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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:09Speaker 01

  About four or five years ago, I had chronic fatigue, brain fog. I was always irritable. I was looking at my phone like every three seconds. I had no ability to focus or concentrate. I was tipping the scales. And then I got, you know, a bucket of cold water on my head with a diabetes diagnosis. It was a shock to me because, yeah, I was the wellness guy. How could I be part of the American nightmare? I had to wake up and make some serious changes.

• 1:39Rich Roll?

  When the wellness industry began to look more like a business than a movement, Jeff Krasno chose to chart a different path. A former music manager turned entrepreneur, Jeff is the co-founder of Wanderlust, which was basically like Coachella for yoga and wellness. An endeavor so all-consuming, it took a pre-diabetes diagnosis for him to realize that the business of wellness had made him, well, unwell. What followed was... A different commitment to well-being, one that led him down the rabbit hole and back, restoring his health along with a desire to serve others, which he does through a

• 2:19Rich Roll?

  platform he founded called Commune, which is a podcast as well as an online learning platform on which he hosts courses and events on everything from spirituality to regenerative agriculture, along with personal essays which he shares weekly with a growing audience in excess of a million people worldwide. What makes Jeff's perspective worth considering isn't just his insider knowledge, it's his willingness to challenge an industry he helped build. While others market quick fixes, Jeff offers something different, a return to what our bodies actually need. So today, we discuss all of this and more with a focus on the hows and whys behind inviting

• 2:59Rich Roll?

  more strategic discomfort into our daily experience as the solution that we need, all of which Jeff elaborates upon in his wonderful new book, Good Stress.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  We evolved these adaptive mechanisms that served us extremely well. And now, abundance is never balanced by any degree of scarcity or repair. But we know that in that scarcity and repair, all of these pathways in the body are activated to promote longevity and resilience.

• 3:38Rich Roll?

  Jeff, so nice to have you here. I think this is probably long overdue, but well timed, given the fact that you have this new book, Good Stress, which is wonderful. I think you did a fantastic job. On top of which, I love your writing style. You're quite the writer, so thank you for writing the book. We're going to talk about that, of course, but it's just good to kind of break bread with you here today.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, Rich. We've had a lot of informal commiserations, if you will, and compared a lot of notes on what it's like to sit behind a mic for a living. Perhaps we'll do a podcast where we pull back the curtain on that reality someday.

• 4:17Rich Roll?

  You think people would be interested in that?

• 4:18Speaker 01

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

• 4:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I do think, at least for now, it's worth kind of taking a bit of a state of the union on the wellness industrial complex. You and I are of the same age. I'm a little bit older than you, but we've both, you know, kind of been in this world for a long time. And I look to you as a person who keeps wise counsel and has a pretty good kind of ethical barometer. And I would say, at least in my own experience, it's been kind of a strange last couple of years to be a participant in an ecosystem that has experienced some

• 5:01Rich Roll?

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

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I suppose I try to apply some of my spiritual leanings towards sort of my political viewpoints and try to find and cultivate the middle way, if you will, which is a central tenet of Buddhism, where I try to consider all thoughtful points of view and then find some form of centralized coherence around them instead of just dismissing, you know, something as a conspiracy or something as, oh, just another artifice of the establishment, et cetera. You know, I think what we have seen, you know, in the

• 6:12Speaker 01

  wellness space is sort of a kind of perplexing political migration, if you will, you know, largely as a product of...

