Better Place Project with Steve Norris
Better Place Project with Steve Norris
Good Stress! Revolutionizing Well-being by Merging Ancient Practices and Modern Life, with Jeff Krasno
In this week's episode, Jeff Krasno is back to chat about his new online course Good Stress!
Have you ever felt like modern life is out of sync with our ancient DNA? Journey with us and our guest, wellness maven Jeff Krasno, as we navigate the terrain of evolutionary mismatches and the holistic health practices that can steer us back to vitality. Jeff's revelation of reversing diabetes and his embrace of Good Stress through fasting and resistance training is not just his story—it's a blueprint for anyone seeking rejuvenation at any age. We traverse the healing powers of nature, fasting, and the surprising benefits of welcoming a little discomfort into our daily routine to rekindle our ancestral resilience.
From the rise of global yoga communities to the power of simple, in-sync-with-nature habits, our conversation with Jeff peels back the layers on democratizing wellness. We share the backstory of how a post-9/11 need for solace and an unexpected partnership with Oprah sparked a wellness revolution, and the ensuing growth of an inclusive, online yoga collective. The stories from diverse participants are a testament to the emotional resonance of shared wellness experiences. We also uncover the potential of practices like cold therapy and mindful eating not only for our physical health but in training the mind to navigate life's stressors with grace.
In wrapping up, we turn our focus to the art of nuanced communication in a world brimming with polarized views. Drawing upon Jeff's encounters and our own, we discuss how empathetic listening can be as transformative as any physical health practice. This episode is an invitation to integrate these strategies into your life, promising a profound impact on well-being. Whether you're looking to optimize sleep, engage in challenging discussions, or simply introduce more plant-based foods into your diet, this episode is a tapestry of insights for a healthier, more harmonious life. Join us for an episode that's as much about fostering a better world as it is about personal transformation.
To learn more about Jeff's new course Good Stress, please visit:
https://www.onecommune.com/
Jeff on Instagram: @JeffKrasno
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Coming up on Better Place Project. And then you know, my point here is that in the last 100 or 150 years, you know, culture, and the pace of culture has really upended our design, our engineering or our evolutionary advantages. So you know, I'll kind of point to like a specific example where you can see these evolutionary mismatches. So we were obviously, you know, like living on the Serengeti sometime, you know, 10, 15,000 years ago, and we were more or less opportunistic omnivores. We were eating, you know, 800 different kinds of plants, seeds, tubers, and occasionally, when we got lucky, you know, some wild game. And then we would endure, you know, periods of significant scarcity, you know, particularly during winter's fallow. So our bodies, in relation to those environmental stressors, develop certain adaptive mechanisms. One of those was storing fat. So we think about fat in the modern age as this villain we like, vilify fat. But all fat is is warehoused energy.
Speaker 2:Make the world a better place. Make the world a better place. Hey, hey, I'm Steve Norris. Welcome to Better Place Project, where each week, we shine a light on amazing humans from every corner of the planet who are doing extraordinary things to help make the world a better place, including sharing their knowledge with us on how we can be living healthier, happier, more purposeful lives. Hey everybody, welcome to episode 190. He is back. I am so stoked to have Mr Jeff Krasnow on the show.
Speaker 2:Jeff Krasnow is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being. He hosts the Commune podcast, interviewing a wide variety of luminaries from Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey and Gabor Mate. Jeff pens a personal weekly essay titled Commusing that explores spirituality, wellness and culture and is distributed to over 1 million subscribers every Sunday. Culture and is distributed to over 1 million subscribers every Sunday. Jeff is the creator of Good Stress, a collection of wellness protocols that he developed to reverse his diabetes, lose 60 pounds and reclaim his health at age 50. Good Stress is available as an online course and is being developed into a book and TV series. Jeff is also the co-creator of Wunderlust, a global series of wellness events. In 2016, he was selected by Oprah Winfrey to be part of the Super Soul 100 as one of the nation's leading entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:In 1995, jeff married his college sweetheart, skylar Grant. They live in Los Angeles and have three daughters. Jeff and Skylar were on the show together. That was in May of 2022, episode 87. And that episode was just a blast. So if you've never listened to that one, go back and check it out when you have a chance.
Speaker 2:But today Jeff and I, like I mentioned there in the bio, talk about his new course Good Stress, and in this episode we cover everything from fasting to exercise and resistance training, light therapy, deliberate cold therapy, deliberate heat therapy, training the mind and breath, stressful conversation, reconnecting with nature and just guys. I don't know that I've ever done an episode with just this many nuggets of information and I know we went on pretty long in this episode and, trust me, I didn't cut any of it out, because I would have been cutting nuggets if I edited any of it out. So stick around for this episode. If you have to break it into two walks in your neighborhood over a couple of days, do it, but this one is just so chock full of so many good nuggets that I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did and get as much out of it as I have. So let me get right to it my conversation with Jeff Krasnow. Welcome to the show, jeff. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 1:It's a treat to be with you. I always really enjoy our time together.
Speaker 2:It's hard to believe and I just realized that this morning that it'll be two years next month since you and Skylar were on the show and I had so much fun talking with you both and we went off on so many fun tangents from curb your enthusiasm to who knows what. But I realized after we got off that call and I went over my notes I forgot to ask you about one of the main questions I wanted to ask you about, and it was something that I heard about that you talked about on one of your podcasts before, about what was the impetus really for you launching your commune community and your website community and your website and what I'd love for you to share briefly with our listeners and I know you've told the story many, many times, but it's so good about what Oprah Winfrey had to do with the launch of Commune.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, and first of all, just thanks for having me back and I love connecting with you and the amazing community that you're building.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you so much and have built. It's so impressive and your curiosity is always on full display. Yeah, so I started this concern called Wanderlust. It was for lack of a better description kind of the world's biggest series of wellness events, and we had these big yoga and mindfulness festivals all around the world, and I was just coming out of 10 years of essentially living on an airplane in the name of yoga and wellness, and I had been fortunate enough really just lucky enough to be placed on a list called the Super Soul 100, which was Oprah's handpicked top 100 entrepreneurs in the United States.
Speaker 2:And given everyone else who's on that list, I always considered myself Some heavy Gabby Bernstein and there's oh and some, oh, I mean ridiculous.
Speaker 1:I always consider myself like. Deepak and all those. Yeah, number 99 on that list. But you know, just because I was on the list, I would get invited to all sorts of really interesting dynamic events. Dynamic events, um, you know, up at her place in Montecito, and um, my wanderlust facility was just about five blocks away from from own, which was, you know, the network that she was running at that juncture, and um, that was up in New York, right? No, that was actually in LA, in LA.
Speaker 2:Oh, that was in LA. Yeah, okay, yeah, okay. Okay, I knew her montecito homes was obviously out here, but I was thinking her studio was in new york at the time.
Speaker 1:But all right yeah, no, that's all right. She had a lot, yeah, in west hollywood, basically, and um so uh. You know, I was always a fan and and became a friend of deepak Chopra and I was introduced to his meditation challenges God many years ago, where they would launch, you know, these 14-day or 21-day meditation challenges.
Speaker 2:In fact, david Gee originally started running that at the early days of that right Through the Chopra Center.
Speaker 1:That's correct. Yeah, I believe he was actually the original architect of the program and the structure itself.
Speaker 2:um and he was just on the show about four or six months ago and we talked about that, so that's why I was front and center yeah, he's just the.
Speaker 1:He's an angel here on the earth.
Speaker 2:He's amazing and to have him right here in our backyard. And, by the way, just another thing I have you to thank you for you turned me on to him through your podcast a couple years ago and I was just really starting to get in the phase where I was meditating every single day and you had him on your show and he just so resonated with me. So to this day I go back and do his guided meditations all the time. But, yeah, he told me about how he went through the whole, how he launched the program and they were up to I don't know, a couple hundred thousand people doing this 21-day program. And then they said, yeah, we're going to take it to the next level. Oprah wants to be involved. And then he kind of stepped aside. But so, yeah, so you pick it up from there. You were looking to do something similar with your yoga, correct?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, so Oprah would do kind of the opening oratory on these Deepak Chopra meditations.
Speaker 1:So you know, you'd sign up for one and then you'd get an email and these were all audio, and then Oprah would you know, say something about how meditation really bent the arc of her personal life and health, and then Deepak Chopra would come in and lead you.
Speaker 1:So, anyways, I found myself at a brunch over in West Hollywood on their lot, on the Oprah Winfrey Network lot, and I was sitting actually with Gabby Bernstein and Marie Forleo and somebody else, not Brene, but like I can't remember. Anyways, it was my typical natural habitat, jeff, and a lot of wonderfully intelligent women, as I have three daughters, and so I was very felt like my natural habitat. And there was one open chair at our table and I saw Sherry Salata, who was the co-CEO of OWN, and I said hey, sherry, you know, sit down, like join us, and she's like no, no, no, no, that seat is saved. I'm like all right, well, whatever, and then about five minutes later you know who plunks down, but Oprah Winfrey and there she is, so cool and yeah, you know, I've had the good fortune to meet people who are well-known throughout my life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but Oprah, I think you'll agree, and I also. You and I both worked in the music industry for many years. I've been to the Grammys, been to the backstage Grammys, I've met a lot of household names. But Oprah, yeah, if she sits down at my table, I knew I would be hearing in my ears like, oh you know, it's a whole other level of celebrity.
Speaker 1:Well, I was hearing more flanking and clinking in my stomach. I was like you know, my stomach was turning around. I was a bit nervous, but she was as affable as could be. You know, she was very much in her Weight Watchers mode. So as we were all eating, I remember she was like pointing to different items of food number two, number three, number five, Anyway, she was assigning a different category. I didn't really know what it meant, um, but but she broke the ice and that. That was sweet uh of her, because I'm sure she experiences a lot of nervousness in in her heart in her orbit.
