The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #307 - Jeff Krasno

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Jeff Krasno
make energy, essentially metabolism, sits upstream from so many different aspects of your life. When you study human physiology, what you find is that we are actually seven octillion self-assembled atoms experiencing 37 billion billion, and that's not an oral typo, 37 billion billion chemical reactions per second.

And so you look at a 45 percent obesity rate in the United States, that's normal. That is a normal outcome for how we're living.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics of lying here in. So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this.

Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Friends, what a beautiful whirlwind of a conversation that I have in store for you today with the incredible Jeff Krasnow. I loved his book, Good Stress, The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things. It truly touches on all the things we talk about in this show and I really love the direction the conversation took today. It was a very deep contemplative esoteric route where we talk a lot about the nature of our identity and sense of self in this world and how it's affected by things like biohacking and cold exposure and our diet and just all the things. My brain felt so expanded after this conversation and I bet you guys will feel the same as well.

These show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about so definitely check that out. That will be at melanieavalon.com good stress. So get ready as we dive into topics like the inevitability of impermanence, the locus of consciousness, a really cool psychological benefit of fasting, the concept of information foraging and how we are inundated today with so many things to look at and yet do we actually take in any of it, the benefits of being uncomfortable, why and how to have stressful conversations, dealing with fears of death and aging and so much more. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, I have biohackers intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love and then check out my Instagram finally Friday announcement post and again comment there to enter to win something that I love. All right, I think that's all the things without further ado please enjoy this incredible conversation with Jeff Krasnow.

Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I'm about to have. So the backstory on today's conversation, when I received the information about this wonderful guest and his book, I was an immediate yes. All I had to do was just see the cover of the book and I was just like, this looks amazing. So I'm here with Jeff Krasnow. His book is called Good Stress, The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things. Friends, okay, and then the subtitle 10 protocols to extend your lifespan and your health span. And we were talking right before recording and reading this book was so incredible. It was friends, if you like this show, Jeff has spoken with, he's friends with all the best of the best when it comes to taking care of our health and biohacking and tackling this thing called good stress or eustress.

Melanie Avalon
And so you hear everything that he's learned from hundreds and hundreds of conversations over the years exploring this whole world. And the book dives deep, deep, deep into things that we talk about a lot like heat and cold therapy and sauna and fasting and exercise. And beyond that, though, it takes a really interesting perspective on the role of bridging Eastern and Western philosophy and really addressing why maybe just one approach isn't the way to go when it comes to where you should exist in those two universes, in particular, this whole world of the yin versus the yang. And I'm really excited to talk about that.

It's also overwhelmingly poetic. So I learned, I'm a word person and I learned so many words reading your book. I was like, this is great. And Jeff also goes into his personal story as well and what led him to doing what he's doing. And you will just walk away with a lot of motivation, a lot of science, a lot of actionable steps, including topics that we don't always talk about in this show, like how to have hard conversations and the benefits of xenoharmetics and plant stressed compounds. And there's just so much in here. I have so many questions. So Jeff, thank you so much for being here.

Jeff Krasno
Thanks a lot, Melanie. I really appreciate you reading the book. I love connecting with you and connecting with your audience. Amazing.

Melanie Avalon
It was amazing, like I said, just in the very beginning, you open with this really beautiful story of where you envision yourself in the future. And I was like, where is this book headed?

This is definitely a different tone than I think a lot of the work in the biohacking sphere is accustomed to.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, I'll just say, as a caveat for our conversation, I don't have any letters at the end of my name, so I'm more of a citizen scientist. And I'd like to explain many of these concepts that are physiological or psychological in nature through story so people can see their own story in them. And sometimes I find myself being a translator between these concepts that are very high-minded and just average people because I am an average person. And as I tell my story, you'll see I'm not really extraordinary at all.

In fact, my situation was unfortunately all too ordinary. And I tend to like veering towards the comical over the clinical. So you'll have to bear with my dad jokes. I am a dad of three girls, as I were.

Melanie Avalon
No, I love it so much. And maybe that's one reason it really, really resonated with me.

I'm curious, did you? Because I know I'm like you, I am a citizen scientist with no letters after my name. And when I got my book agent, or sorry, my literary agent for my book, that was one of the things they were like, we have to get you like letters somehow, like you got to get some sort of like something. Was that a conversation for you in your life with doing stuff?

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, it's actually so interesting, Melanie. I used to have paroxysm of anxiety in response to anyone in a white coat. I mean, going to the doctor was essentially anathema to anything that I would choose. And now I sort of want to wear one.

I became absolutely obsessed with studying human physiology. You know, I was talking to actually my publicist, not my literary agent, but I said, you know, I really regret not going to medical school and not becoming a PhD, not becoming a neuroscientist, et cetera. She's like, that's what makes you a thought leader. A thought leader is an expert in nothing. But sometimes as someone that sits sort of to the side or even above all of these kind of siloed areas of interest or fields of expertise, you can synthesize them in a way that is unavailable to someone who is so deeply inside the minutia of cardiology or neurology or gastroenterology or endocrinology or whatever. So that's kind of where I found myself was sort of hovering a little bit above all of these specialties and be able and really, you know, I embarked on this mission and I interviewed 400 doctors. And so I was sitting in this seat, this kind of panopticon, if you will, where I could really take my time to synthesize a lot of elements of human physiology that we often chop up into bits and pieces. And that's really one of my critiques of Western medicine, allopathic medicine in general, is that it is so reductive in nature that, you know, oh, we've got a problem and, you know, we get sent off to a very, very specific specialist. And that specialist doesn't really actually have any sort of deep knowledge in other systems of the body. But of course, the body is a combination of interwoven systems. And so I think this is like where being able to sit slightly to the side of Western medicine sometimes gives one a little broader systems biology perspective on it.

Melanie Avalon
I get a little bit, I'm going to say stressed. I feel like we should define the word stressed. I get a little bit, not overwhelmed, but okay.

So like on this show, for example, in podcasting, like, you know, you'll interview somebody and you can learn so much about a very specific topic. You know, oftentimes in regards to health, but it could relate to, you know, myriad things. When that happens, I'm like, wow, there is so much to know on a depth level for so many different topics, and you just can't know all of it, which I find a little bit upsetting. So it's like, how do you step back in my role as a podcaster and, you know, in your role with what you're doing and have the appropriate amount of, you know, breadth and width to everything? Like how deep do you go in any one topic? So it's kind of, for me, it's always a puzzle of how to get that example that you just gave, like sit back and be able to get the full picture. Like where do you sit to get the full picture and how do you go deep enough in each thing? Because you just can't know everything.

Jeff Krasno
No, no, you can. And I think the more you learn, if you're humble, the more you actually realize how much you don't know. It's like actually bringing a torch out into the night sky. It actually reveals how much darkness there actually really is. But of course, that's the exciting part.

And that is the aspect of it that keeps you curious. I mean, nature doesn't really have a boss. It's like it's the boss, like the lettuces or the snails that eat the lettuce or the ducks that eat the snails or the, you know, the foxes that eat the ducks or the coyotes that eat, I mean, you know, whatever you can go on and on and on. Nature doesn't really have a boss. And the same is faithfully true of human physiology. I mean, you could talk to a neurologist about brain health, right? And the functionality of neurons in your hippocampus, right? Okay, sure. They might know more about tau tangles and beta amyloid plaques, etc. You're like, oh wow, this is really fascinating. But brain health is also very, very reliant on the functioning of the heart. So that would be the expertise of a cardiologist. Because if you don't have oxygen perfusion to your brain, your brain's not going to function. So the brain is actually very, very reliant on the heart. But it's also actually reliant very much on metabolism and digestion, because the brain is a greedy little devil when it comes to energy, right? It's like 2% of the weight of the body, but consumes maybe 20, 25% of the energy substrates. So if you're not, if you're essentially insulin resistant, right, because you're eating too much refined grains or fine sugars, starches, etc., you can have insulin resistance in your brain. And so really, cognitive decline can be a metabolic issue. So, but you know, but a neurologist is not necessarily going to know that much about metabolism. And then of course, there's also inflammation in the brain that can lead to dementia and Alzheimer's. But that could also be caused by kind of degrading the intestinal lining of the gut. So really, brain health is more reliant in that sense on what a gastroenterologist might know. So it's really, you know, I think where we need to be headed in kind of medicine 3.0 is a broader understanding of how all the systems in the body work together. And that really is kind of how functional medicine and integrative medicine often approaches health and diagnosing issues and disease is actually going back and trying to root cause and understand how all these different systems of the body work together.

Melanie Avalon
And that's reflected because in the book you have your four principles that you came to. So impermanence, interdependence, agency, imbalance, and what you're speaking about right now is a lot of the interdependence, all of these systems relying on each other.

