's terrible for your system. So digital, digital sunsets, shutdowns, decelerations are all really important. And I have strategies for doing that that are a lot like what people know about sleep hygiene, but explain it a little bit differently. I think the goal is to reregulate a dysregulated system. The system is dysregulated by living in the unhealthy default reality. So for me, beyond the practical value of these individual practices, there's a constant reminder that I need to re regulate my system as a, I call it preemptive repair strategy for going out and doing business with a reality that is for the most part not working in the favor of my biology.

[Ronan]

Yeah. Now those are great. They make a lot of sense to me and they're, they're not so prescriptive as to be, you know, illegitimate. They're just like, it's just tuning in to certain systems. Right. It's just really paying attention to your body overall.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Even beyond. It is absolutely that. And the other thing that I think is super important, noticing how difficult it is to do even a three minute morning practice, I mean we keep loading people up with more and more complex protocols, ice plunging and la la la. Like if you can't get three minutes in the morning, if you can't regulate yourself that way, notice what gets in the way. I promise you it will be the same thing that gets, gets in the way of every other diet, every other strategy. And mostly what happens is people Just ping pong through them. It's bulletproof coffee this day and mud water the next. And we just keep trying like the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And if you can't re regulate your basic systems, you're just a sitting duck for whatever the next promised solution is. So I think noticing how you are struggling to do even the most pleasant basic things is a really good lesson and why it's hard to do so many of the other things that we beat up on ourselves for not being able to do.

[Ronan]

Uh, I think right at 3:30 that is like perfect timing. Um, that's a nice way to end it off. And I think you're right. I mean truthfully, like if there's one shift we can make in this entire world that like one single swipe press of a button it would be to get rid of these things. I think that would be because that takes our attention. Dopamine always on, you know, blue light. There's so many things wrong with it. And I look forward to the day that our cell phone overloads or get thrown into the ocean and we can go back to living a little bit more of a disconnected. I've been so tempted to, you know, move to a dumb phone. You know, basic features have map, phone, text and that's it and everything else take off and I can't imagine we won't get there. The more and more we see how crappy cell phones make our lives or smartphones make our lives in so many ways.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

So much of our human technology is like that. It's created with all the best intentions and it does bring convenience and comfort and efficiency, but it always, it giveth and it taketh away. And again I think I come back to the single most important thing is, you know, if you can't change the fact that these are ubiquitous and ever present, you can change the way you relate to them. And to me that's just a really good symbol. It symbolizes the way I think we need to learn to relate to the rest of our fast changing, accelerating, complex society. Learn that and it you learned a survival strategy that will get you far.

[Ronan]

There you go. There's your listicle. There's the one thing to learn. Pilar, this has been an awesome conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for making the time and, and thank you for doing the work you're doing. It's really nice to speak to someone who's so balanced about this. You know, it's so easy for people to go to the deep End and get extreme and trade, you know, intuition and logic and reason and their own understanding for lists and practices. And, you know, I think there's value in habits, but quickly habits become crutches and people stop paying attention to what they actually need. So it's really refreshing to speak to someone whose view is, I think, smart, but fluid enough to be really sensical.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Thank you, Ron. Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you too. Thank you. Thank you to you and Chris both for the invitation to come on. It's been really fun.

[Ronan]

It's been great. Chris, is there anything you want me to ask that I haven't asked or is there anything you want to ask that you have. We haven't asked.

[Unknown]

Yeah, no, I'm just. I'm just ready for a Cinnabon after this conversation. You know, you guys keep talking about Cinnabon.

[Ronan]

This episode is not brought to you by Cinnabon, but maybe it should be.

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Brought to you by the unhealthy default reality.

[Ronan]

Yes, exactly.

[Unknown]

All right, so what's. Do you. Do you have a heart out or do you want to do like a quick five minute decompression?

[Ronan]

We can do a five minute decompress. It's fucking blazing hot in this room right now and I'm sweating, I'm sweating. I'm schmidzing. I need a corn beef.

[Unknown]

Actually.

[Ronan]

I went to a sauna yesterday. Yeah, no, that's great. I really enjoy her. Her perspectives.

[Unknown]

Yeah, I love her. She's just super smart. It's really interesting how she can go between like farm girl to like, scientist.

[Ronan]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

On the turn of a dime. And very few people can do that. And just very balanced perspective.

[Ronan]

Yep.