Speaker 1:So it was probably intentional. Um and and then. So I I kind of summoned the gumption to say, you know, hey, you know I've been a big fan of Deepak Chopra and you know I always felt like you and Deepak should get married. And yeah, there was silence, just like that. She kind of looked at me, she's like what? And I'm like, yeah, because then you could be Oprah Chopra.
Speaker 1:See, that's the story I wanted you to tell that is so good, and I, I had been saving that up, um, for the right moment. And of course, there it was presenting to me and, and I don't know how, she had never thought of that before. I mean, I, but she thought that was just funny enough to give me the time of day. And then, you know, she started with a sort of a litany of inquiries as to who I was. And you know, I told her about Wanderlust and then I said, listen, I, you know, I have a, an idea to really democratize access to yoga. You know, my wife is a yoga teacher and she started this studio. Wife is a yoga teacher and she started this studio at ground zero, right?
Speaker 2:after 9-11.
Speaker 1:And it really just, you know, I sat there kind of in the front row watching the power of yoga and community to really heal people and be a big part of their transformation and I want to make that as accessible to people as possible. And you know what you guys did you and deepak did. You know you made meditation basically like this household practice. Now you demystified it. It's on the cover of time magazine and you know new york times can't stop talking about it anyways. So and she's like no, no, no, this body doesn't do yoga, this. But you know, she kind of gave me this kind of thing. She just kind of blew it off for a second and I said no, no, this is not like you know, some like little ponytail blonde girl popping up into a handstand on a whim, and this is just like real basic yoga. You know the fundamentals of a practice that you know really can kind of crack the door for more people. She's like, okay, I like you enough.
Speaker 2:And kudos for you for having the chutzpah to bring that up. That was great. Make her laugh a little bit with the Oprah Chopra joke and then, boom, go in for the ask. That was brilliant. Yeah, yeah, but you must have been shaking in your boots just even proposing it. But look what came about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you miss every shot you don't take. So then Monday morning I got a call from I think it was Noel Kehoe or someone over there and they said you know, we heard from Oprah that we're doing this project with you. I'm like, okay, they're like can you come over and tell us what it is?
Speaker 2:And I'm like all right, I think I could squeeze that in my schedule.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, you know, I came over and I explained, you know, the vision for a 21-day yoga challenge. And they were very, very generous and really spoon fed me this model for, you know, democratizing access and allowing people to take it for free with their email, et cetera. And um, and candidly, you know, um, I had a plan, but the plan was like in its primordial soup. And so then, very quickly, I had to shift into high gear and I literally, for like a couple thousand bucks, filmed my wife, skylar in our living room and, you know, produced a very thoughtful 21-day foundational program. And then, you know, I was back and forth with her team and they said, okay, well, great, so where are you hosting it? And I'm like, oh, where, where am I hosting it? And they're like, yeah, you're the yoga guy, right. And I'm like, yeah, story, yeah, sure. And so then I, you know.
Speaker 1:I hung up the phone I was like okay, I don't have a platform, I have to build one. And at that juncture, you know, I had just enough knowledge to be dangerous through. You know, use an off-the-shelf platform to build this little kind of video-on-demand site.
Speaker 2:Necessity is the mother of invention.
Speaker 1:Right that's in this case for sure, and you know they were like. You got to launch it like right after New Year's, because New Year, new you and everyone's making their resolutions. I'm going to be a better man this year than I'm next year whatever.
Speaker 1:And so we did. But it didn't give us much time, but within about eight or nine days we had registered 120, 130,000 people and I was like wow, this is amazing. And we invited all those people to a Facebook group. There was maybe 30, 35,000 people that opted into this Facebook group and it was just a beautiful thing to watch, steve. I mean, it was honestly very emotional.
Speaker 1:I actually haven't told this story very recently or very often at all, but kind of, within that Facebook group it was really like the best element of social media happening, because there were people from all over the world you know, madagascar to British Columbia, to New Zealand, to Estonia, and they were all you know coming together around this practice. And I remember there was a woman, actually from Mozambique, who posted a photo of her little altar space. It was a very humble little space with a candle and a photo of her son and she described it and a photo of her son and she described it, and that kind of opened the floodgates for thousands upon thousands of these photos of people's altar spaces and it was a really just kind of wonderful. Um, and then, early on in the challenge, there was a woman who was quite heavyset, who posted a photo of herself and she said I never felt like I was good enough to do yoga, but this platform and this program has given me sort of the safety and security to dip my toe into it and now I feel confident enough to share me. And she posted this photo of herself.
Speaker 1:And that was like sort of a watershed moment because from there there were people of every size and ilk and race and creed posting photos of themselves, people like African Americans, for example, in this country, who have never felt part of a yoga community for um, and there they were stepping forward and getting into this practice. So I was like, wow, this is, this is really like making a difference in people's lives. And the business model also seemed to be penciling out. And from there and this community.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This community that you were building.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:People connecting from all over the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and decentralizing the means of connection. And so from there it was yeah, I basically built a business on top of that model. On top of that model and, you know, through Wanderlust, I again had had the opportunity to meet so many influential authors and thought leaders and mystics and sages, and they all I didn't, I never bounced a check. So they all, they all, you know, took my calls and you know I asked many of them, you know, to participate in this new platform that I was starting and many of them agreed and that really helped. You know, the new need friend, and so I was fortunate enough to have some friends that helped me launch this thing. And now here we are, five years or so later and we have, you know, over 150 courses on the platform with, honestly, virtually everyone that I've legends I grew up reading, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, you're right, it's. It's a who's who of of of everything spiritual, health, wellbeing. No, you've built a fantastic platform and you know, fast forward to yesterday, Sunday morning, as I do on so many Sunday mornings, I'm having my coffee, my latte, and I'm reading through my emails and I come across your commusing email, which I read every Sunday, and it happened to be the one on good stress, and I thought this is perfect. I'm talking to Jeff tomorrow about that and what I love about, and you've done this with some of your emails, but it was nice to be able to you have an option right there. I can either read it or I can just click to listen, and it's essentially the transcript, but I opted to listen out on your podcast, so it gave me a really good you know some good homework for me to review in preparation for our talk today. So what really really struck me if I could read a quick little passage, because this was something that really stuck out for me that I never really heard it put this way. And you said, quote this culture of chronic ease leads directly to the current scores of chronic disease.
Speaker 2:In short, the way we live creates evolutionary mismatches. Humans evolved to thrive in conditions where discomfort and stressors were the norm. Our modern lifestyle is hijacking our biology and rendering our hard-wrought adaptive mechanisms maladaptive. Acute short-term stress in the human body activates pathways that promote longevity and resilience. This phenomenon is called hormesis. Now, in an era of uber-convenience, we need to purposely self-impose these conditions as a means to be well.
Speaker 2:Adopting the protocols of good stress is a way to bring our bodies, which have been ravaged by our reliance on the big max, back into balance. Good stress mimics the acute stressors my Paleolithic ancestors, fez Ansark simply my name, spelled backwards might have encountered in his daily quest for survival. Fez never developed diabetes or heart disease or dementia, nor did anyone in his tribe. Yet Fez and I share virtually the exact same genome. Good stress helps us live a little more like Fez. Through the adoption of Paleolithic stressors, which I sometimes call the protocols of inconvenience, which you put in quotes, we leverage our inherent engineering. We swim with nature's current instead of against it. That's really cool. I never really thought of it like that, that for thousands of years we constantly had to deal with it's a cold night, I'm shivering, it's hot, it's with stressors, and now we don't. And I'd never really connected the dots to disease in our lives. Can you unpack that for us a little more Sure?
Speaker 1:So this organism and your organism and everyone who has a body who's listening, is really the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of Homo sapiens, and then millions of years prior to that, with our hominid ancestors, and over these massive swaths of time, nature developed a very perfect design. And then, in relation to the environment, and then my point here is that in the last 100 or 150 years, culture and the pace of culture has really upended our design, our engineering or our evolutionary advantages. So, you know, I'll kind of point to like a specific example where you can see these evolutionary mismatches. So we were obviously, you know, like living on the Serengeti sometime, you know, 10, 15,000 years ago, and we were more or less opportunistic omnivores. We were eating, you know, 800 different kinds of plants, seeds, tubers, and occasionally, when we got lucky, you know, some wild game, and then we would endure, you know, periods of significant scarcity, you know, particularly during winter's fallow.
Speaker 1:So our bodies, in relation to those environmental stressors, develop certain adaptive mechanisms. One of those was storing fat. So we think about fat in the modern age as this villain. We like vilify fat, but all fat is is warehoused energy, you know it's also serves as a as a cushion, and you know it's an endocrine organ and there's some other attributes to actually extol about it, but at its core it's really just a stowage of energy for a rainy day. And so we were evolved to get a little bit fat in the late summer and in the fall. And you can see this in all these kind of mechanisms of the human body. As I begin to kind of pull them apart. We get a little bit less sleep because it's lighter later in the summer, and that makes us a little bit more insulin resistant, for example.
Speaker 1:So instead of using energy or using substrates like fat and carbohydrates for energy production, our body would say wait, let's store a little bit of that as fat. Or let's say we would come across an amazing copse of fig trees, you know, in the late summer, early fall, which is when you would harvest figs and we would gorge on them, as we are wired to do, and you know that fructose that you get in a fig is also. It's not just calories, it's also information, and it would inform ourselves to say, hey, become a little insulin resistant, don't uptake the glucose into the cell. Instead, store it as fat, because right around the corner there is going to be a paucity of calories and we're going to need that warehoused energy. So that's the way we evolve.
Speaker 1:That's completely adaptive. Being fat and storing fat is adaptive, only it's not when we do it all the time. So, when there is no paucity of calories, when you essentially can rely on your smartphone to quote-unquote, conveniently order up any type of food 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, in or out of season, to the front door.
Speaker 2:Therein lies the point that also I was going to point out as well, also out of season foods as well For sure that we're not used to eating a lot of fattier foods that we would normally eat in the wintertime. If they were in season in our area, we wouldn't even eat, so I think that's a good point there as well.