I have a question for you about that because you talk in the book, and I think I mentioned it briefly in the intro, but you talk about how you existed in this world of an Eastern perspective to health for a long time and meditation and mindfulness and all these Eastern philosophies and such. And yet, that wasn't enough for you to... You were still struggling with health conditions essentially, and you found benefit to the Western side of things as well, and bridging them together. So my question there... Well, first of all, I'd love to hear a little bit about your personal story surrounding that. And then a question for that is... So bridging this Eastern and Western is bringing balance. It's bridging the East and the West. And yet, at the same time, the Eastern philosophy existed without the Western philosophy. So it doesn't necessarily, I guess, need the Western philosophy. So how do you reconcile this Eastern-Western balance versus just existing in the Eastern philosophy versus, I guess, even just existing in the Western philosophy? Where should we be?

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, well, I found that there was tremendous convergence between the intuitive knowledge of Eastern mysticism and the more empirical knowledge, if you will, of kind of Western allopathic medicine. So if you go back 2,500 years ago and sit next to the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, there he had this awakening, this revelation, for example, that all of life is impermanent. Everything in the universe is subject to construction and deconstruction and decay. So clinging to anything or craving anything is totally futile.

And if you do, it will bring about a tremendous amount of suffering called dukkha. And of course, then if you look into human physiology, you actually find the same thing. If you open the hood on your own organism, you find incredible impermanence. And this really actually violates our sense of self because we anchor our self-identity on top of a sense of physical continuity, like Melanie wakes up in the morning, like kind of saunters into the bathroom, takes off her jammies, flexes a little bit in the mirror, and there's Melanie. She's pretty much the same Melanie as was there yesterday. And so that physical continuity makes us feel as if there is a stable, reliable, fixed self. But when you study human physiology, what you find is that we are actually seven octillion self-assembled atoms experiencing 37 billion billion, and that's not an oral typo, 37 billion billion chemical reactions per second, per second. You know, our 39 trillion bacteria, mostly snuggled in our colon, is turning over every four minutes to 24 hours. We're 70 trillion cells, so that's more than half were bacterial, and those are all turning over. So once you actually examine the transience of the human body, you actually then begin to see this conciliance between this kind of Buddhist sattori of impermanence and matched with kind of the Western knowledge that yes, indeed, all we are is change. And, you know, this was key for me because for a long time, I really was just the story that I told myself about myself that, you know, I was this chubby kid that would really do anything to be liked. I was a perpetual people pleaser, and that I, all my self-worth was sort of based through the eyes of others. And my fate was written in the Stars of My Genetics, and a lot of people feel that way. A lot of people feel that really change is unavailable. But really, this notion of impermanence as applied to your biology and your psychology proves something very, very different. It says change is not only available, it's all that's on offer. All there is is change. And that's actually tremendously empowering. Because yeah, you know, maybe I have a little bit of the thrifty gene, you know, which was like great in a famine in the Ukraine or something, but really, you know, pretty maladaptive on Instagram. But that's not really my fate. My metabolism, for example, was way more in my under my own agency than I ever thought it was. And I think that that is a central message to my book and just my work in general, is that people really, really need to embrace the always availability of change.

Melanie Avalon
I'm personally obsessed with this concept. I've been talking about it a lot with my therapist actually recently, and it's because I see it a lot.

I see people, it's ironic because people seek stability. So they want a really stable identity. So they'll often cling to identities and then that identity doesn't work. So they change it to a different identity and they're seeking this, like they want to have this one stable identity. So they're often changing trying to find it. When if you just realize that maybe like you just said, the stable thing is that we're always changing, it is so freeing, like it's wonderful.

Jeff Krasno
Absolutely. I mean, life is a dance. It's a continual dance of construction and deconstruction. Even just our lives truly are just these links of process in this continual chain of captured sunlight.

I mean, you know, we know this actually just by paging through a photo album, you know, is Melanie that cherubic little angelic two-year-old? Or, you know, is she that like adolescent? Or is she like the hot babe? She is not. I didn't know she, any, you know, you're none of those things. You know, you are essentially just process and not product. And if you are just process, then there is no terminus, you know, to your health journey, if you will. It's just a, it's just a constant, it's a mobius strip. And you have more agency over your trajectory of that process. And you can be moving towards wholeness. That's the process of healing. Or you can be moving towards disease and disconnection. That's the process of ailing. And, you know, you can adopt the behaviors and alter your environment moment to moment, such that you're more adaptive decisions about that trajectory.

Melanie Avalon
So actually, major question there that came up when I was reading your book, but before that, I wanted to point out because you're mentioning your thrifty metabolism and our identities surrounding our metabolism. And one of the really interesting facts you had in the book was that people think our metabolism slows down as we age, but you pointed out that what the science shows is that it doesn't really change much from 20 to 60.

So what I mean by that is it's these other factors. Our metabolism doesn't inherently get worse with age by destiny.

Jeff Krasno
This was a really interesting discovery that came out of a interview that I did with a doctor named William Lee, who then pointed me to this New York Times article that was about metabolism that cited a number of recent studies. And yeah, we've been essentially led to believe that you either kind of have good metabolism or you don't, sort of the way that you know, I think I equate it to either having an ugly sweater in your closet or not.

But it's not, you know, metabolism isn't really something that you have. Again, metabolism is a process within the body that is essentially, I mean, it really is the sum total of all the chemical reactions in the body, but really the way we think about it often is how efficiently we're essentially creating energy. And now I will put an asterisk here around that study because, you know, women as they enter menopause, for example, they stop producing estradiol. And that will result often in a bit of insulin resistance. And that's why women often struggle with a little bit of weight gain as they enter menopause. So in that sense, you know, you could say that hormonal changes actually create changes in menopause. So I want to recognize that. But the way we really think about menopause generally is that like, oh, you know, from 20 to 60, it's this kind of like slow decline. And really, that's not what the science is bearing out. Our metabolism can be very much influenced by other factors. So like, do we have high levels of inflammation, for example? Inflammation can really slow down metabolism very, very seriously. Are we adopting behaviors such as, you know, really eating a lot of ultra-processed foods, a lot of refined grains and sugars and starches, et cetera, that are going to undermine how efficiently we make energy? So there's things that we can do, but naturally, there doesn't seem to be much degradation in metabolism over those four decades.

Melanie Avalon
definitely a paradigm shift. And it's something else you just mentioned that we can be moving towards wholeness or disease.

And you had a sentence about that in the book as well. And I went down a rabbit hole in my mind contemplating that concept there, because what I was thinking and wondering was, is there two levels to that? So is there in general where our constitution is moving towards wholeness or disease? But on the cellular level, especially you mentioned all of these reactions happening, billions of reactions. Can we be simultaneously moving towards both? Can some of our cells be moving towards disease and then can they both be happening at the same time?

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I haven't really thought about it, but I'll think about it right now, which is, it doesn't appear to be linear, per se, like, don't think of that spectrum as a straight line, and there's one trajectory to the right, and one trajectory to the left.

I think this is a kind of, kind of four dimensional, what does that thing call, it's not called a teragram, it's like a sort of some sort of Buckminster Fuller sort of structure or something.

Melanie Avalon
Geodesic dome.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, but there's like a yeah, well, you can think of it that way for sure. Where yeah, you can be moving in different directions, right? So, you know, you, you know, for example, like your, your neural health might be super on point. But, you know, there's some other element, you might be having like a little arthritis or something like that, that could totally coexist.

But I would say that what I found is that there are some sort of upstream processes in the body that really impacts so many things downstream. And really, like how we make energy, essentially metabolism, sits upstream from so many different aspects of your life. So you might be experiencing insomnia, brain fog, weight management issues, cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease, neuropathy, you know, all of these things that we've labeled kind of downstream, upstream, that might all be the provenance of all that might be some form of metabolic dysfunction. So if you can tackle that upstream issue, then you can push that trajectory across all of these kind of different areas of your health, you know, towards the positive side.

Melanie Avalon
I got hit with a tangent. I'm just thinking about how I just learned with rivers. I always thought they flowed north to south, but it's just upstream, downstream. They just flow downwards. I was like, oh, I was wrong about that my entire life.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, you want to be like the ocean, walk through life from the lowest point, like the ocean does, the ocean's most powerful body of water, but it's humble and low, and all of the streams and tributaries flow into it. It's definitely a philosophy for living.

Melanie Avalon
I love it. What's also really interesting with all of this is the role of time, especially time identity and disease, because what I'm thinking of right now is something like if a person gets type 2 diabetes and then they resolve it, now they're going to forever be in remission from type 2 diabetes, even though they're technically at the same place that a person with that who never had type 2 diabetes would be at, because both of those people have the potential to get type 2 diabetes and yet one is in remission and the other one just doesn't have it yet.