• 6:24Speaker 01

  You know, the Left's inability to platform conversations in many cases, you know, for many, many years, I mean, really since the beginning, the world of sort of preventative medicine, or integrative medicine, or healthy food, was the province of the Left. In fact, really, the Left was the party of anti-establishmentarianism. You can go back even to the 60s, you know, the Civil Rights Movement, or the anti-war movement, et cetera. And then certainly, you know, what we see out here in California, which was kind of the early seeds of the hippie movement, that embraced, you know, healthy food and preventative

• 7:04Speaker 01

  medicine, and sometimes kooky, wacky ideas, but, you know, ones that were interesting, and then sometimes bore out by science, and sometimes not. What we've seen, you know, I think, starting, well, accelerating really with COVID, was sort of an odd horseshoeing of, you know, the Left, and the part of the Left that has embraced, you know, many of these kind of wellness or health modalities, with a certain element of the Right, which has always considered themselves very libertarian, right? And so, sometimes that has manifested in kind of anti-vaccine, or vaccine skeptical

• 7:45Speaker 01

  movements, or homeschool movements, or even like, raw milk, or get your fluoride out of my water, whatever. And then, we saw kind of the emergence of, you know, Robert Kennedy, sort of soldering the edges of that horseshoe together, and-- The horseshoe became a circle. The horseshoe became a circle, yes, well put. And, you know, we, I think now, with, you know, Kennedy becoming HHS Secretary, I think it has created a sort of strange tension, both in Washington, you know, with some of the people on the Left that have, you know, been leading the healthy movement in terms

• 8:29Speaker 01

  of policy for a long time, like Cory Booker, or Senator Bernie Sanders. But also has created a lot of conflict for just--

• 8:40Speaker 01

  You know, thinking people like you and I, who have seen this, you know, the issues related to healthy food and sane policies related to medicine and healthcare. We've seen those as adjacent issues to sane climate policy or sane women's rights policy or healthcare or health insurance policy. And now they appear to be very bifurcated from those policies. And I think it, you know, it'll be a very, very kind of challenging moment in Washington, too, because of course,

• 9:24Speaker 01

  you know, the right has typically embraced deregulation as their sort of primary lens through which they see the role of government. And I think what we would really need to change the food system and the collusion, if you will, between sort of big pharma and big food and big agriculture is more regulation. So there's going to be that inherent tension there. That'll be, I think, interesting to see how it plays out. I think, you know, for, for you and I, you know, holding the middle can be, can feel like very lonely, really, a lot of times.

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  Because you're, you're sort of a man without a tribe when you do that. And, and you expose yourself to criticism from both sides. I just shared with you before the podcast, I put up an episode with a functional medicine doctor, which is something I've been doing from day one. And for the first time, the comments were very politicized. The left sort of flagellating me for peddling pseudoscience and the right, you know, kind of welcoming me, you know, to the other side and saying, finally, you know, you've, you've seen the light, neither of which are true. I feel like I've been charting this same course from, from day one. But then I have to, you know, on that topic of like, you know, kind of leaning into

• 10:49Rich Roll?

  Being curious, I have to then challenge my own biases around this. So when I say, how has this issue suddenly become politicized? The truth is perhaps that maybe I've always perceived it or aligned it with with a different kind of political lens all along, right? And maybe I'm I'm sort of, you know, trying to navigate the confusion that comes with the inversion of that. And it's suddenly becoming a talking point, you know, for the other party. But it is interesting, that tension between this deregulation, you know, kind of priority on the right

• 11:29Rich Roll?

  with the hand in hand, you know, need for the regulations to advance those policies that suddenly, you know, they're championing. That is interesting. But I think it's when you think back on its antecedents, yes, the hippie movement, civil rights. That gave birth to sensibilities around alternative health, which have always been, you know, part of that kind of community. So the original distrust or contrarianism is progressive by nature. A distrust of Big Pharma and Big Medicine and all of these things were very much of the left, right? And now to see them on the other side creates an experience that that feels like you woke up in a parallel universe and everything kind of looks the same, but it's a little bit different.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:10Rich Roll?