Speaker 1:And most of these calories that we consume are refined grains, refined sugars and ultra-processed foods. And so when essentially there is no scarcity, when winter never comes, all we do is store fat. And then you look around and you say 45% obesity rate in the United States, and my statement here is like that's not a bug in the system. That's actually the natural and expected result of our miraculous genome simply trying to cope with the way that we live. That's it. And so this is a way where culture has hijacked our biology and made adaptive mechanisms maladaptive. And there's so many examples of that. You know and you know.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to go into other ones, but I'll let you lead talk about some of the different areas, because I love how you talk about some of the things in reference to that stored fat, like things as simple as a cold plunge in 40-degree water in the morning. Then, when you get out of it, your body's saying, hey, I've got this extra fat I can burn to get my body back up to body temperature. So there's so many awesome things like that that I know you teach in this course. But before we dive into some of those bullets, so to speak, can you tell us, jeff, what got you to this point? It's my understanding.
Speaker 2:Back in 2017, some of these aforementioned issues that are going on in modern society were happening in your life and in spite of you just coming back from tours around the world with your health and wellness system I think you used the expression. It was more like wealth and hellness for you at that point, which I love that expression that you used. So back us up to 2017. What was your life like? And, physically, mentally, what kind of condition were you in?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this, steve, is really why these topics are so personal and one of the reasons I'm so passionate about talking about them. In 2017, 2018, I exited Wanderlust and I spiraled, I would say, into a bit of a depression. I was under a tremendous amount of bad distress at Wanderlust. I had private equity investors sort of breathing down my neck, but I also had kind of all of the typical sort of work overload, wicked insomnia. You know travel schedule that was, you know, ridiculous. You know I was basically fueling myself, you know, on wine and coffee, and you know so many of the modern, you know habits that are maladaptive. And so, like 2018, even into 2019, 2020, I was tipping the scales at like 210.
Speaker 1:You know I had chronic fatigue, like I said, insomnia, brain fog, just general irritability, like complete lack of ability to focus and concentrate. I think I read a grand total of zero books in 2017. I just couldn't even get through five pages without just wandering and this incessant need to check my phone all the time. And then there were the more kind of ghastly physical presentations. I started to grow these like brown skin tags in my armpits, and so I later actually found out that that is a symptom of diabetes and insulin resistance. At that point I didn't really know. I kind of had this jelly belly inner tube of dad bod, you know that kind of visceral adiposity, and then what I later found out with the clinical diagnosis of is gynecomastia.
Speaker 1:But I had these sort of boobs of man and yeah, not A cups, as my daughters love to tell me, so you know. So there was definitely insult to vanity. And then I put this continuous glucose monitor I'm wearing one right now on my triceps. My friend, casey Means, had started a company called Levels Health that made these continuous glucose monitors that you know give you a dashboard into your blood glucose levels moment to moment.
Speaker 1:And I put one on and I looked into the app and I had you know 125 milligrams per deciliter fasting glucose levels which, you know, for a lot of people that's not going to mean anything but that is basically the highest end of prediabetes and borderline diabetic glucose levels. And that finally spurred me on to go see my PCP who did my hemoglobin A1C, which is kind of the gold standard blood panel that you're going to for glucose anyways, that you're going to get from your doctor, and that was like 6.7%. So bottom end of kind of diabetes and that was sort of a, you know, a bucket of ice on top of my head. You know, wake up. That wasn't a, that wasn't a delivery protocol, that was just a wake up call.
Speaker 1:And and so you know I was 49 years old and and like 60% of Americans, I had, you know, chronic disease. And you know, and here I was, you know, like a relatively active guy running a yoga company, you know, raising three daughters, like paying my taxes, like wait a minute, I shouldn't have diabetes but like 13% of other Americans have, you know, have diabetes now and like another 47, 48% have pre-diabetes and don't even know about it. That's insane. You know the chronic killers. You know dementia and heart disease and stroke and even cancer and certainly fatty liver disease, kidney disease, et cetera.
Speaker 1:So I was well into the nightmare that is the American health, the ground conditions of American health, I should say.
Speaker 1:Conditions of American health, I should say, and you know, but fortunately I had, you know, a lot of resources at my fingertips.
Speaker 1:So I, you know, started interviewing doctors, essentially for my commune podcast, and you know, to date I've interviewed maybe I think I'm 580 episodes, in which is just like blind persistence at some level.
Speaker 1:But you know, I've interviewed 350, 400 doctors and read all of their books and hosted many, many, many of them in Topanga at my retreat center and began to distill a collection of protocols and engage in, like tons of me, search and jump into my own petri dish and become the end of one Jeff Fedge experiment and, and you know, over time, through the adoption of these protocols, we're able to reduce virtually all my symptoms and, most notably, like, bring my blood glucose levels into an optimal range around. You know, really like in the modern era, you know, we're choosing the way that we die and not with a tremendous amount of thoughtfulness, like these chronic conditions that are so pervasive. They are, yes, the result of chronic ease and convenience are, yes, the result of chronic ease and convenience. But the gospel, the good news is that they are largely preventable and, in many cases, reversible, and that's what I'm excited to talk about.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, let's dive right in deeper then, about some of those reversible and preventable kind of ways and things that we can be doing now that you talk about in the course, and we won't go in too much. We don't want to give everything away, but let's start with fasting, and last I remember you talked out on social media you've talked about fasting in the past and I know at the time, about a year ago it might even have been a couple years ago when you were on the podcast last that you were avoiding eating except for between 11 am and 7 pm. Is that kind of where you are on a regular kind of typical day?
Speaker 1:Yeah, more or less. I mean, I've certainly become less fundamentalist about it as I was able to sort of reset my metabolic baseline and become honestly more it's worked for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, become much more metabolically flexible. My basal metabolic rate has increased a lot because I've gotten more into resistance training. So I would, you know, I think there's a danger with health around becoming too neurotic about some of these practices. In fact there's this, you know, condition called orthorexia, where you can become unhealthily obsessed, I believe it. That being said, you know, the adoption of that 16-8 fasting protocol in which I consolidated all my consumption of food in an eight-hour window, was very key in the early days to manage and reverse a lot of my conditions and I stuck with it kind of assiduously for about a year and now I kind of go in and out of it. But I think you know, really, the main point with it is that your body needs to repair and restore and if it gets a single monotone message of grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, because you're eating all of the time, that's just simply not healthy. It causes imbalances.
Speaker 1:So by consolidating my eating window into eight hours, I mean I well, first of all, I saw a great impact on my blood glucose. I was, I mean, and that just makes sense. Obviously, if you're not taxing the pancreas to release insulin because you're not putting carbohydrates into your body. You're going to become more insulin sensitive over time Because just one basic concept around physiology that I think everyone can understand sometimes by analogy with coffee or alcohol is that the excess of any single molecule in the human body will create a resistance to itself. So we know that with coffee. If we're avid coffee drinkers, it takes more coffee right to get us that sense of buzz. The same is true for insulin. So if you're constantly, if your pancreas is constantly producing a ton of insulin, your cells are eventually going to become more insulin resistant. They're going to develop resistance and you're not going to be able to uptake glucose. It's going to sit in your bloodstream more. So that was a key knock-on impact of fasting. I also lost a lot of weight. Now you can eat 14 pints of Chubby Hubby in an eight hour window. So it's not that you necessarily lose weight by consolidating all your eating, but generally when you're paying conscious attention to what you're put in your mouth and when you put stuff in your mouth, you are more likely to make better choices.
Speaker 1:There's this thing called Hawthorne effect. Is that you know behavior under observation always modifies, and so even when you're just observing yourself and you become kind of a disciple, or you have discipleship to a particular practice, your behavior will generally change. So I just started eating better. I became more plant-focused. I hadn't adopted basically a plant-focused ketogenic diet, but I will say there were other kind of more spiritual or psychological dimensions to fasting that I found, honestly, probably to be the most potent components of it.
Speaker 1:And you know, it was really interesting. It's not anything that I expected or that I had read about going into it, but because I was disciplined to this eight-hour window, that didn't mean that I didn't get hungry outside of it. You know, I got hungry, particularly at the beginning. So it'd be 9pm or something and I'd be outside my window and I'd get hungry, but I wasn't going to eat and I wasn't going to simply kind of unconsciously, mindlessly meander over to the fridge or the cupboard and just pick something out. So I had to witness the nature of the hunger. And so you know, viktor Frankl, I love this.
Speaker 2:You asked yourself a question at that point, did you not?
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. So, like Viktor Frankl in, you know, man's Search for Meaning has an amazing quote that's been, you know, used so many times. But between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space lies our freedom or liberation. So there was a stimulus, that was the hunger. And then, because I couldn't just react and eat, I created a space and in that space there was an opportunity to witness the nature of the hunger, such that I began over time to delineate between whether or not that hunger was a biological need or an emotional or psychological desire. Like, was I just eating? My feelings? Was I bored? Did someone insult me on Instagram? Why was I hungry? Was it really a biological need or was there some other just psychological desire that I had for food? There's some other just psychological desire that I had for food.
Speaker 1:And as I began to rip that apart and untangle it, that mindset, that skill, that space, began to punctuate all these other elements of my life. I have three daughters. They're doing aggravating, annoying things all the time. My normal reaction would be to yell or get angry or get aggravated myself. But wait a minute. Like there was a stimulus. Now there's a space and in that space I could say oh no, well, why are they acting that way? Well, what's the substrate here? What's the ground conditions that are informing some behavior?
Speaker 2:And why am I bothered by?
Speaker 1:that and why am I bothered? And what's the appropriate response? And certainly for anything for alcohol, for retail, for any component of your life that is reactionary. You know, fasting turned out to give me this capacity that I could refine to examine the nature of certain stimuli, such that I just didn't respond immediately and mindlessly and unconsciously it's a beautiful, beautiful question to ask.