They could be at the same place, metabolically speaking.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, they could be. I mean, so I had a diabetes diagnosis five years ago, and I've reversed the measurements of my diabetes, like really blood glucose and insulin. But that doesn't mean, you know, I don't often think of myself as in remission, because again, I'm just kind of within this process. Yeah, it's nice to look at my little CGM reading and, you know, see the number 80 there when I wake up, like 80 milligrams per deciliter, it's very healthy. You know, five years ago, that number was 125 130 fasting, you know, blood glucose. So but I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm in remission, I just have to, I'm just, you know, have created an environment and have adopted protocols that put me in a much, much more optimal range.

You know, and I believe that that kind of trajectory is available to most people, as it pertains to chronic disease, you know, there are some genetic factors that predispose us sometimes dispositively towards disease, I mean, certainly type one diabetes, but even type two. But by and large, you know, when you look at Americans now 93% of us are metabolically dysfunctional, 50% of us have either diabetes or pre diabetes, mostly in modern America, we're essentially choosing the way that we get sick. And, you know, not with a lot of thoughtfulness. Yeah, I think, you know, what I discovered in my own journey, and like I said earlier, it's like my own journey was so ordinary, it's like the symptoms that I was suffering from five years ago, brain fog, chronic fatigue, inability to concentrate irritability, insomnia, kind of fidgetiness, need to check my phone all the time, dad bod, you know, this little kind of adiposity inner tube around my middle man boobs, like all the stuff. Those are so normal. I mean, they're really actually abnormal, but we've totally normalized them.

And they're so easy just to kind of write off as I'm just having a bad day, or you know, there's a little lot of bad stress at work, etc. But these things are just upstream from all of these kind of chronic diseases. And as I started to try to understand the origin of my own chronic disease, what I was really doing was actually trying to unpack the bigger question is why are we so so sick as a society. And that really led me to this basic thesis, which is the overwhelming majority of chronic disease is the result of chronic ease. Since the Industrial Revolution, but really accelerating in the last 50 to 70 years, we've engineered our society at every single turn, often in the name of profit, for comfort and ease and convenience. And really what that has done is that has hijacked our biology, we're simply not engineered for lives of chronic ease.

So I really began to understand my chronic disease, and really the chronic disease epidemic more generally as really just the expected and normal product of our paleolithic genome, literally simply trying to cope with the way that we live. In fact, a lot of chronic disease is really at the core, the body's adaptive mechanisms, actually just trying to deal with our lifestyle. It's like, it's totally adaptive to store fat, totally adaptive.

Jeff Krasno
If you go back 100,000 years or 10,000 years on the Serengeti, we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years there, millions of years as hominids before that. And in the late summer, early fall, we would put on a little bit of weight. Your Melanie's loincloth would get a little tighter in October. And that was for very, very good reason, because we were designed to expect calorie scarcity.

The fallow of winter was just around the corner. But when winter never comes, which is basically how we've engineered our society from a calorie perspective, the body just does what it's designed to do, which is to store energy for a rainy day that never comes. And so you look at a 45% obesity rate in the United States, that's normal. That is a normal outcome for how we're living. And you can go and really... identify all of these evolutionary mismatches. There are so, so many of them that essentially pits our engineering against culture. And culture is fast. And sadly, evolution, for humans anyways, is very, very, very slow. So we're just not adapted to thermonuteral environments. We're not adapted for the endless surfeit of nutrient-deficient shelf-stable calories. We're just not. We're not adapted to just live inside all the time, separate from nature. We're not actually even adapted to live in single-family homes or vertical box apartments. What we are adapted for is actually a bit of calorie scarcity, of exposure to massive fluctuations in temperature, of immersion in nature, of squatting instead of sitting, and living in community instead of being atomized and isolated.

Melanie Avalon
So we were talking before about the cold exposure before recording, I do cryotherapy every day. And I had a really interesting conversation one day with the woman who runs the machine. And she was asked because I've been doing I've been doing it every day for four years. And she asked me if it was like easier now. And I was like, No, I was like, I was like, I don't, I still dread it.

I don't enjoy it when I'm in there. But it feels really great when I'm out. And she was like, Oh, well, don't you think you should, you know, have adapted by now? And I was like, No, I was like, I was like, I'm pretty sure it needs to feel like I think it's a good thing that it's still not comfortable for me. Like, I think that's the key. I think if I I think if it felt comfortable, then I probably wouldn't be getting as many benefits from it. But she was like, I think you need to adapt. I was like, well.

Jeff Krasno
Well you probably are i mean overtime cold is pretty interesting cuz it's very subjective and some people have a great tolerance for cold and other people don't women tend and this is not a desk to have a little bit less tolerance for cold and actually. That's a good thing because there's more benefits conferred at a higher temperature if you really unpack like what's happening there when you get cold. It's meant to be a little bit uncomfortable and I would never recommend anyone start with a 40 or even 30. Let me just rephrase I would never recommend that anyone start with a 34 degree ice bath. I think that's crazy.

You know women off came and stayed in my house for a couple weeks and we had a commercial ice delivery and there is no ice bobbing on top of the water and it was like 35 36 degrees. That was crazy in the same way I would never recommend anyone run a marathon if they never run before you just have to lean into the very very edge. Of your discomfort and then what's always available to you is you know lengthening duration and lowering temperature but if you're not getting cold. Then your body isn't forced to have that adaptive response so you get into an ice plunge what happens well you know your core body temperature plummets right and then your body jumps into action because it's engineered for homeostasis so it does everything that it can. To bring your body temperature back up to that little warm porridge Goldilocks zone of around ninety eight point six so what does it do so it heats you up you know it engages in this process of thermogenesis it looks around it needs an energy substrate to do that so uses glucose or. Trichlycerides fat stored in your fat cells to essentially feed your mitochondria to make heat to warm yourself back up and so. Just you know the process of getting cold you see how it forces your body to have an adaptive metabolic response there's also all these other kind of very interesting responses to deliberate cold.

I mean it appears to be a mood regulator i mean you know from doing it you always generally get out you feel very alert and probably. Pretty happy or very at least kind of emotionally regulated i mean there there is a protracted protect activation of the production of dopamine over even a forty eight hour period and elevated kind of production over forty eight hours and this is i think we're. Call therapy could be really interesting as a treatment for depression or addiction etc i think you know the other piece of it.

Which could be the most potent piece really is the development of emotional resilience so you know you get into that ice bath and you know you know you gas right and. Your body has that adaptive involuntary response to your heart rate and respiratory rate increase you feel that epinephrine coursing through your veins are gonna have a panic attack oh my god and then you have this moment available to you.

Jeff Krasno
To apply top down conscious pressure often through leveraging the breath in a parasympathetic way to essentially mute or neuter that involuntary bottom up response. And the practice of doing that the practice of applying top down pressure on top of involuntary bottom up response is a skill that eventually spills over into the other parts of your life.

Where you're inevitably confronted by acute stressors and then do you have that ability that emotional regulatory ability that you learned in the ice bath to apply when there is a situation at work or. You know in traffic or with your children or in a relationship with your friend etc and so this is why kind of some of these physiological good stressors or adversity memetics sometimes the most potent impact of them is actually psychological and emotional.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, exactly. And I think that's when I had that conversation, you know, she was so fixated on how I needed to feel not uncomfortable. And my, my takeaway and the point here is no, it's okay. Like good comes from feeling uncomfortable, especially in these, these situations where you're activating all of these systems in your body.

Just a quick note about Wim Hof. I had him on the show as well. And one of my favorite moments in the history of this show is, I was talking with him and I, cause I've actually never done an ice bath, which I know people think is crazy. I still haven't. So no excuses, but I was telling him that I don't have an ice bath at home, but I was saying that I have a chest freezer and I was like, I was like, can I fill it up with water? He was all about it. You know, in his accent and everything, he was like, yes, he's like, you bring Alaska to Atlanta. He got so excited, but I never actually, Melanie, you can bring Alaska to Atlanta.

You put the ice in the there. You, you tame the wild tiger of your metabolism. You tame the fear. He's so amazing. He's a hilarious guy. Oh, which speaking of accents, I was dying to hear you say in the book, how you tend to adapt your accent subconsciously to people. I was like, I wonder how he'll, if he'll adapt his accent to me, cause I don't know what my accent really is. It's kind of a blend of, I'm not sure how, what I would call it. But I was like, I wonder what, what intonations he might pick up.

Jeff Krasno
Well, you have a lovely voice. You have a lovely radio voice. So I feel like I have to match your gravitas. But I think this goes kind of to the impermanence conversation that we were having before, because we're always adapting moment to moment to our environment.