[Unknown]

It's good to hear a little bit of healthy debate and pushback on. On your side too. You know, just to really get into the weeds. And it's interesting. Yeah. Just after this conversation with Pilar, I'm really going to think about the morning routine, the nighttime routine, asking the deeper underlying craving behind the craving.

[Ronan]

Yep.

[Unknown]

You know?

[Ronan]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know for me watching TV is like a desire to be unconscious for a while. It's nice, like. And I think that's the thing that we have to keep in mind is there's nothing wrong with it on occasion. You know, as long as you're not using it to mask some broader underlying issue that you're avoiding. But there's nothing wrong with tuning out every once in a while. It's okay. Just like, it's just like using mind altering substances. It's just a different way to disconnect from certain things and connect to other things.

[Unknown]

Yeah, yeah, I know. Listening to the conversation, I almost felt guilty for my need to unplug. And Pilar would probably say, oh, don't feel guilty. Like this is part of life. Like, she talked about children liking being dizzy or hanging upside down as a form of altered consciousness. So that's really interesting that it's so ingrained in us. The five year old loves spinning around to get dizzy. And sometimes us adults need to just like veg out on the couch and eat some potato chips.

[Ronan]

Totally. Unfortunately, I also had like tomorrow I'm actually taking Cohen, my youngest, to Canada's Wonderland because he loves that spinning stuff and that roller coaster stuff. And I, I have to mentally train myself to go on those things because I do not love them, but he does. And you know, I take. Cherish the opportunity to have those experiences with them even though they make me feel sick. Yeah.

[Unknown]

You know what I'm not good at is the planetariums. Have you ever been in those?

[Ronan]

Not for a long time, but yeah.

[Unknown]

Gives me extreme motion sickness because it's like a sphere.

[Ronan]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

And it's like a fake. It's like this fake distance depth perception thing that just like totally does not work with.

[Ronan]

Messes with you. Yeah, that's fair.

[Unknown]

One thing I wanted to point out as a producer is like, it's interesting when we bring on authors, you know. Pillar made a couple of references to her book and I just hope, like, the audience isn't annoyed by that or it doesn't seem like overly self promotional. I think it's really coming from a place of enthusiasm. I met her in Puerto Rico when she was giving a presentation to the Blue Ribbon Mastermind. And I just, I loved her talk because it had so many visuals. Like she was talking about like graphs and charts and stick figures. And so when she talked about the ape in the arcade, I think that's a really strong visual metaphor, you know, and for myself as a very visual person, I think those kinds of illustrations and metaphors are super important when it comes to teaching about health or teaching about anything because it, it doesn't stick unless there is a story or a visual. And for me, that whole idea of like, yeah, we are kind of like apes in an arcade in the sense that our, our cultural evolution has outpaced our biological evolution.

[Ronan]

Yeah. I mean, I don't have much to comment. I do appreciate the idea of that. The visual aspect aspects of it help it become a little bit more embodied. As opposed to cerebral. I think that's a good point. I think that's part of the point of this podcast and not editing people's comments too much so you can hear it in an authentic way and as three dimensional or multidimensional way as possible. You know, on the Ape in the arcade, I'm like, the truth is like, if we put an ape in an arcade with all the sugar and lights and all that kind of stuff, they'd end up exactly fat and lazy like we're becoming. So I say that only with, you know, a big reminder to have compassion for everybody and anyone. It's like, you know, that I don't think there was any conscious intent to lead us to where we are, but we are where we are and it's challenging to navigate and have compassion because there's no species that would be at all prepared to deal with this, whereas just equipped as anything to navigate it and we'll get through it. Everything, I do believe everything will work out fine and of course, correct as needed.

[Unknown]

Yeah, I think that's one of the big takeaways for me is like to have grace and compassion for ourselves. I think a lot of the ambitious A type people who probably listen to this podcast are entrepreneurs and go getters. It's like it's very easy to get into a negative self talk spiral. Why don't I have the perfect routine and the perfect body and the perfect diet? And this was so much about balance and why it was really refreshing.

[Ronan]

Yep, 100% agreed.

[Unknown]

All right, Ronan, well, I gotta go pick up some groceries. I'm gonna swing by the Cinnabon.

[Ronan]

Yeah. Buy some whole food from Cinnabon and make sure you take like pictures of like all the greasy goodness running down your face.

[Unknown]

Yeah. All right.

[Ronan]

And I have to ask, how do you pronounce your name properly?

[Pilar Gerasimo]

Oh, Pilar is the first name Pilar. Second name is Jerasimo, like Jerusemore, kind of Jerusemo.