Speaker 2:I've lately. I'm all about exercising and staying in shape.
Speaker 2:I surf, I keep active, I hike all those things, but lately I've had quite an affinity I've always loved dark chocolate and I've had quite an affinity for the Trader Joe's dark chocolate acai berries, and I'm sitting there last night, sat down watching a documentary, popped a couple of those, popped a couple and that question. Literally I'm only hours removed from having listened to your podcast and I sat there and I thought these are tasting so good, but why do I want more? What need am I feeling? Is it a psychological or am I really hungry? Does my body really need these right now? And it's amazing, because what that does is it really does turn you into an observer, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, and I think there are a lot of protocols that we can adopt into our lives. And then I do believe that behind all of the protocols, there is mindset, emotionally regulate and bring that which is unconscious, conscious is almost behind all of these other things. And so, yeah, I mean that would be the sort of the secret sauce behind all the protocols.
Speaker 2:I think, all right, beautiful, let's jump to the next one. And you talked, even within fasting, something about you, something about you don't want to eat all the time. You use the metaphor also, obviously, with muscles and exercise you want to tear down those fibers and let them grow back. Conversation that you've kind of discovered resistance training. So what are some of some key points in the areas of exercise that you feel have benefited you most in your kind of, you know, changing your behavior and your physique?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I'll say you know, before I directly answer, that the question that I almost always ask myself in regards to any of these categories is how did I evolve right? So how did I evolve in relation to exercise? Well, I walked, boy, did I walk, walked 10 miles a day. The Hadza and the Kung, the kind of last existing hunter-gatherer tribes that are still operating today, they walk, you know, six to eight miles per day still. And so walking became just a very central part of my life. And you know I live in a very hilly area, particularly walking up hills, I do it almost every day. Very hilly area, particularly walking up hills, I do it almost every day. So you know that you could categorize that as zone two exercise if you want. You know where you kind of get.
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say, speaking of zones, I don't know if you've watched the Blue Zone. You know the latest one that came out last year or earlier this year on Netflix on the Blue Zones around the world. But their studies found that there's a direct correlation between longevity of humans and the hilliness of the village that they live in. Because when you're climbing steps or you're going up hills, you're working the biggest muscle in your body, your quads and your hamstrings, and that facilitates bone density. Obviously, muscle strength prevents you from falling, breaking hips, all those things. So you're lucky that you live in hills. That alone is going to help you live longer.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And then you know there's so much to unpack with exercise and movement. I mean, one of the things that I committed was just making movement a more regular and normal part of my daily existence. So you know, obviously there's been this massive efflorescence of gyms in the United States over the last couple decades, but that didn't. That's not getting us any fitter necessarily. I mean that's not just epidemiologically, because to sit behind a desk for eight or nine hours under fluorescent lights and then go huff and puff it out on a treadmill for an hour again, that is simply not how this organism was designed.
Speaker 2:By the way. Huffing and puffing under fluorescent lights too, true, but to your point, you're talking about Jeff being sedentary completely for eight hours and then bursts of exercise.
Speaker 1:Exactly. We tend to think of exercise as this cubbyhole, codified little thing that we need to do three times a week or four times a week. That sits in this one little hour of the day. That actually doesn't really get us that much. We need to be moving all of the time because, again, that is how we're designed. Now that doesn't mean we need to go run three miles four times a day. You just get up and walk multiple times a day. You do some push-ups multiple times a day. You do some pushups multiple times a day. You do some air squats. You just it's called Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's some acronym, I think it's called NEAT, which is like non-exercise active thermogenesis or something to that ilk, where essentially you just integrate these things into your daily life. I mean, a lot of people are getting walking desks now. I think those are fantastic. Or standing desks, agreed. Yeah, so just integrating movement into your daily life. Okay, how else did we evolve? Well, probably against our will, every once in a while we had to break into a sprint. Yeah, we're not chased by odd toad on gillets very often these days, um, but I do believe that you know, a couple times a week, you know you should get your heart rate up to like 90 percent of max or something 85, 90 percent of max, and that could be high intensity training, um, but you know, so I that. Or zone five training, etc. So I think that's good.
Speaker 1:I do that on the tennis court because I'm still like a very competitive and avid tennis player, play a lot of singles still, and I get my heart rate up, um, a couple of times a week. The big one for me was resistance training, I mean, and mostly it was body weight training. So I got hooked on pull-ups and there were a lot of reasons for that from my past. Those are awesome, but I got on like 100 pull-ups a day for a while, which was maybe a little over the top. But body weight exercises are awesome Push-ups, sit-ups, all sorts of different kinds of core um, because you can do them anywhere and almost really at any time. And, um, you know the like you said, like the most obvious example of good stress is you overload a muscle, you rip the microfiber in that muscle, you give it a chance to repair and then it grows and it hypertrophizes and you know you grow a muscle and so the growth of muscle has so many benefits. I mean, yes, it protects against, you know, sarcopenia, particularly later in life. You know we're losing about 10% of our muscle mass every decade. So you get into your 60s and 70s and you know you fall and you break a hip and you're dead within a year, right, oftentimes.
Speaker 1:Exactly need to maintain muscle mass, particularly in middle life, because you know as you get older it gets a little bit more difficult. So you want to grow, you want to build that muscle. It's good for bone health and all these other things. But where I found it to be again one of these places that I didn't even know that it would have. This impact is again on metabolic health, because muscle is a.
Speaker 1:It is a glucose disposal agent. It is a vacuum for blood sugar and even you know, even at rest it's amazing it uses glucose. But when you contract a muscle, it will uptake glucose even without insulin. So it's just amazing. That was kind of the final stage of balancing my blood sugar and reversing my diabetes and prediabetes was actually building muscle. There's so many other components of muscle. It's an endocrine organ. It secretes these kind of what are called now myokines, one of which then stimulates the production of a protein called BDNF, which maintains neural function and actually stimulates the growth of new neurons, so new brain cells, even later in life. We never thought that that was possible. We thought that our brain was on a decline from 26 years on, after you were 26,. Right Now we're learning through neuroplasticity.
Speaker 2:Neuropathways yeah 100%.
Speaker 1:So you know, actually hitting the gym or doing some pull-ups and growing some muscle has impacts on cognitive health. So there's just every reason kind of in the world to be doing it. And of course, this is again how we evolved. We evolved, you know, gathering wood and doing some physical exercise that you might categorize as resistance training every day. Course, if you kind of look back at like what hunter-gatherer bodies look like, you know in our minds I don't have photographs, but you know they had a lot of lean muscle mass, right, absolutely. And so you know again what used to be sort of natural paleolithic stressors, cultural paleolithic stressors. Now we actually have to consciously, deliberately, self-impose those stressors to be healthy, because we live in a world that has been engineered for comfort and convenience, and that's the basic premise right there.
Speaker 2:Boom. Let's move on to the next one. You talk about light therapy and I love what you mentioned in the newsletter, that Larry David. There's an issue with Larry David here being a disruptor in the light therapy category. I'm with you on that. The old curb keeping you up at night. One more episode. It's only 26 minutes or whatever it is. That's right, I'm guilty as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now we have to go back to season one, given that, larry just concluded, he's done.
Speaker 1:I know he's done is that we evolved to get a certain band of the light spectrum at a certain time of day that would set our circadian rhythm and optimize sleep. And now culture has provided on-demand, 24-7 access to entertainment. We're sitting around all sorts of screens that emit that particular band of the electromagnetic wave spectrum that is disrupting this endocrine balance between cortisol and melatonin, which then results in these cresting rates of insomnia. And when we don't sleep there are so many negative knock-on impacts. We feel it subjectively, but we become more insulin resistant, we don't activate the glymphatic system, the sort of the lymph of the brain, our memory suffers, we generally don't eat well, it's very, very hard to exercise, we become irritable all of these things and worse candidly. So we want to focus on getting the right kind of light at the right time of day and not getting it at other times. And of course this is where Larry David comes in, because if we're watching too much, uh larry at night, if we're not taking some of the precautions, um, you know, and it's not just larry, obviously, but um, but we will um exacerbate that endocrine um imbalance and we'll find it harder to sleep. So obviously I'm talking about blue light.
Speaker 1:Blue light is a certain band of light of the electromagnetic wave spectrum between kind of 380 and 500 nanometers. When we get that in the early morning and we get outside and we look at the lower part of the sky that tends to be very, very blue around that time, we get that those waves interact with these kind of specialized neurons in the inferior part of our retina. Of course, again, this is how we evolved we slept outside or woke with the sun and we went out, got morning light, and so when these specialized neurons in the inferior part of your retina get blue light, they send this, this message, to these two nodes called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It sends another message to the pineal gland. But the moral of the story is that sets your circadian rhythm such that your pineal gland produces and secretes a hormone that we all know about called melatonin, about 14 hours later, and that's what makes you groggy and gets sleepyhead into bed.
Speaker 1:But when we disrupt that and we get blue light at different times of day, particularly at night, that cortisol, melatonin, seesaw, gets out of balance and again our you know, our sleep can get, you know, very, very disrupted. So the protocols are very simple and then there's a lot of like sleep architecture and sleep hygiene at night, and I'm sure some of you know, your, your folks are very aware of some of those things. But there are a few little you know, tricks and nuances too. Tricks and nuances too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I will definitely speak to this one because I, like you, Jeff, have a history of pretty severe insomnia throughout different parts of my life, for sure, especially post-divorce after the divorce 10 years ago with the mother of my kids and a really rough time there.
Speaker 2:But the and but.
Speaker 2:The last year I've been sleeping better than I have in the last 10 years and doing multiple things.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that I started doing about a year ago and and just started going around on Instagram and on Facebook more and more people talking about just what you said getting that first light in the morning, my at sunrise, or sometime between 645 in the morning and 737, right with the first sun coming over the hill where I live and Dana Point down here, I step outside on my deck with my lemon water in the morning, do my meditation first, then step outside in four or five minutes, 10 minutes, maybe 10 or 15 longer if it's cloudy, they say, but just get that sun on my face, no matter how chilly it is in the morning not that it gets that cold here in California, but it's made a huge difference.