In fact, you cannot really separate the behavior and function of your own organism from the behavior and function of your environment. So you see this with people that are highly socially adaptive, where their mirror neurons are at, like, DEF CON 1, right? So they're able to dance in a way with the people that they're with for the sake of connection. And my wife teases me endlessly that I often adopt the accents of the people that I talk with at Wim Hofshur. And man, it's like I've interviewed Deepak Chopra a few times, and it's so embarrassing that, you know, it's like they say that when Deepak Chopra is on your show, you start to talk like him. And then it's like, you know, you do these. And, you know, I did it with Matthew McConaughey, where she's the most embarrassing one to listen to, because he comes on the show and I'm like, all right, all right. You know, I just like I'm right into a Southern draw. And, you know, for me, you know, and I go into some sort of self-deprecating, I hope humorous length on this in the book, you know, this was really an outcome of my peripatetic youth, where I was essentially traveling from country to country, like trying to fit into new schools and new languages and new dialects as a chubby kid. So I developed this kind of social chameleon ability. But if you kind of see it through the lens of impermanence, you know, and there is no real stable, reliable self, then there really is no stable, reliable accent, you know, and that you're essentially just adapting moment to moment in the most effective way to connect with the person that you're talking to. And, you know, sometimes it can seem like you're compromising your authentic self, you know, that, oh, no, you know, Melanie's accent is this thing, and that's how she speaks. But actually, I've really grown to embrace this idea that there is no solid, reliable, stable Jeff at all. You know, I will take on the mantle of a particular role on a particular day, because that seems to be the one most suitable for making it through the day or, you know, making enough money or whatever kind of practical logistical matter that I have to satisfy. But, yeah, I find the, you know, kind of adoption of different accents quite fun, you know, actually. It's fun to be able to step in to different sides of yourself. I used to feel like, oh, yeah, I'm just kind of, it's just a technique for fitting in and being liked, but now it's a little more playful.

Melanie Avalon
Well, it's also interesting because if I reflect on my own accent adoption with people, I probably do it at a sub perceptual level without realizing it. And if I'm talking to somebody from the South, like, so if I've been talking to Matthew McConaughey, I know for a fact it would have probably come out in me because my I was raised in the South. I had a Southern accent growing up.

So it kind of speaks to both the impermanence of everything and how there's all these warring factors of influence. So your path, like you mentioned your past, what you went through, so that, you know, clearly affects you a lot now. So it's just really interesting, all the factors against across the timeline of our life and you know, what's affecting what

Jeff Krasno
This notion of interdependence and impermanence, I think, really applies as much to your psychology as it does to your physiology. You know, we talked about it through a more physiological lens, but I think it's true for psychology, too.

You know, you aren't the same person moment to moment, really. You know, and again, this violates our sense of self because, you know, like Jeff liked the Yankees yesterday, so he must have liked the Yankees today. You know, I feel like I think the same things, but really, if we actually examine the slope of our lives, we actually realize that we really espouse different beliefs kind of over the grander swath of our life. And I think that that's actually even true in a moment to moment where, you know, we're always in the state of flux as it relates to our environment. And, you know, I think that this notion of being unfixed and kind of always changing in relation to where we are and this kind of concept of the exposome, all of the sum of all the inputs of our life, it can be really unsettling for people because it does feel very uncertain and very unstable. But I think embracing it is incredibly liberating because it really allows, again, for positive change.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, what's interesting because I'm just reflecting on, I think I feel pretty, I'm not threatened by the idea of a shifting identity or like a stable identity that's shifting, that's changing, but I'm very haunted by like Theseus's paradox, the ship. So like the concept of if you break down a ship piece by piece and then rebuild it piece by piece, like is that new ship or if you replace, I'm not sure exactly how the paradox goes, but if you replace like one piece at a time, you eventually have an entire new ship. So is it the same ship? And that just haunts me.

I've thought about, oh, I thought about in the context of the future of humans and AI because we talk about whether, you know, there are these ideas of Neuralink and integrating with AI and all of this stuff. So I thought about, well, so if you replaced each cell in your body or each body part with and this is a thought experiment, but with a synthetic, you know, robotic machine and did it piece by piece until you eventually had an Android of sorts, would you still be the same person in that Android?

Jeff Krasno
Well, I mean, again, I think this gets into kind of anological territory around the nature of self. So this is definitely not what I usually talk about.

Melanie Avalon
Rabbit holes.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, we tend to identify ourselves as this locus of consciousness, like crouching somewhere between our eyes in our head, right? But try to biopsy that. There's nothing there. It's just a delusion.

And yes, there is a kind of biographical history to Melanie, like where, oh, yeah, I grew up here and then I moved there and then I moved over here and now I'm on this weird podcast. That is true, but that, you know, self as consciousness doesn't seem to have an anchor anywhere, particularly physically. And this is, I think, this notion of the illusory self is very, again, very unsettling and somewhat uninstinctual because we're so married to our instruments of sensory perception. So you know, our ears, our eyes, et cetera, that essentially protect us, protect the sort of biological imperative to survive, that we associate ourselves with that. But, you know, we, but if you really examine the question, like, am I the thinker of my thoughts or am I the feeler of my feelings, really? I think under rigorous scrutiny, the answer is no, you know, it's like you have thoughts, tens of thousands of them all day. And most of the time, if you really examine that you didn't put them there, you know, they just arose into your field of consciousness and you may be identified with them or, you know, maybe you latched onto it and then that thought will appear and disappear. The same thing with emotions and feelings. And this is why meditation as a practice, it often reveals the illusion of self. Because if you can become very, very quiet and essentially witness emotions, feelings, thoughts just purely as phenomena arising and subsiding in consciousness moment to moment and just, you know, witnessing it without judgment or identification, it really is a sort of a tuning fork there for the true nature of self, that there really isn't one, per se, that these feelings and emotions and thoughts that we often so attach to and identify, these are just phenomena, you know, just the same way that, you know, you, you know, you see, you know, a car or you see, you know, a leaf blowing in the wind, etc.

These are just phenomena. And, you know, you are the blackboard upon which this phenomena is etched, that there's something that you are, this consciousness that is not necessarily centered or anchored in your physical body that is more reflective of the sort of greater, larger universal self. Anyways, this is, this is not in the book. It's fascinating. I mean, I find it, I find these topics fascinating and I enjoy talking about them. So thanks for leading me, leading me down them.

Melanie Avalon
I'm getting flashbacks to 10th grade and 10th grade honors English class. One of the first questions shout out to coach group. What he asked us was he asked us if we never had any senses, would we be aware of ourselves? And that's, I think we debated that the entire class.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, that's a fascinating idea. I mean, there's this practice in yoga, I guess in Hinduism then, called pratyahara, which is sort of a withdrawal from the senses. So you lie down and you begin to sort of withdraw from all of your senses. And it eventually sort of elicits a sense of selflessness.

But I guess the more kind of obvious or fun way to approach it is like, you know, how do you know that you're wearing pants? Or how are you aware of your pants? Generally, you're aware of your pants when they're too tight. Otherwise, you're not thinking about your pants. They're just pants. And in the same way, we are aware of ourselves when we are too tight. Right? So if you think of the moments in your life that you become utterly self obsessed, right, where the aperture of your attention is super narrow and tight on yourself, it's generally when you're tight, like, okay, you're on an airplane and you're experiencing very severe turbulence, you're tight, right? You feel this sense of threat. And this is often, you know, explained by, you know, you're in your sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight or except, you know, this is when you're most, most aware of self for self preservation purposes. But then think of the other side of that coin, the yin side of that coin, if you will, where you're utterly relaxed, that you're walking through nature, and the aperture of your attention is super, super wide. And your awareness is so great, that there is a sense of kind of dissipation of self where you are the chirping of the birds and the breeze blowing through the leaves, where you are the sun setting into the horizon. And you do get that feeling when you're absolutely, completely serene and tranquil and immersed in nature. And so it is a way to think about it, you know, that I think most of us kind of traipse through life feeling a sense of tightness in the same way that our pants are too tight, we're too tight. And that really, like underwrites this sense of the self, the individual that we have. And, you know, we live in a world that is essentially engineered to invoke or elicit that sense of tightness, that sense of fear, outrage, not enoughness, etc. And, you know, our social media is actually algorithmically preferenced for those things. So it's no wonder that we live in this kind of atomized individualistic society, because we're always going through this feeling of extreme tightness.

Melanie Avalon
It's so, so fascinating. I interviewed Jackie Higgins. She's a documentary filmmaker in the UK and she has a book called Sentient. And it's all about what we can learn from animals senses. So senses that they have that we may or may not, most of them we don't have. But it's really, really fascinating about expanding the potential of how we interact with the world.

But she talks about this one guy who lost his sense of proprioception, or I don't know if maybe he never had it. So he, he was not aware. Like, even though he could use his hands and legs and things like that, he wasn't aware of his body. He couldn't use them. So unless he was looking at them, that's how he learned how to deal with it. But like his arms would just do things unless he was looking at them, which is just fascinating.

I would like to interview him about his sense of self.

Jeff Krasno
Well, yeah, this is interesting because this locus of consciousness that we believe is anchored in our head tends to kind of perceive itself as separate from the body, right? That the body is something that it has and that, you know, it breaks down from time to time and you take it to the body mechanic, right? In the same way that your car breaks down, you take it to the car doctor and that the body is something else than you, right? It's kind of this bag of skin.