  And and trying to, you know, figure out how to walk that middle path and, you know, breathe life into, you know, the ideas that you think are important and worthy while kind of trying to sidestep all the, you know, the minds that are, you know, ahead of you as you walk that path is a challenge.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're closing a lot of doors behind us. Almost everything that I say, I feel like, yeah, I'm say, I'm kind of modifying it in some fashion in order to keep a lot of different constituents happy to some degree. I think that.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Right wing media found a tremendous amount of traction in anti-establishmentarianism. You know, now it has landed, it's put its thumb on health and food. But prior to that, you know, certainly there was a tremendous amount of traction around, you know, anti-Big Pharma, certainly around in conjunction with COVID, but also against kind of the mainstream media complex, for example. And really, all of the other institutions that have long served liberal democracies, sort of anti-government, anti quote unquote "science."

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, to be anti, particularly in the age of social media, I think is, has a lot of potency. You know, social media, which is the primary way that most people get their information now, is engineered to algorithmically preference content that is designed to make people mad and outraged and triggered. And anti-establishment content does just that. It's not sexy to get up there and say, "Well, the government fixed your roads and helps to provide electricity and water."

• 14:06Speaker 01

  No one's, you know, sharing that content. But it is pretty sexy to get up there and say, "Okay, well, you know, you know, the government is in collusion and subsidizing, you know, big food that's owned by the same asset management firms as Big Pharma. And, you know, the same, you know, investors that are creating the products, that are delivering the poison are also delivering the antidote in the form of drugs that never really address the root causes of the problem, but only the symptoms of the disease, such that people are, you know, on them forever."

• 14:41Rich Roll?

  And the revolving door between those who regulate these industries and the, and the people that run them.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  True. And all of that is actually true. You know, those misaligned incentives and that, you know, backroom deals and that revolving door is incredibly deleterious to, to human health and the health of American citizens. So, yes, you know, Much of what comes out of the mouths of people kind of within the functional medicine world that have now kind of, you know, moved towards the right is actually true. It's the same things that we've been saying for many, many years. I've been making content, for example, on how in the mid eighties,

• 15:28Speaker 01

  big tobacco scooped up all of the big food companies like Kraft and Nabisco, you know, Philip Morris and RJR scooped up all of these companies and essentially, you know, leveraged their business intelligence and their marketing savvy and their understanding of addiction to essentially addict a generation of Americans, particularly American kids, to ultra-processed foods and, you know, cereals and et cetera. I've been saying that for a long time. It's just, you know, it has a different sort of currency today.

• 16:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a different valence to it now. And I suppose, you know, everything is political now. It used to be, you know, don't talk about politics and don't talk about religion. But essentially, I think no topic is left untouched. And certainly, you know, wellness, food, nutrition, all of these ideas that you and I have been talking about for a long time are no exemption to that. But in the midst of it, like, as people who are both, you know, kind of content creators in this space, running commercial enterprises, like, how are we, you know, not immune to those incentives? So I'm curious around, you know, how you find your ballast amidst all of this to, you know, not fall prey to, you know, the clickbait

• 16:51Rich Roll?

  or knowing like, oh, well, if I do this, I know it's going to work. You know, what is the truth? And kind of holding to your ethical standards around, you know, putting stuff out there in the world that's helpful and, you know, aligned with your values and the message that you're trying to profligate.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, candidly, it's a challenge. How do you essentially break through the noise, you know, with important, rigorously excavated information?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  While also not playing that clickbaity game, you know, not essentially taking an anecdote, laying a bias over it, releasing or deploying a piece of content specifically designed to leverage someone's human negativity bias. I mean, the incentive is so strong to do that, right? And, you know, we see plenty of people within our space that have had a tremendous amount of success following that formula. And, you know, for us, it's more about really staying the course and really investing in the long term

• 18:06Speaker 01

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

• 18:51Speaker 01

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

• 19:24Rich Roll?

  And then presenting what you find along the way in all its messy nuance, right? As opposed to the, you know, the reductive finding that applies to everybody in every case. And, and resisting the impulse to...

• 19:41Rich Roll?