Speaker 2:And, conversely, yeah, no scrolling on my cell phone for an hour before I go to bed and I read at night that's what I do, and the TV comes off at least an hour and I don't watch that much TV anyway but made just a huge difference in my life. But I had only heard this this last year, so I can tell you, getting that first light first thing in the morning, because that's something I never have in my entire life gone out of my way to do and I think that's made a big difference for me for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it, and you know it connects you to nature and and it's a For sure.
Speaker 2:I sit out there and I'm listening to the birds chirping and yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, and you can stack your meditation or your breath work practice, you know, um, contemporaneously with just being outside, um, you do have to keep your eyes open though, um, but to get to get the actual effect of the light, um, and you can't wear sunglasses, um, but, uh, but there's, you know, you know so many good reasons to do it, uh, and then you know, I do really recommend that everyone now activate that night shift um option on on all of your screens. They all screens pretty much have it, um, so it turns the screen a little bit more Amber, um, and of course, that again, ask yourself, how did we evolve? Well, what did we do at night? Well, we sat around a fire, right, which is not blue light, it's amber light.
Speaker 1:And that and that amber light was generally in the inferior field. So it would hit the superior part of the retina and we don't have those neurons there. So like if you're gonna watch Larry or whatever your poison is generally put the screen in the inferior field, so like below your nose, because then the light will be going into the superior part of your retina. Now that's not fail safe, but that's just like a little trick. There's obviously other things, like you know, blue blockers, you know all the lights in my house now are amber For a while. You know, I always loved the tenor or the tone of incandescent lights. But you can't get incandescent for good reason. Just they're not very energy efficient. But LEDs were primarily on the blue side of the spectrum forever. But now there are, there are, there are Amber LEDs. So just go convert over. They're so cheap, they last forever, and then you know, great call.
Speaker 1:And then just like Amber nightlights, you know, sometimes motion sense sensor or activated nightlights, if you know you get up and you go to the bathroom, like guys in their 50s sometimes do, oftentimes do yeah, in the middle of the night, and so yeah, there's just obviously these things. I also, my wife is we don't use heat or air conditioning, that kind of speaks At all.
Speaker 2:You don't. Never, yeah, we don't do it Wow, and we had some cold nights here in LA this last winter we do. I applaud you for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I tend to like encourage her to go away during those periods so I can cheat a little bit, but my bedroom is kind of honestly kind of below probably the optimal temperature for sleep. But you want, you know, 62 to 65, 66 degrees.
Speaker 2:Yes, See, that's where I'm completely fine sleeping All winter long. My windows are wide open in the bedroom and you know windows in the living room, sliding glass door to the deck. I love a cool, almost cold house at night, but I will admit some of these cold winter days we had in January, even early February, do I wake up in the morning and close them up? And turn on the heat for even 10 minutes just to take off some of the chill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm guilty as charged, Sure sure, yeah, of course I mean, well, you can also, you know, the thermostats are so sophisticated now that you can, you know, set them to kind of come up and down. But again, you know, Steve, think about that it's like we didn't have these digital thermostats 12, 15,000 years ago, right? So actually, exposure to the fluctuations of temperature, you know, activated all of these resilience pathways, you know. So, obviously, you know the dose makes the poison right. You don't want, to like, have a 30-degree house, or you don't want to have a, you know, house that feels like a sauna. You know you don't want hyperthermia or hypothermia. Those are dangerous conditions. But pushing the edges of your comfort zone, getting cold and getting hot, you know, confers all sorts of health benefits and psychological benefits as well, and those have been huge parts of my protocol.
Speaker 2:And let's talk about that. You just segued us perfectly into the next topic that I wanted to talk about Cold baths and saunas. I know you do them both. Do you do them every day?
Speaker 1:Every day that I'm home, yeah, and I'm fortunate enough to work from home and I'm fortunate enough to have a sauna. But there are other ways around this. Everything that we've talked about thus far is honestly free, so fasting will save you money. Almost anyone can access a cold stream of water. We'll talk about that. You know, anyone can do kind of pushups or pull-ups. Pretty much that's our go for a walk. These things are all free.
Speaker 1:Getting hot isn't always free, and certainly not everyone can have a sauna at home, though. There are more and more commercially available, relatively cheap infrared saunas that you can just you know, that fit in relatively small spaces. But you know there are also now a lot of sauna blankets on the market that you know are a couple hundred bucks and really do simulate many of the same benefits that you can get from the sauna, of which there are myriad. But fortunately for me, I have a sauna. I have an outdoor cold shower and a large cedar bucket that I make very cold, and, yeah, I do that every daily, early morning, contrast bathing, and sometimes at night, though it's better to get warmer at night for various reasons which I'm happy to discuss. But these have been central, really central, particularly the cold, because I abhor the cold and generally doing hard things makes doing other hard things easier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's brilliant, and so do you generally do the cold plunge in the morning? Do the cold plunge in the morning, and so do you generally, right after that, go straight to the sauna and go to intense heat, or do you do that later in the day or in the evening to get some of the benefits that you just mentioned?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll do the sauna and cold plunge in a sort of contrast bathing routine in the morning. It is important to finish cold if you want a lot of the benefits that cold provides the metabolic benefits, the dopamine, et cetera. But I will, you know, raise core body temperature in the sauna first, and I will often go back and forth, because the sauna heat is a vasodilator, so it's going to open up blood vessels. Cold is a vasoconstrictor, so it's going to open up blood vessels. Cold is a vasoconstrictor, so it's going to close down blood vessels when you go back and forth, um, that actually like upgrades your circulatory system and moves your lymph around, so that can be um super beneficial. But yeah, I mean getting hot. Um, you know 180, 190, 200 degrees for 20 minutes. You know four to seven times a week.
Speaker 1:You know the, the data around it, which all comes from from finland, mostly um, where there's like a it's sort of akin to how many sheep are in new zealand the amount of saunas in finland, um, but ronda, patrick, uh, it's done an amazing job kind of doing these meta-analyses, rolling up a lot of the data from Finland and it's just incredible in terms of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular health, obviously, like sauna does simulate kind of low-grade exercise on some level because you're raising your heart rate. There's some detoxification benefits. Sometimes those are overblown candidly, but there are some. But there's so many other ones. I mean there's again the activation of BDNF.
Speaker 1:We talked about it a little bit earlier as it relates to resistance training. There's also these heat shock proteins that people are talking about now. So these proteins maintain the healthy three-dimensional form of other proteins and there is early evidence that they may help reduce rates of dementia, because with Alzheimer's, you know, you do see the collapse and misfolding of certain kinds of proteins, particularly like beta amyloid and tau. So there do seem to be neuro protective elements.
Speaker 2:I've never heard that. That's very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of sauna and yeah, I mean I, I, I can't really, you know, I also just love the experience. It is also like you're in I do too generally, you know, if you're in a physical dry sauna, uh, or you know an infrared sauna. It's generally like a quiet place to reflect and I have my own weird, funky, funky little practice. Sometimes I meditate, sometimes I chant, sometimes I stare at the grain of wood, the grain in the wood, and so it is a, it's a, there's a-.
Speaker 2:It's mindfulness, it is Absolutely yeah. And then the cold man.
Speaker 1:The cold is awful. I've always hated it and we don't have to dwell on it too much, but it was so central to weight management for me and it has so many other benefits. You know from really psychological benefits, potentially like, are the most potent again and I'm happy to go into that. But I'm also happy to jump over somewhere else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I will completely vouch for you on that. Wim Hof got me into taking cold showers a few years ago, but when I really kind of stuck with it for the first time during COVID, I flew back to Illinois. My mom was having surgery, so I flew back to stay with my mom and dad at their place for a while and help out, help with cooking and whatnot. After my mom had her surgery, and while I was at their house their guest bathroom that I was staying in something happened and, long story short, they didn't have hot water and I thought this is perfect, and this was during the wintertime too.
Speaker 1:And this is in Illinois.
Speaker 2:So when I say cold, I'm talking like really cold water and I don't think it was 40 degrees, even close. But I cannot tell you how invigorating it felt. And after like eight or nine days, by the eighth or ninth day I hardly went skidding in the shower. Eighth or ninth day, I hardly winced getting in the shower. It's amazing how adaptable we humans are and how quickly that it changed to the point where you know, at first I'm like, can we get the plumber out here to? You know, at least get me somewhat, you know, luke cool water instead of this icy. But then after a few days I'm like, no, let's not even, you know, get the plumber out here, let's let it go. And I completely got hooked on them. To this day I take cold showers almost exclusively, or I may, if I'm freezing when I get in the shower, I may take, you know, a warm shower, but I always end for two to three minutes with just ice cold and I love it.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, Well you have a unique composition, I would say. I mean, I think the cold is something that people are generally very, very deterred by, so much that they can't even really start a cold therapy practice.
Speaker 2:See, I am generally Jeff, I'm a cold weather baby. I'm the guy that's wearing the sweater and a hoodie when everyone else is in a tank top, so I surprised myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I always say with people you know, the interesting thing about the cold is that it's actually very subjective, so you can actually reap the benefits at almost any temperature, provided that it actually feels subjectively cold. So this is what I always try to tell people with the cold you know, start, you know really ease into it. You know you always have the opportunity to decrease temperature and increase duration. But even if you just start in the shower, where you take a warm or hot shower and you just turn it down until it's a little bit uncomfortable and then you breathe through it and a little bit more, and just start there, um, and know that you know just a little tiny bit every day, and, um, and you're going to build up greater and greater levels of resilience and you're still going to reap the benefits, um, you know, metabolically.