It's hard to have these conversations because then you say the word I, like I just did, and then I'm like, what do I mean? What do I mean by that? But I begin to more associate myself with the physiological processes of my body. And it is, you know, okay, well, I got a certain amount of sleep that subjectively actually makes me feel really good, but it's also making my body process and create energy more effectively. I know that that's true. So anaerobically and aerobically, you know, I'm being, I'm able to generate better energy, better adenosine triphosphate from food substrates. And that's actually the real me. That's the real me.

It's funny because it flies completely in the face of kind of our Abrahamic dualistic traditions where, you know, the body is seen as, you know, made of dust or made of a clay figurine in which God in the book of Genesis literally inhales or exhales or it's a soul in through its nostril. And that there is this sort of duality between the soul and the spirit and the body. And the body is susceptible to vice and pleasures of the flesh and drink and all the rest of it. And it'll return to dust.

It's sort of sublimated and transcendent to step into this eternal soul, right? That's the real you, the transcendent you. And I've had just a complete about face on that dualistic perception of the world that no, no, actually I am this miraculous body. That is truly what I really am.

And I'm animated for this brief blink of an eye. And I have to make the utter best of that moment, you know, it's like, if you really live in the wonder and the awe of your own human organism, then the only question that remains is for the brief period of time that I'm here, like how brightly will I shine? How can I illuminate myself and everything around me? And to me, that is a way to live with true purpose.

Melanie Avalon
I'm curious, did you have a similar contemplation when writing the book? I'm thinking how it's similar with a book, this dichotomy of, you know, the tangible, the physical, so the body or the words of the book, like the actual physical book, like the physical ink on the page, and then the sense of I and the person, the self, the ego, and then with the book, it's like the knowledge and the ideas that you're bestowing upon the reader. Have you thought about that at all?

Like the concept of writing a book, like what you're what you're creating and doing and how it takes on so many different forms. When people read it, they're all going to get their own interpretation and take away different things.

Jeff Krasno
I mean, it's interesting. It's your book until you press send, and then it's everybody else's. And books are tricky because they are fossil records. They don't really change.

I mean, there can be new printings and new editions, but generally they are reflective of a moment in time. They're sort of like a blood panel. You go to your doctor, and you're like, oh, my C-reactive protein is high. That day, it is a snapshot of what you're thinking over a very condensed period of time. But this is how the brick house of human knowledge moves forward, one little clay brick at a time. And so I don't know. I mean, writing a book in many cases feels like completely screaming into the wind. I think there's 100,000 new books per year. Or no, no, I think there's 100,000 books in every Barnes and Nobles or something. So it's a little daunting to write a book, but they're pieces of art.

They're the way writers paint. You could also say, oh, I never want to paint a painting. Because, oh, look at that. I've grown so much since that time. That's not reflective of what I think or how I work or my technique anymore. But then we would never say to an artist, well, don't paint a painting then. So I don't know. I read some things back from the book from time to time, and I'm like, oh, god, I don't believe that anymore. I mean, no, not really. Not the things that, not the information, more that sometimes the turns of phrase are clumsier than I would have otherwise liked or you know.

Melanie Avalon
I never had the perception of clumsiness, so I think about this quite a bit. I'm happy that books are still around.

I actually thought they might have been phased out by now, so I'm happy they're still here and I love when I'm reading a book and I have a very visceral experience reading it and I had that was very self reflective. Oh, it was okay, self reflective and then it was double self reflective because you called it out and I was like, well, it's just so many layers of meta-ness right now, but it was in the chapter. It was the chapter on information foraging and our lack of attention today and I was reading the chapter and reflecting on how it does take attention to focus and not get distracted by all the things all the time and how I was exercising that reading that chapter. And then you made a comment about that very concept and I was like, this is a thing. Yeah, so that's something from the actual book we can talk about this economy that we live in today where everything's buying for our attention and I learned the word nomophobia. Is that it? The fear of not having our phone?

Jeff Krasno
not having your phone or even when your phone has low signal.

Melanie Avalon
Yes, I love it's that specific.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, I think that came from Jess Davis who, uh, yeah, she was kind of starting an unplugged movement for a while. But what was her anyways, she's cool woman. If you, if you think about how pronounced monkey mind is at this juncture in our society, I mean, I find it candidly with myself. I have a harder time reading books than, than I used to. And I'm a voracious reader. So, you know, that, that our ability to focus has been so degraded just by mere dent of the economy in which we live.

You know, I did this other project called the comfort trap where I actually studied, uh, went back kind of a couple hundred years studying sort of the attention economy from, you know, the printing press on to the first emission coming out of CNN, um, on cable news to then, you know, the smartphone to social media, et cetera. And, you know, you could map kind of the human attention span across that time, you know, quite, quite faithfully. And, you know, it's hard to actually grok the idea that one's precious attention and focus has been commodified and productized and bought and sold. So literally your actions kind of moment to moment within the sphere of the digital realm, anyways, are just actually like units of economics. And it's like where you put your attention moment to moment, you're actually making people money or losing other people money or whatever. And that's kind of the imperceptible changes in your own behavior kind of is the product of this economy. It's pretty candidly fucked up to think about it. And this is, I mean, I don't know how much free will we actually have Melanie, when you actually look at your genetics, I didn't choose my parents quite clearly, you know, I didn't choose the time and era and religion and anything in which I was born or the country that I was born. I didn't really design all the prior causes that led to all the other things and circumstances that influenced my life. I certainly didn't control all the random serendipity, but I do seem to have some agency over where I've put my attention moment to moment. And, you know, if we lose that, then we are, we're just done. You know, we're done as a species. So, you know, I talk about that in the book. I interviewed this, um, this neuroscientist, Adam Gasali. He, he has this metaphor around foraging that, that he applies to one's attention. And sort of quite, you know, just briefly, like, you know, he talks about fig trees, you know, on the Savannah and how if there, if we come across just one singular fig tree, we will denude that entire tree of figs, right? But if we actually come upon like a great cops of fig trees, then we'll just, you know, pick the ones at shoulder height, the ones that are easiest to get at. And then we'll look over at their tree next to us and do kind of a cost benefit analysis where like, Oh no, I'll just go over to that tree now and I'll pick the easy figs. And then there's another one over there. I'll go to that one. And then I'll go to that one. And, you know, we do the same thing with information now. It's kind of information foraging where you're served some piece of content up.

Jeff Krasno
And, you know, you do this little analysis in your brain in the first five seconds. And you're like, yeah, I think I got the gist of that. I'm going to keep scrolling.

Or, Oh, I've read the first 20 words of this article. And now it's of course cross-linked out because the publisher wants you to click into the next article because they want to serve you a new ad, right? So this is how the ad revenue model and media works.

It's just like, keep people clicking out so they can get served another impression. And, you know, eventually our brains become completely trained for that behavior. And we just have endless monkey mind where essentially thoughts are branches. And all we do is swing from one branch to the other.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, it's like we're reading everything and nothing. And it's actually one reason I think doing podcasting is actually very therapeutic because it's, well, I would say forced, but I'm doing it willingly. Like I love doing it, but it's a, you know, there are boundaries and barriers around this amount of time where you're having a conversation with somebody else and not, even not looking at your phone, not, you know, doing anything else, it works the muscle of the mind. And I think those experiences are so, so helpful.

It's also why I love like theater because you're actually like locked in and not supposed to be checking your phone. And yeah, one thing I thought was fascinating in your book was I hadn't heard this before, but you were talking about these different focus meditation techniques. And it was kind of like a throwaway fun fact that you put in, but it was something about how the happiest people are those, like studies have shown that the happiest people are those that can quickly refocus on something, which I thought was really interesting.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, it's pretty interesting that the opportunity in meditation actually lies in the return to some single pointedness of mind. So, you know, sometimes meditation is confused with the turning off of the spigot of thoughts, but that's not true at all. I mean, you'll be in a meditative state and, you know, a thought will emerge. You know, all of a sudden you're thinking about like LeBron James or whatever. And then you're like, wait a minute, why am I thinking about LeBron James? Like I didn't put LeBron James in my consciousness. What the hell? I don't even like LeBron James or whatever. And then you're like, okay, wait a minute. No, I'm going to go back to my breath or back to my Trishti, my gaze point, or back to my mantra, a nam yoho rengikyo, my Nichiren Buddhist mantra, or whatever it is. And then all of a sudden you're drifting off and thinking about something else. And then, but then there's that opportunity to return.

And the people that are best at returning are the people that seem to be the most content and happy. You know, there's also the, I think the Harvard study with Matthew Killingsworth and someone, Dan Gilbert, I think. And, you know, their finding was that the happiest people appear to be those who can actually yoke action and intention when you're actually thinking about the thing that you're doing. Right? I think Thich Nhat Hanh had that famous saying, when you wash the dishes, wash the dishes, you know? And, you know what I mean? Like, just examine your own behavior, right? So, so much of the time we're not thinking about the thing that we're doing. We're just lost in thought. We're brooding over the past, you know, projecting the past into the future, sort of creating kind of negative anticipated memories half the time through kind of projecting anxiety that doesn't even really exist, or we're just daydreaming. And so I think with that study, which was quite interesting, was, you know, the people that seem to be happiest seem to be able to concentrate on the thing that they're doing. And, you know, there are meditative practices that do that, you know, just like what we talked about before, that ability to kind of return to a gaze point or a drishti or a kasina, I think, can help train the mind just to be present. I mean, we know that feeling, how utterly relaxing that is to be, I often just conflate this with being in nature, because for me, that's kind of where the experience really rears its head, where you're just absolutely utterly non-judgmentally present. And you're just there now, fully. And you're just looking around, noticing things, and you're so, so relaxed. And, you know, that's really the ease that we're looking for. We're not looking for the Jeff lying on the couch in his snugly 72 degree thermonuteral environment, door dashing, chubby hubby binge watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. I mean, that's nice. But that's not really the true ease that we're looking for, even though that portrait of ease is the one that we often celebrate in modern times. And that kind of ease really does result in a lot of dis-ease.

Jeff Krasno
Really, the true ease that we're looking for is the one that we're totally inhabiting the present moment. And we can also get that when we're immersed in some creative endeavor, or some collective enterprise, you know, sometimes you're with a group of people, you're doing something together that could be just like a dinner party where everyone's engaged in conversation, or it could be some kind of philanthropic endeavor, but you're so immersed in it, that you lose sense of linear time, you feel just so at ease, you know, or certainly when you're engaged in physical activity, I'm a tennis player, sometimes I have like perfect proprioception, perfect awareness of my body in space, and like a kind of refined intuition that defies, you know, the amount of bits my brain can actually process where I actually intuitively know where my opponent is going to hit the ball before he even hits it.

That kind of flow state, that true, true ease that we're looking for. And, you know, sometimes that ease is born out of a little bit of discomfort, a little bit of training, a little bit of making yourself a little bit out of your zone.

Melanie Avalon
You know, it's like with the flow state, which I like that you, I was wondering, I always am so curious when I reached the concluding chapter, like, cause that's where the author, I feel like has the podium to just provide their, their overarching thoughts of everything. Like, what are they going to touch on?

You did touch on flow. And I do think, like you just said, one of the important things about flow is that you are, it's like you're engaging in things that are, you're competent to do, but they're still challenging for you. Like that, that level of challenge needs to be there. Otherwise, I don't think you enter the flow state, which just, you know, speaks to this role of this benefit of stressors and challenges and.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, well, you build up like a concert pianist like builds up their technical well, you know, through endless practicing of scales, right? And then they get on the big stage, and they really have to forget about the technical well and access, you know, the spiritual well, become the conduit for something greater and more universal. But that's only available through the utter discomfort of building the technical well over so much time.

And, you know, we know that just in kind of more prosaic ways. I mean, even like tasting that tomato that you grew in your backyard that's so luscious and juicy and rich and sweet, you know, versus the ethylene gassed variety that you just buy at the store, right? But you know, that that luscious, faken tomato was the result of a little bit of inconvenience of cultivating the soil and pruning the leaves and, you know, making sure that there's just a month, the right amount of water and sun, etc.

And that can be applied to so many areas of life, you know, but it's funny that, you know, the I agree that the conclusion or the last chapter of books is is demonstrative of like, now, what does the author really think about all that? Yeah, mine got slashed to bits by my editor, Canada. I really I want to publish the the unredacted version at some point.

Melanie Avalon
Was there anything specific that you could share that they were like, Nope, this has got to go.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, I think it was a little too critical of the Abrahamic traditions, I would say, probably. And only, you know, listen, I sort of joke about my atheism to some degree, because I'm not really an atheist, but it's a—and I also, in the same way that a mazurka and a polka and a tango and a waltz are all different forms of dance. They're still dance. And, you know, whether you're a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Christian or a Jew or a Zoroastrian or you believe in Thor, I don't know, you know, you're still trying to get—if you're honest about it, you're still trying to get to the center of the wheel somehow, you know, these are all just spokes. You're trying to get to the truth of something, of why we're here and what we're doing. So, you know, I am sometimes critical of Abrahamic religions because of the way they generally have been leveraged in our modern society.

But I think where my editor had some issue with it is kind of in the context that—I presented in the context of really our fear of death, which for me is the ultimate stressor to metabolize, I suppose, as part of the spiritual or self-examined life, is that we're in such a fascinating, interesting chapter of the human story where we have this thing called consciousness. There is something that is like to be me, right? There is an experience of Jeff. And to know that there is an experience of Jeff, that is quite amazing. It's one thing to be happy or be sad, it's quite another thing to know that you're happy or sad. And this is sometimes called qualia, but that the kind of other side of that double-edged saber is this awareness of our own mortality and the acute, severe knowledge that everything that we love, including ourselves, is gonna die. And this has created sort of paroxysms of anxiety and fear throughout the history of our species. I discussed this in the chapter where we spent thousands upon thousands of years killing all of the world's megafauna, all of those saber-toothed tigers and mammoths and dire wolves and bears, because they were a threat. And then Louis Pasteur came along and said, no, it's not just the megafauna and the big things that'll kill you, it's the little things that you can't see, the pathogenic viruses and bacteria. So the last 160, 70 years or so, we've dedicated ourselves to killing all of those things in our gut and in our soils, et cetera. And we are so scared of death that we created these mythologies that somehow promise eternal life. If we subscribe to a sexual regulatory manual written by some paternalistic old bogey in a Merlin's cap or something that sits in some cloud with a moral abacus and measuring our transgressions, say, oh, well, if you're gay, uh-huh, sorry. It's like if you're not a virgin on the day that you were born, sorry, you know, you're shoveling embers for always. And these kind of seemingly absurd mythologies really so often have their origin in our fear of death.

Jeff Krasno
And this is what I'm grappling with now is how can I get over that fear? And my approach to that is really reformulating my relationship with nature.

not as something outside of me, not as something that I am deemed to have dominion over, or that I am meant to subdue, but actually something that I am, not just part of, that I am growing out of. And, you know, this again kind of takes me both in a mystical direction, but also in a very kind of empirical scientific direction, that all the atoms that make me up were baked, were forged in the crucible of a star, of a supernova, some eight billion years ago, that under insane pressure and in temperature vomited its elemental guts all over the universe, and reformed into a rock called planet Earth, and over billions of years formed microorganisms. And those microorganisms had symbiotic trysts and relationships to form chloroplast and mitochondria that somehow gave birth to multicellular life and woodpeckers and bears and otters and possums and melanies and jeffs. And to see yourself with awe and with wonder as part of that giant universal experiment, I think relieves a tremendous amount of anxiety to know that there was an atom that was in Buddha and Lao Tzu and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King and Gandhi is also in you, for sure. And in that sense, you always go on, you always are moving on to some other animated form of information. And yeah, the way that we experience life through our five senses is likely coterminous with the cessation of respiratory function and brain function and cardiac function. But when you look up into the sky and you see that glorious needlepoint of gas and to know that that's you, that truly is you, that is a kind of a faith, not kind of faith as belief in the absence of evidence, but truly as trust in something eternal, some sort of foundational intelligence in which you will always be a part of. And I can grok that cognitively, you know, but kind of like forgiveness, which starts in the head and it has to slowly migrate to the heart. The feeling of freedom from the fear of death is different from the thinking about it. And I think this represents a great challenge for our species.

Melanie Avalon
I'm fascinated by the fear of death. I'm actually, right now, another book I'm prepping is called You Only Die Once. And she's talking all about the mental mori and how that actually being aware of our death actually brings vitality and meaning to our life. I've always been haunted by aging. And what's interesting is I don't perceive that I have a fear of death.

Like I wouldn't say I have a fear of death, but I'm acutely, I mean, I would subscribe to, it's called geroscophobia, the fear of aging. It's the reason, honestly, that I probably have this podcast because it's about the pursuit of longevity. I often wonder if is my fear of aging actually just a fear of death or is it separate?

Jeff Krasno
Well, we don't like the decrepitude and the cognitive decline and the way that we tend to limp through the last 20 years of our life in the West. Modern medicine has done a lot to extend lifespan, but if you go back to 1900 when we, I think the average lifespan was about 48 years, you probably know better than me, but when we died, it tend to happen very, very quickly. It would be like, Melanie is like, doo, doo, doo, doo, and then she's dead. And there wasn't this distention of morbidity in which we're limping through life with multiple chronic diseases, getting treated with a cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs that don't really address the cause, but just the symptoms. And that's the fate that so many of us have to bear now.