Speaker 2:And this is where I like yeah, I was just going to say real quick, you mentioned a key thing there too is the breathing, the somatic, the deep, you know, especially when I got in, when it was ice, ice cold, just those deep breathing into the belly focused my mind there and after a couple of minutes it completely relaxed my body.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, just think of the involuntary response of the body when it perceives threat.
Speaker 1:So this is what's happening when you get into the cold your heart starts pounding your breath rate, takes your breath away right, your breath rate increases. Your heart starts pounding your breath rate, takes your breath away right, it goes, your breath rate increases, you're going to get that burst of epinephrine that you're getting, and cortisol you're going to well, not actually cortisol, you're going to get epinephrine. It's going to like, come up, simmer up with a feeling of kind of panic, almost right, and that is completely adaptive again. And then we have this space, we have this opportunity to apply kind of neomammalian top-down pressure on top of bottom-up involuntary physiological response. So you get this involuntary response. Then you have this moment where it's like, okay, I can leverage conscious breath, I can leverage my neo-mammalian sort of rational brain to know that I'm not under threat and I can apply that top-down pressure onto that involuntary response such that then I can emotionally regulate in that moment to bring myself back into a parasympathetic state, even when it's very, very, very cold, and that ability right there becomes inestimably potent in other parts of your life, because inevitably you're going to come up against stress in your life and will you have that ability to put top-down pressure on top of involuntary fight-and-flight response that's going to become so useful when you enter another kind of stressful situation. So this is where ice baths and the benefits really transcend the physiological and begin to spill over into other areas of your life.
Speaker 1:Now, for me, the physiological side was just unbelievable. I almost watched the fat drip off my body because I began to stack my fasting protocol and my cold therapy protocol in a very, very particular way to maximize weight loss. And this again just as obvious once you begin to understand the mechanisms of the body. But if you haven't eaten for 15 and a half hours let's say it's 1030 AM you're going to have very, very low blood glucose levels because you haven't put anything in your body. Now your liver is going to titrate, make a little bit of glucose. It's not like you're going to be hypoglycemic, necessarily, but you're not going to have a lot of glucose around.
Speaker 1:And then you get into a cold shower. Well, what happens when that happens? Well, your core body temperature plummets and then your body is engineered for equilibrium, for homeostasis, so it has to go into thermogenesis right away to upgrade your core body temperature back into the Goldilocks zone around 98.6. So your mitochondria, particularly in this one particular kind of tissue called brown fat, like goes into overdrive and says I got to make Jeff, I got to make Steve warm again, but quick.
Speaker 1:And it looks around for energy substrate for that. So it looks for glucose. And there's no glucose around, so it doesn't have any other option except to convert fat triglycerides stored in your fat cells into energy as a substrate for making you warm and it is the most potent way to burn fat. And so if that's an issue for you and you're looking to lose weight quickly, well, let me revise, because quick I don't like quickly. Actually I always say you got to ease into all of these protocols, but I will just say it is very effective to safely combine a fasting protocol with a cold water therapy if you're really trying to burn fat.
Speaker 2:Great advice. All right, this next one might be my favorite topic out of all of them that you cover, and that is training the mind and breath via stressful conversation, yeah, where you interviewed 25 different people that disagreed with you. In fact, share us what led up to those interviews kind of the hate comments that you got and what you learned from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, sure. This in the end too, steve, I think, is like where I am gravitating to most now, because I think the physiological things are very interesting and certainly we need to feel subjectively healthy to bring our best self into the world. But but this was just, um, I guess it's really another interesting way to look at good stress. So as a means of background. So I started to write a weekly essay you referred to it earlier, briefly called Commusings right when we went into lockdown in March 2020. Such that we could kind of navigate the choppy waters of those times and, by sharing stories and also really rigorously examining socio-political issues, to find some form of sane middle ground.
Speaker 1:I was hoping just to kind of like lower the temperature out there a little bit and, of course, so I agreed to do this weekly Sunday essay. Soon found myself over kind of a literary barrel every Saturday for this Sunday essay, and this was going out to like 1.2 million people. So I had, just for my sake, of my own vanity, had to make it somewhat good. So I started spending a tremendous amount of time on these and, fortunately and unfortunately, 2020 offered a lot of incendiary topics around. You know which to thank exhort.
Speaker 1:So you know, obviously, writing a lot about COVID. Writing a lot about, you know, our national reckoning with social justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. A lot about, you know, qanon. And then there was an election that year, if you remember vaguely provided plenty of divisiveness and whatnot.
Speaker 1:So I was writing these essays and I would include my personal email on all of them and, you know, across 2000 words every Sunday you're bound to, you know, rub people the wrong way, you know, in certain circumstances. So I would wake up Monday morning and the bow of my inbox would be crested, uh, with maybe 500, 600 emails and, candidly, most of them were, were encouraging and and um, and most people really had appreciated them, but I would say two dozen a week, uh, were very, very critical and some were just, you know, filled with expletives and ad hominems and there was nothing really to do with them. And they came kind of from all sides. You know it was like all sides of the political spectrum, from, you know, abolish the police crowd and you know some, quite a few African-American women who didn't think like a white man should be centering himself at that moment and and and writing about these things. To then a lot of you know people on the far right and a lot of you know Trumpers and et cetera.
Speaker 1:So so there was, you know, in some cases nothing to do with some of these emails, but I vowed that I would respond to all of the relatively thoughtful ones. And so I did, and I would exchange, I would have sort of a volley of emails with people that had interesting but divergent opinions about particular issues and then eventually, after like three or four exchanges, I would say, hey, how about we hop on a zoom call and um and this is what I call sometimes my great David Copperfield routine, because I made a lot of people disappear, but uh, wait, I can't hide behind my keyboard and be a jerk there.
Speaker 1:That's right, yeah, and so. But 26 people, I think, actually took me up on it, and so I spent the kind of Monday and Tuesday afternoons in August and September 2020 having these Zoom calls with, you know, people that disagreed with me vehemently about some issue and, you know, at that juncture, when I began to lean into those calls, Steve, I had built up. You know what I call my psychological immune system.
Speaker 1:So, and this was key, and again I didn't really realize or know what I was doing at the time, but after a good amount of examination, you know, some insights became available.
Speaker 1:So, you know, you build your physiological immune system through some exposure to low-grade, you know, pathogens, bacteria, viruses, et cetera, such that you know, when you come across those, your body, you know, recognizes a bacteria and it has an antibody for it. And you know that same logic can really be applied to your psychology. You know, for three or four months I had endured, you know, quite a bit of insult, such that my psychological immune system was fairly strong. So I was able to come into these conversations and create in a very regulated place, in a very parasympathetic place, with the intention of creating a safe and secure setting for the conversation to take place, you know, and such that, like this kind of heart coherence or attunement or kind of relatability was possible. And so I went into these conversations. I didn't at that juncture have really any training in nonviolent communication, like. Subsequently I got very interested in Marshall Rosenberg and I went and, you know, got a little bit of training, but at that point I was kind of operating a lot by instinct.
Speaker 2:Have you ever read? Out of curiosity, not to interrupt, but because this is pertinent think again, Adam Grant.
Speaker 1:No, no, I haven't.
Speaker 2:Because hearing you talk about reaching out, wanting to have these conversations, and hearing about you talking on the podcast about and you're going to share this with us a little bit more he talks about so many of the things that you're talking about and the whole book is about our ability as humans, or our inability to rethink our position on something and why is that?
Speaker 2:And he gets into the human behavior behind that. It's a wonderful, wonderful book that I highly recommend, and things like how to have discussions with somebody, that it's escalated and ways you can diffuse that our heels are so dug in on our position that so often we're so blind to the other person's you know side of it, or their opinion or their viewpoint, that you know that there's no possible positive resolution. But the fact that you decided to just engage and talk to them and meet with them in person or via Zoom, face-to-face, shows your ability to want to connect. And when you establish some commonality which I understand and let me turn it back over to you because I understand that's one of the approaches. That's why I thought you had read that book, because he talks about establishing commonality with those that we disagree with about establishing commonality with those that we disagree with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean that is really what happened. I mean there are these interesting techniques, like steel manning, for example, that are very effective for examining your own positions and modifying them and sometimes even fortifying them, and that's a whole other really interesting technique for having stressful conversations or debates. But in this particular case, you know I would get on. There would be sort of this exchange of pleasantries. You know I would generally ask him like how are they feeling? And that would generally spark a 45 minute diatribe that they would go on about their life and I was just essentially the recipient for 40, 45 minutes, kind of over and over again. You know these calls took on such a similar pattern.
Speaker 1:Honestly, Steve, and you know I was hearing about their kids and their parents and their stressors and their health, and I was hearing about almost everything except the issue that had put us at loggerheads in the first place. And you know, very quickly I realized, you know, that people really just want to be seen and they want to be heard. And you know that was my role here. You know I was creating a safe container for people to be seen and heard, container for people to be seen and heard.
Speaker 1:And, you know, as I got better at it, I began to start making notes, as people were, you know, gish, galloping about their life, you know, I started to notate kind of places of convergence between my life and theirs.
Speaker 1:So maybe they were also born in Chicago or, you know, maybe they married their childhood sweetheart, or maybe they had daughters, or maybe they drove across country these many times, all these things that were kind of places of consilience between me and them and then, after they had exhausted themselves, I would be like, oh, you know, it's so funny, I was from Chicago too and, you know, my parents grew up in Evanston or whatever. I would find these places of convergence and what I realized is that, you know, this is a very effective means of nonviolent communication was really to like go into these conversations like connection, not seeking solution, you know, not seeking agreement, just really trying to seek and find connection. Um was key and and really listening to, to understand, and not listening just to respond, because so many times when we're in a conversation we're already kind of forming the rebuttal in our head.