And it makes getting old so mangy. But really, if we reframed that and instead of becoming elderly, we just became elders. And we became fonts of accumulated wisdom. I mean, that's the kind of old age that I'd be quite happy with, kind of free of the cognitive decline and the decrepitude. I do think, and I kind of talk about this early in the book, of my kind of the vision of my own death. And it's a little Pollyanna if you go and read it, but it's equally absurd. I mean, I'll just very, very briefly describe it. I kind of go to a cottage with my wife, who I've been with forever, and at 118 we essentially die on the same day. It's a little more poetically written. And it seems absurd, but it's equally absurd that our last 20 years needs to be this amalgam of wheelchairs and bedpans and dialysis and worse. And so maybe that's part of your fear of aging. It's just how we age, because I think there is a really, a thriving way to do it.

Melanie Avalon
What's interesting is because I often will ask us, and I can ask you, would you want to live forever? But given the opening of your book and the story that you share, I'm guessing I know the answer to that. And I always thought everybody wanted to live forever because we clearly see the world through our own biases. So it was really interesting to me that a lot of people don't want to live forever.

And I think it is because they associate the ending years with all that decrepitude and decline in health span that you just described. And yet I want to live forever. So I don't know if I, it's like, I assume I'm not going to be that. And yet I still have this very intense fear of aging, but the good side and the good thing about it is it makes me pretty acutely aware of time and the preciousness of it. Like, I just feel like I'm always racing to do all the things because time is ticking. So it has a cost benefits to it.

Jeff Krasno
Well, think about it this way. The only time that it's ever been or ever will be is now. So, if you're really chasing eternal life, it's right here. I mean, it's a little bit of an intellectual exercise, but I think that there's some validity to it.

And again, could you call it life if there was no such thing as death? I'm not sure you could, because it would have no context. This is the sort of conundrum of the coincidence of opposites, right? That oppositional ideas only exist in relation to one another. You can't get into an elevator that only goes up. The other thing that I struggle with with just the practicality of escape velocity or kind of amortality is that if you knew that every sort of combination of nanotechnology and stem cell therapy and whatever, CRISPR or something, if you knew that every organ could regenerate faster than it degraded, would you ever go outside knowing that there's a risk that you'll get hit by a bus and the whole thing would just be over? And so, I kind of think that that amortality movement is one that actually engenders more fear, because I don't know if I would do anything to risk it.

So it's just another sort of, another wrinkle in it that maybe you want to consider. But I don't know, Alan Watts is my kind of my hero, philosophical hero. I think he used to say, like, we were all dead once. Was it so bad?

Melanie Avalon
So in your example, you're saying it would be a situation where we don't age because we regenerate, but we could die like we could fall off a cliff.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, you could still, yeah, you could still, you know, die by freak accident. I mean, it's, you know.

Melanie Avalon
It's kind of like I don't like my iPhone is I have the iPhone 11 Pro, which is, I don't even know how many years old. I don't like getting a new iPhone because once you get a new one, then it's just gonna like at least this one if it breaks. It's so old, it doesn't even matter.

But once you get a new one, and it's pristine and clean. It's like, okay, now it's expensive. And I might just break it. So it's like, it's like the fear of potential loss that hasn't even happened yet. But I'm okay with my iPhone breaking if it's this 11 Pro. So I guess it's kind of similar if we didn't age, we would be in this pristine body and we would have the fear of actually losing that completely compared to being adjusted to a slow decline with inevitable death.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah. I will put a point on that metaphor. I didn't know where you're going, but I totally get it. It's something like that. I think it is something like that.

You know, I mean, we all look at, you know, these Brian Johnson and the Don't Die movement and, you know, this kind of fleece vested Silicon Valley, a mortality movement. You know, Jeff Bezos has like wrapped up, you know, all of the great longevity doctors in some lab somewhere. I'm going to figure out how, you know, he and his plutocrats live forever. I don't know. I mean, for me, like, I look into the natural world. That is my north star. And the natural world comes and goes. And it experiences itself as Melanie and as Jeff and as Bob. And really, all the experiences of individual life are really the entire universe experiencing itself in that moment in that organism. So for me, I'm okay coming and going. And I'd prefer to do that, you know, without a lot of pain and suffering.

Melanie Avalon
I guess there's just so much, for a second where I thought you were going with the regenerating immortal organs was the direction of if you were like that, would you have meaning and purpose? Like basically if you lived forever, what would drive you to have purpose and meaning in life?

I just think I would just keep doing, there's just so much I want to do. I think I could just keep doing things.

Jeff Krasno
There's a lot, but I'm not sure it's a courteous thing to do, though. I mean, because if you look at the way life evolves, you know, from, you know, phytoplankton floating upon the ocean surface to, you know, the most sophisticated advanced human being, it evolves through death, essentially, through kind of under pressure and the multiplicity of genetics, you know, that nature continues to select for the best of it and iterate and continue to iterate and continue to iterate. And, you know, we're just one group of people living forever. I'm not sure we actually get any better.

Melanie Avalon
I mean, if we just look at us now, this kind of ties it into what we're talking about at the very beginning. I have found it really intriguing evolutionarily and with our current health epidemic, I find it interesting that we have not adapted to ward off where we are right now.

It's like evolution can't, and I don't know much about how evolution works, and I probably should learn more, but it's like evolution can't grasp the longer-term effects of this state of ease that we're living in that's killing us slowly.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, could we eventually become like these characters in WALL-E, right? It's like, I mean, if we had long enough to do it, we could probably evolve into just eating twinkies all day. That would be, but it would just take so long because we live so long as creatures.

I mean, if you study like nematodes or sea elegance or whatever, they live a couple days. So you can kind of study them quite easily and see kind of evolution unfold before your eyes. With humans, it's so difficult because we have these extended lifespans. But yeah, you know, I hope we get better, you know, I'm not sure where we are. I'm not sure that modern society is any proof that we have iterated in positive ways, but one can only hope.

Melanie Avalon
I'm curious if Ozimpic is going to be a lever for fixing everything or our ultimate demise. It's interesting.

It's interesting to see everybody change. So many people in society radically change, weight-wise, so fast. It feels like overnight.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, and it seems to have pleiotropic benefits. I mean, what it seems to really do is actually blunt dopamine in the brain. So it's like, yeah, it slows digestion and gastric emptying and creates a feeling of satiety and all that kind of stuff too, for sure. But what it also does, it seems to actually make, you know, bliss point engineered foods sort of less irresistible because of the blunt dopamine effect.

It also seems to also have application for addiction and a bunch of other uses. So, you know, I mean, you could make the argument that like in 1900 in the United States, the obesity rate was 3%. It wasn't because we had some glut of Ozampic, right? The Ozampic deficiency. Yeah, it was not enough. So, you know, so do we really, really need, you know, this drug that seems to be lying in the pockets of these companies like Novo Nordisk, et cetera, and kind of perpetuating this kind of really broken sick care system. Do we really need that in order to be metabolically healthy? I mean, at this juncture, I don't know, maybe we do, you know, just given how polluted our ecosystem is. But, you know, I'm holding out hope that it's not the only answer. But, you know, I don't know, you know, like maybe I've moderated on it some because at the beginning I was like, oh, it's just another pill, another quick fix, and other, but, you know, on the other hand, you know, penicillin and antibiotics, you know, I don't want to villainize pharmaceuticals, all pharmaceuticals, because I do think that there's utility to some of them. And given where we are as a society, you know, maybe this is something that is quite useful.

Melanie Avalon
I know, I guess you could make the case that it could be the ultimate metabolic biohack. Maybe. We have to see the long-term effects.

I mentioned you actually, we were recording an episode of the Intermittent Fasting podcast last week, and I was talking all about the fasting part of your book. I loved how you said one of the most profound effects for you for fasting wasn't even the physical effects so much. Well, physical effects downstream, but it was your awareness of all the times that you feel inclined to eat, but it's just a trigger, just a moment. And what's the reasoning behind that? And do you actually need to eat at that moment? And that clarity, I think, is so helpful. And I think a lot of people don't realize the potential benefits there with something like fasting, that it's really helpful to disconnect that, that constant need to eat all the things that society has conditioned us to.

Jeff Krasno
Totally. I mean, I think it provides that space that Victor Frankel described, between stimulus and response. In that space is your choice, and in that choice is your potential freedom or liberation.