Speaker 2:Thinking about what we want to reply Exactly. You know, as you're saying that, what comes to mind is you know, Brene Brown, you know what you were doing there. Jeff is, you know. She says better to get it right than to be right, and you got it right in those calls better to get it right than to be right, and you got it right in those calls. I applaud you for that. You got it right. You didn't feel the need to one-up them or try to convince them of something other than what they believe in the moment. You were an empathetic witness, an empathetic listener and, like you said, they just wanted to be heard. And and, by the way, are you born in chicago, were you?
Speaker 1:born in chicago. Yeah, I was born in springfield, okay. Well, there you go, I learned about you. Yeah, midwestern boy, no wonder I like you so much. We're connecting and not agreeing, um, but um, yeah, you know it was um, you. It was really interesting because, coming out of it, you know, I don't think really we very few of us ever ended up talking about the issue. You know, sometimes we would get around to it, but that wasn't really the focus. That ceased to be the focus of the connection. And you know, I made this kind of crazy little Rolodex of what I call frenemies. They all sit in my little address book as frenemies and I'm still in touch maybe with 10 or 12 people and they're still like most of them. We still very much disagree about certain things, but you know, my, my trumper friends, like send me photos and they sort of poke and prod me a little bit, a little jab me of like oh, here's my, you know weekend barbecue and things.
Speaker 1:But you know, and they've got and I'm like why do you have a trump sign up at your weekend barbecue? You know explain that to me and but they would.
Speaker 1:But you know, I would ask them that. And they would be like, because that's what brings us together, I'm like, oh, you know. And then I stop and I'm like, oh, wait a minute, people are looking for something to rally around. They're looking for some form of, you know, community cohesion. You know I can't believe it's him, but it is.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, I just got a a deeper insight and um into a lot of people's lives. I mean, candidly, there was a bunch of people that I like I live in LA, I live in a bubble yeah, I know I live in a bubble and in a lot of the people that I were, I was talking to, you know they were like white, lower income, rural people that you know were working multiple part-time jobs and you know their main street was boarded up and half the town had been decimated by fentanyl and they shop at 7-Eleven. So you know, I'm like, when you really truly connect with that kind of you know life and suffering in many cases I mean, most of them were, you know had some chronic disease or multiple chronic diseases and some of them couldn't afford their insulin, et cetera you get a window into why people are so pissed off and you become more empathetic and connected to that. And you become more empathetic and connected to that. You know, really leaning into stressful conversations and refining your capacity to be able to do that has impacts that you would never expect. I mean for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got to be friendly with a bunch of strangers who disagree with me, but it also allowed me to have conversations with the people that matter most in my life, and those are the conversations that are so easy to avoid, you know, with our parents or our kids or friends or our loved ones. And you know to be able to go into those conversations both bravely but with a certain amount of kind of euthymia, the sort of unflappable emotional regulation and then be able to go in with this, with the MO of really listening and trying to find connection and trying to address feelings and and the needs that need to be fulfilled to address those underlying feelings that, uh, you know it can change the entire arc of your life.
Speaker 2:So, what a, what a salient point yeah that. That, like you said, you're stretching the proverbial muscle of inconvenient discourse.
Speaker 1:Well, again, like Steve, you go back. How did I evolve? I didn't evolve being some digital warrior slinging ad hominems on Facebook. I evolved, you know, with plenty of conflict, but resolving that conflict face to face and um, and you know, we need to flex that muscle, we need to train that muscle, um, you know, such that we can lean in to, you know, hard, thorny, stressful conversations, because that's really what stands between us and a better life. So I really, you know, encourage people to try to do that. I mean, social fitness is, in a way, you know, very connected to that. Obviously, we have a massive loneliness epidemic in our country and you know there's more and more studies on the impact of loneliness physiologically.
Speaker 1:Kind of the stat that's going around these days are from a BYU study that you know conflates or equates the kind of risk of all cause, mortality, of loneliness with smoking 16 cigarettes a day Is that?
Speaker 2:right yeah, wow.
Speaker 1:And worse than obesity or alcoholism.
Speaker 2:That also came up in the blue zones, by the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Those that have someone friends, family friends, family, grandkids, people that care about them, that they're getting out in the community just an absolute direct correlation between that and longevity yeah, and human happiness.
Speaker 1:I mean I interviewed this guy, robert waldinger, who's the head of this harvard longitudinal study on human happiness, as they've been study on human happiness, as they've been tracing this group for 85 years or so. Yeah, and uh and yeah. I mean, basically, happiness was directly connected to the strength of your social connections period. You know, um, and you know it seems crazy that we need to have a social fitness regimen, thatimen that mirrors our physical fitness regimen.
Speaker 1:But you know, in today's day and age, when you know, you feel like you can just live completely in an isolated fashion because you just get Amazon to do everything for you. So you know there is this. So you know there is this kind of feasibility of individualism, but in reality you can't be happy. You know, there is really no such thing as an individual Like we are completely, really reliant on each other in so many ways, in so many ways. And so now, in this modern age, we have to develop our social skills because, you know, we've become so atomized, so some of these are just like really simple ones. But you know, for example, like I have a new rule in my own life, which is I answer the phone when a family member calls every time, you know, even if my time is very, very limited. And you know, sometimes I just say, hey, I can't talk right now, but I love you and I'll call you back later, and you know, versus texting 19 times to try to find the right time to talk.
Speaker 1:You know a lot of there's other just skills. You know listening skills that you can, you know, develop as part of the social fitness. You know regimen I take five minutes a day to reach out to someone doesn't have to be a family member, but generally like a friend, to have a connection with them, or just to practice some random act of kindness where maybe I see them on social media doing something and I express my joy for their joy. So there's about a dozen of these that you can practice and again, they're slightly inconvenient. It is more convenient just to press voicemail, right? It sure is, yeah.
Speaker 1:But you know, Embracing a little discomfort yeah, a little discomfort will in the end, actually creates a lot of true real ease. What we think is ease in our life, or the things that we're chasing that represent ease, actually result often in dis-ease or discomfort. But what is real ease? You know, what we're really really looking for actually requires a little bit of inconvenience, and you know, we know this. We know that short-term pain generally leads to long-term gain, but again, it's, I think, forming these habits that can be very adaptive in the long-term.
Speaker 2:Love it. And then another thing that I did not expect to see in kind of the list that you talk about in this course, but as soon as I saw this topic it made me think of. I'm a big wine lover, wineendoza, australia, and one of the things that you learn early on is that the best wine in the world is made from really stressed vines. Sometimes it's the crappiest soil that makes the most elegant, beautiful wine, because the vines have to work harder to get to dig deeper to find water and sometimes it's rocky, chalky soil, but that's what gives us these nuances of smoke and notes and minerality and these wonderful French wines and so forth. So to see on your list that eating stressed plants is something that can be of great benefit to us, can you tell us why that is? Is it for the same reasons, I'm assuming?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, plants get stressed too, and you're right, it often is in response to very inhospitable growing conditions. So that could be really rocky soil or very dry conditions, very hot conditions, windy conditions, and plants in some ways have their own kind of immune system. It doesn't really work like the human innate and adaptive immune system, but over time plants will develop resilience in response to inhospitable conditions and they will develop even specific molecules that are associated with that resilience and humans call those molecules polyphenols. So, like you say, winemakers in the vinification process often purposefully stress their grapes. Now they do it more really generally for taste, not for conferring health benefit per se. But many people have heard of the polyphenol resveratrol.
Speaker 2:Resveratrol.
Speaker 1:I take it as a supplement, that's the only supplement I take is resveratrol You'd have to drink I think it's like a thousand glasses of pinot to to get the impact exactly um, but pinot is. Pinot noir is the world's most stressed grape is at least what I read um has the most health benefits as a result of that, you're right and uh, and so there's all these.
Speaker 1:you know, quercetin and ECGC in green tea or luteolin in Himalayan tartary buckwheat. I mean, I have a whole list of all the most stressed plants and their polyphenols and their benefits in the course and in my book that's coming out next year. But I think it's kind of miraculous that these resilience molecules and the stress of plants and the benefits are then transferred from autotrophs to heterotrophs when we eat those plants. And it's just another kind of reason why we should be eating a whole variety of plants. I try to eat 30 different plants per week. That's my goal. I don't always hit it, wow.
Speaker 2:Now do you have, I'm assuming, on your property, your own garden? Do you grow most of your own plants?
Speaker 1:No, I mean we shop, we go to a lot of farmer's markets, but we are avid sprouters and fermenters so we do a lot of sprouting. I really really highly encourage sprouting. It's so easy and it's so on.
Speaker 2:Sprouts are just the most nutrient-dense food in the world really, they sure are, and you've done some great little Instagram videos on how to just do them quickly. Put them on your windowsill and boom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's amazing, you don't need any soil, you really require almost nothing, just like water, a little bit of water to rinse them, kind of day in and day out for a few days, and not even really any sun they don't really like a lot of sun and you just need seeds and a mason jar and some cheesecloth and a rubber band and a mason jar and some cheesecloth and rubber band and uh and you can make literally the most nutrient, dense, organic fiber rich, protein rich, low glycemic plant food just anywhere in your house. It's nuts, it's incredible. I mean, if you scale that you, you literally could solve so many different issues Ever since I saw your video on that, like a year ago.
Speaker 2:I've said that and I still haven't done it, so you've re-inspired me. I am going to within the next week I'm going to start making my own sprouts.
Speaker 1:Cool, yeah, do it. And, like you know, it's so cheap too, so ridiculously cheap.
Speaker 2:And I love them. I love them. They're so good. Yeah, they're so delicious and you can do it with.
Speaker 1:You know, obviously we're used to kind of alfalfa sprouts or broccoli sprouts. There's all these anti-carcinogen molecules Sulfurophane is the kind of most famous one at this point, but you can do it with like lentils and mung beans and chickpeas you can get like all of these legume sprouts and super high in protein. So there's just every reason to do it. And it's so much fun to go up in the morning and just like look and like see how your sprouts are doing.
Speaker 2:And it requires almost like no work.
Speaker 1:You literally rinse them twice a day. That's it, they're done. That's awesome. And then, four to seven days, you'll have a whole jar full of sprouts from like a tablespoon of seeds. It's like crazy, that's so cool.
Speaker 1:And then you know, the other one is fermenting. So we make a lot of sauerkraut around the house which is again so ridiculously cheap. You can get cabbage for virtually nothing and you just get a crock pot, some water and some salt done and then you have this amazing prebiotic, probiotic, postbiotic, like superfood in your fridge. You can put it on everything. My kids love it so oh yeah, uh, it's just tacos, anything you want, anything, it tastes good on everything.
Speaker 1:So these are like little things and they're. It's so gratifying too. It it's so cool because you're doing it and I mean anyways. There's tons of other kind of fun fermentation product projects that you can get into, but you just start with. You just start with making your own slaw. That's a good place to start.
Speaker 2:Perfect. All right, two more quick ones we've got, and this is one we talk about constantly on the show Reconnecting with Nature. Do you also believe in grounding, I'm assuming? Getting out barefoot, putting your feet in the soil.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally. I mean I did a bunch of research on grounding. You know there's a lot of like skepticism around the science. You know there hasn't been like there's been certainly plenty of research, but not like big gold standard research.
Speaker 2:So there's like a lot of 5,000 people studies yeah.
Speaker 1:But, you know, whatever the Earth maintains, a negative charge, that's true. I understand how that happens. It's actually a lot through lightning, it's kind of interesting, but, you know, brings electrons from the ionosphere into the Earth's surface, the crust. And then, you know, the earth's crust is, is conductive, and when you walk on it with bare feet, uh, you know, the theory is that you absorb some of those negative ions and those, those electrons then are available to neutralize free radicals, which are, you know, the free radicals are basically like these cause inflammation, they can cause oxidative stress. Sometimes they're actually beneficial, but in in excess they're not, they're very detrimental. And so that's the idea is that by walking barefoot, you know, you can neuter some of these free radicals. Um, so, yes, I'm into that. I also, um, have gotten way into kind of minimal shoe wear, and so I I wear. I actually have a pair on right now. Um see, I don't I'm barefoot right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I've been all the time yeah, these shoes, they're making them now with a conductive coil, so you can uh, you can absorb some of the oh yeah, because they say the rubber sole is one of the worst harms to humanity to our health yeah, is the invention of the rubber sole shoe. Yeah, yeah well then you know you have these kind of crowded toe boxes that, like you know know, crush your toes, and then you know these big, thick soles that.
Speaker 1:that again. How did I evolve? I evolved mostly barefoot or with minimal footwear, and there's, you know, hundreds of thousands of nerve endings in the bottom of your feet. So you get all of that sensitivity which, over time, you know, enhances your, your balance, which, over time, you know, enhances your balance. You use all the musculature when you're barefoot or in minimal sole shoes. You use the musculature in your foot and in your ankle and, you know, whatever, over time, that's gonna be huge, particularly as you get old, and you need that balance and you need that strength in order not to fall. So, anyway, so I'm into the barefoot movement or the minimal shoe movement. I got super, super into squatting. This has been a game changer for me.
Speaker 2:That was the last thing I wanted to ask you about it. When I first kind of heard you talking about it, I thought you were just talking about doing squats at the gym. But no, you're talking about, like you know, Asian squatting, or how I use the term Asian squatting when I did some research on it. You go out on Google it's usually Asians and they call it Asian squatting, but it's the way you actually sit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you sit in like a resting squat, basically. And again, this is how we evolved evolved. It's not like we never sat or had. It's not like we didn't have downtime. We actually had a lot, quite a bit of downtime. Um, you know, across, uh, you know, our tens of thousands of years, um, but you know we didn't sit on a you know cushy couch or in a cushy chair. Uh, you know we squatted a lot. And, man, if you want to, um, prevent lower back pain and knee pain, start a squatting practice. Like it has changed my whole life. I have these. I actually don't necessarily love the way my legs look right now because they kind of lumped up, they're these like with muscle, but it completely changed my whole, like I'm a tennis player and I was like injuring my lower back quite a bit.
Speaker 1:My knees were all like clicky and poppy, all gone, just completely all gone and so now, when you're like, if you're got kids and you're, you know, watching, curb your Enthusiasm or whatever at night, now I'll do it like in a squat, you know, or I'll be kind of doing some primal movement on the ground or something like that, but I'm squatting all the time and then just doing air squats, you know, just as you go throughout your day. And now I do squats like on the bozu ball. That's my latest, because it's not only like, obviously, building quad strength, but you know, you have to keep your core very, very engaged and your attention and your breath very, very focused, because otherwise you'll, you'll fall off the ball. And I even do my some of my weight work, my weight training, on the bozu ball, like in sort of a like a little kind of hunch, a little squat, um, but uh, it is, it's amazing, um yeah, and I heard you, yeah, and that's the way we're meant to move, yeah.
Speaker 2:I figured out. Okay, I'm gonna be talking to Jeff next week, let me listen to. I listened to the chat you had with Light Watkins oh yeah, yeah, we were talking about it, and I understand that he was the one that first inspired you to start squatting. And so I listened to your episode to see if I could do it, and of course, I couldn't get my heels all the way down and I pride myself. I've always been athletic and I've got really good balance. And so I'm doing it with a little book, because you guys talked about that, like putting some wood or something under, and after I heard you two talking about it, like I said, I went out on YouTube and watched a bunch of other videos on it and I'm sold. So I've been doing it every day for like five or six days now.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:And getting better, because I started with a book about this big and now I'm already down to a book about maybe an inch off the ground.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good for you, no-transcript. And one trick that you might try again. I'm always like ease into it, but you can take some 10 pound weights or 15 pound weights and, as you do your squat, like obviously maintain a lot of strength in your core. As you do your squat and as you get down, you can apply that extra weight and that'll help you get your heels down.
Speaker 2:Now, do you have your arms outside of your legs or inside your legs? Inside your legs With your dumbbells?
Speaker 1:Inside your legs and you're using that pressure up from the extra weight. You're using that pressure kind of on the inside of your thighs and that'll help you, like get your heels more interesting, okay, or flush to the ground.
Speaker 2:I would think that might also help you from falling backwards, too, because that when I first tried to do it, my immediately I wanted to go backwards yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So, yeah, I think the weight would help you stay centered too but yeah I'll try that. Thanks for the tip.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right, amigo.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a lot let's wrap with our final signature question, which I know you and Skylar answered this a couple years ago, but maybe you have anything to add to that. What advice do you have, jeff, for us and our listeners on how we can help make the world a better place?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So everything we just talked about has a goal really, and that goal is it's really what I think of as balance. You know, balance really is the signature of health in all of its expressions, certainly in the human body but in all of our systems. You know, in economics we really see, the healthiest society is generally characterized by like a bell curve. Right About balance, there's a good distribution of wealth amongst a middle, thriving class. Right, or in ecology, there's biodiversity. Or in politics, there is common ground and compromise. There is, you know, common ground and compromise. And you know, as I began to look kind of really deep into human physiology, you know, I began to understand that we are really engineered for balance.
Speaker 1:I mean, we call it homeostasis in the human organism, um, but you know, our body manages this tenuous, sensitive equilibrium in almost every place that you look, you know your, the liver titrates just miraculously to maintain blood glucose levels at the right place. Your pH acid balance, your excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters, all of these things are really just these exercises in balance. And you know, I think that that's really what we should be striving for is finding areas of the middle. Healthy systems tend to cluster really towards the middle and we live in this society that is so characterized by polarities now and extremes, and we're pushing farther and farther out on the thinnest edges of the branch, of the branch. And you know, I really believe that, yes, you can adopt all these protocols that we talked about to find balance in the human body, but we can also find balance kind of in the greater body politic, you know, by being able to really intentionally try to find places of commonality, of middle ground.
Speaker 1:For me this is kind of a reflection of Buddhism that always seeks the middle way, because really, you know, our whole kind of success as a species has been predicated on this ability to cooperate and to find, you know, middle ground. And you know all of our unbelievable human enterprise and projects tend to be these confluences, these coherences. So this is what you know I'm really dedicating my life to is trying to cultivate that middle path the middle can be. You know I'm really dedicating my life to is trying to cultivate that middle path. The middle can be, you know, very, very lonely, sometimes candidly, because there's not a lot of incentive, seemingly to be there. You know a lot of people feel like, well know, for outrage and to, you know, leverage, human negativity bias. But you know I really feel that. You know that health lies within the middle and it lies in balance from everything points. Everything that I've studied in my life points to that, everything points.
Speaker 2:Everything that I've studied in my life points to that and that's what I would encourage people to explore that kind of within their own physical body, but in also within the community around them, is like how can we forge more balance and coherence? Wow, just beautifully said, jeff. This has been just incredible. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I just loved this conversation and so excited to put it out there. Thank you so much for being here For our listeners. You can go to onecommunecom that's one O-N-E communecom and the latest course is Good Stress and, jeff, they can order that and subscribe to that out on onecommunecom, correct?
Speaker 1:That's right, yeah, and you can take the first five days for free, no strings attached. In fact, I want you to take the first five days for free. I really believe in trying to democratize access to these protocols, as we discussed at the beginning of the show.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thanks again, jeff. This has been amazing. Thank you, steve. Appreciate it. Special thanks to our producer, noah Existe, and editor Joe Tempogo. Our music was written and performed by Algian Importante. Thank you so much for listening. If this podcast brightened your day in any way, please share it with a friend who you think it might resonate with. Subscribe and leave us a rating and review, as that is the single best way to help the show and get the word out to more good humans. For behind-the-scenes info, please visit our website at betterplaceprojectorg, where you can even click on the microphone in the lower right-hand corner and leave us a message, or just stop by to say hi, and you can follow us on Instagram at betterplaceproject, and you'll find me at Instagram at stevenorrisofficial. Look for small ways to be kind this week, and that will help make the world a better place.