And yeah, we often extol the many, many physiological virtues of fasting, from autophagy, to ketosis, to mitobiogenesis, to the development of metabolic flexibility, to weight management, to activation of a sirtuin pathway. I don't know, keep going. And I like to geek out on all that stuff. But, you know, as I wrote in the book, I think one of the most potent impacts is this requirement to actually witness the source of your hunger. Because if you consolidate all your consumption of food into an eight-hour window, that doesn't mean you don't get hungry outside of that window. You do. But because you've adopted this practice, because you become a disciple to it, that you actually have to examine the nature of that hunger and untangle whether or not it is a biological need or an emotional desire. And in our day and age, I would say 99.99% it's an emotional desire. I mean, certainly for me, you know, I'm fit, but there's plenty of warehoused energy on my body. You know, meandering to the larder is not compulsory for me to biologically exist. I'm generally eating at 9pm because I'm bored or feel dissatisfied, or someone insulted me, something's not going well at work, you know, whatever, fill in the black, I'm eating my feelings. And really getting clear and kind of witnessing the provenance of that stimulus gave me a certain capacity, a space, that I could apply in other areas of my life. Whereas like, do I really, really need to check my feelings of perceived efficiency through retail therapy on Amazon, or through, you know, grabbing that second or third glass of wine, or, you know, reacting in a knee-jerk and maladaptive way to my children, for example. So, you know, these, again, similar to cold water therapy, kind of intermittent fasting can provide you with a certain amount of emotional resilience, how much a certain amount of space to make better, more adaptive and appropriate decisions.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, and it extends to everything. Like you said, the shopping addiction, the Instagram, the my fate, probably, no, I don't want to see my fate, right?

One of my favorite chapters was your stressful conversations chapter and, you know, the stimulus response with engaging with people and how to have listeners who have to get the book because after our conversation, so the book has a ton of has a lot of this, what we've been talking about, and it has a lot of, you know, a lot of science and protocols and how to integrate all of these different things into your life and, you know, how to do the cold therapy and the sauna and a whole chapter on xeno hermetics and stress plants, and the stressful conversation one, which is how to actually have hard conversations, which you make the argument, which I thought was brilliant. And I never heard before. That's actually a form of hermetic stress, having stressful conversations.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, I began to apply this concept of leaning into one's discomfort to other areas of life that weren't just, you know, physiological adversity of memetics, and trying to actually embrace the things that are hard, that we generally avoid. And one of those was having hard thorny conversations, especially with the people that we love, right, parents and friends and partners and children, but also with people that we don't know, you know, our society now is so characterized by kind of anonymous digital warriorship, where, you know, people just throw vitriolic barbs across social media at each other kind of all day and the most odious and certainly unprofitable way.

What if we try to different approach? I mean, I think a lot of these things come back to my question of like, how did I evolve? I evolved in tribe of 80, 90, 100 people didn't mean that we didn't have conflict, we certainly did. But we actually had to come face to face. And, you know, resolve our differences and find compromise and common ground and, you know, recognize our common humanity. And so I started to do that. And I engaged in as a form of research and development, I suppose, in in 26 hour long conversations with people that didn't agree with me about something or another. And kind of through that process, built a protocol for having these stressful conversations, that has become incredibly useful, you know, we have to, you know, we go to the gym to build our biceps and through a little bit of stress, and a little bit of rest, they grow back bigger. That same concept can be applied to one's kind of psychosocial life. So, you know, I started to embrace these stressful conversations. And yeah, if you kind of get into the book, you see that there's an actual protocol for for having them.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, you referenced the Stoics. I think one of my most freeing things I ever heard was the Stoic idea that you don't have to have an opinion, which is so freeing to me.

Like it's okay to just not have an opinion.

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, and to be, yeah, and not to be afraid of silent contemplation, you know, our kind of social media culture just assumes that, you know, if you don't say something about something that, you know, your, your intentions are, are Machiavellian or something and be like, well, how about I just actually sit in silence for a moment and listen and contemplate and not necessarily have a public opinion about every single issue of which I might not actually be equipped to have the best opinion. Yeah. So, you know, you see, you know, if you spend time on social media, you know, somehow the same people are the world's greatest experts in virology and vaccinology and Ukraine-Russian relations. I'm like, okay, well, that's interesting.

So, yeah, and, you know, the principles of stoicism are very influential for me in general. I mean, as it pertains to the stressful conversations, you can really build your psychological immune system in the very similar way that you build your physiological immune system through some low-grade exposure to quote-unquote insult, you build your physiological immune system, you know, through exposure to bacteria and viruses, such that then your adaptive immune system spins up these wonderful proteins called antibodies, which then gives you a certain amount of resilience, protection against those pathogens if you run into them again in real life. Same thing for your psychological immune system, a little bit of, you know, exposure to criticism and recrimination can build up your ability to be unflappable and emotionally resilient and euthemic is what the Greeks called it. You know, I think the idea that the best way to disarm an insult is to be unaffected by it. And to build that kind of psychological resilience is key to actually having a stressful conversation because you need to bring that emotional regulation into the conversations if you're going to have them, because you need to create a set and setting of tranquility and trust sort of from a polyvagal theory perspective, sort of ventral vagal activation where you're not, you know, in amygdala hijack, but you're not also disassociated in NAMM either, that you find a sort of vibrant alert serenity to be able to actually engage in conversations with people with different opinions. And, and that's okay to have different opinions. And, you know, we can also find connection with people with different opinions and not necessarily agree with them or find any sort of solution.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I could not agree more. It's why, it's why I love on this show, having people, I mean, everybody I bring on, I don't, I've never had anybody hostile on the show before. But I love having people of all different opinions, especially with like the diet wars and things like that, because I just think it's so important.

Because how come? Yeah, amazing. I mean, how do you, okay, I was gonna ask you, how do you pronounce because I love that word youth, is it Euthymia?

Jeff Krasno
Euthymia, yeah, so, yeah, I think, you know, the EU is sort of a prefix, Greek prefix for generally good. So if you're like Eudaimonia, it's sort of good life, good spirit or Euthymia. Even Euthanasia is actually, and originally met good, he originally met good death. Of course, we don't really associate Euthanasia in that way. We associate it kind of in a very negative way.

But, yeah, so Euthymia is this sort of unflappable, emotional state. And I sort of think about it as being a weeble wobble, which is more my era than yours probably. But they were like these little toys that, you know, you couldn't knock them down. They would just sort of sway and they would always kind of come back to center. It's not that like an insult or some form of opprobrium might knock you off, might not knock you off kilter for a moment, but you always have this ability to kind of pop back to center. And to me, that is the signature of health, the ability to foster homeostasis of every sort, psychological, physiological, ecological, political, economic, you know, health always lies in the middle.

Melanie Avalon
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time, Jeff. This was absolutely enlightening. My brain feels on fire. So motivating.

And yeah, listeners, I think they can understand now just how incredible this book is and what I was trying to capture when I was introducing you about how poetic and profound your work is. It really brings a whole new lens to this whole longevity biohacking sphere. I really, really appreciate what you're doing. How can people... Okay, well, I didn't even mention... So you're the co-founder and CEO of Commune. You also are the co-creator of Wonderlust, which is a global series of wellness events, and you have the Commune podcast. How can people best follow your work, all the things, get the book, et cetera?

Jeff Krasno
Yeah, well, I'd be shocked if they're still inclined to after two hours of blather. But well, you know, I do have this book, I'm a miserable self-promoter, but I did scoop up goodstress.com.

Melanie Avalon
That was available.

Jeff Krasno
that was available. Go figure. Yeah. And so you can go there and purchase the book. And if you do, I can bundle in all sorts of bonus goodies.

So my main gig is I run a platform called Commune, which is really best described as the masterclass for wellbeing. So we feature all sorts of online courses from thought leaders and doctors. I've got everyone in the kind of integrative and functional medicine space, but certainly a lot of kind of mindfulness teachers and mystics and sages. So if you buy that, I bundle in courses from like Zach Bush and Dr. Mark Hyman and Gabor Mate, et cetera. That's my book. It's good stress, the health benefits of doing hard things. And yeah, I have this podcast called the Commune podcast. And like you, I suffer through long conversations with brilliant people. So you can find me over there too.

Melanie Avalon
Well, this was an absolute delight. I really appreciate everything you're doing.

And the last question I ask every single guest on this show, and it is just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Jeff Krasno
Well, most recently, I'm grateful for all the people that have rallied around my work. It's just been really warming.

You know, my book came out really just very recently. I remember getting up that morning walking into the sun and feeling such an insane surge of gratitude bubbling up from under the crust of consciousness, thinking, man, I really get to stand upon the shoulders of so many brilliant people and feel their love and support. So that's what I'm grateful for.

Melanie Avalon
I love it. Well, thank you so much, Jeff. I am so, so grateful for all that you're doing. This was amazing.

Um, hopefully we can talk again in the future. I just really, really appreciate everything. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Jeff Krasno
Thanks Melanie, this was a really lovely surprise and just a wonderful way to spend a couple hours of my life. So thanks for doing what you're doing.

Melanie Avalon
Likewise, I'll have you the rest of your day, bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast.

For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What, When, Wine, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X. Please visit MelanieAvalon.com to learn more about today's guest. And always feel free to contact me at contact at MelanieAvalon.com. And always remember, you got this.