  Presents loose findings based on weak data to extrapolate you know, a sort of quote unquote, you know, truth that they that they don't want you to know.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I find that the truth generally like clusters somewhere towards the middle. Almost always, you know, I tend to avoid the thinnest edges of every branch. And and look to see kind of where the information clusters. And it generally like clusters towards the middle. Again, this is sort of a Madhyamaka Buddhist approach towards epistemology, I guess.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  But, you know, and not that the consensus is always right. Sometimes the consensus is wrong, but that again, it's sort of being open to new evidence as it arises.

• 20:38Rich Roll?

  Let's take a step back and and kind of create some context for, you know, how you how you kind of got involved in this wellness world and ultimately, you know, kind of, you know, made it your mission in life. As I look back, like, there seems to be a couple important inflection points. But, you know, maybe walk us through quickly your childhood and how you ended up in in New York.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Well, I had a very peripatetic childhood. My father was a Fulbright professor and he was getting stationed around at various esoteric universities, teaching even greater, even more esoteric topics. So, you know, I lived in Northern England and Spain and Brazil, moved around Brazil quite a bit. And, you know, this was a sort of wonderful way on some level to grow up culturally. But but also had a lot of challenges. I was a super chubby, sort of preternaturally chubby kid. And I was moving every six months.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  So I was getting stationed into a new environment, in a new school, in a new language, with a new clique of friends. And, you know, the the MO of my life became, you know, fitting in, really. And I didn't really understand at that juncture, the delineation, I suppose, between fitting in and belonging. So I was really willing, as I examine it in retrospect, to compromise my authentic self in order to fit into groups of friends. And that, you know, really, you know, to fast forward many decades, that really kind of informed the folklore of my life of, you know,

• 22:28Speaker 01

  that I was this chubby kid that would do anything to be liked, that I, you know, really judged myself, you know, through the eyes of others and by extension, became sort of an epic people pleaser. And I think many of your listeners can relate to that infirmity.

• 22:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I certainly fall prey to it very much. Was it Brené Brown that initially snapped you out of that and helped you to understand that difference between fitting in and belonging?

• 23:06Speaker 01

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

• 23:46Speaker 01

  that, you know, humans are so deeply wired to connect with one another, that we will, almost every time, particularly children, you know, sacrifice our kind of authentic selves in order to establish those forms of connection. And certainly that was a signature of my life.

• 24:04Rich Roll?

  Sure, it's an adaptation for survival that only...

• 24:08Rich Roll?

  Becomes a mal-adaptation later in life when you realize that you don't know what your authentic self is, you know, and kind of manifests as a bit of an existential crisis. But prior to that, you, it's something, at least for me, you sort of think of as a positive quality, like, hey, I can, you know, I know how to slide in and get along with everyone. And, you know, I know, I know kind of what to say in response to every question so I can be the person I think they want me to be. And it allows you to kind of navigate your way in and out of a variety of different social circles. And so you, you come to think of it or rely upon it as a, as a skill, right? Only to later discover, like, you have that, like, who am I?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, candidly, it's part of what we're doing right now.

• 24:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Because, you know, we are master generalists that can chameleon ourselves into almost any situation. And in some ways, we have transmuted our greatest weakness into our, into a superpower. You know, I look back at, you know, when I have space from my life and I try to examine and identify, you know, the threads, you know, which have been woven through the entire fabric of my life. You know, I point to like, well, what are the things, what are the things I've done? You know, well, I was running a record label and a music promotions company, doing, you know, big shows all the time and putting

• 25:35Speaker 01

  people, you know, in clubs and theaters. And then from there, I went and started this wellness behemoth called Wanderlust, which was, you know, these festivals that we put all over the world. What were they? Well, they were like assembling like-minded people around, you know, modalities and practices. And then I started something literally called Commune.

• 25:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  And I was like, and I did all of this somewhat unwittingly. And then of course, you know, in a moment of satori, I'm like, oh, wait a minute, what I really do. You know, at the core is bring people together. And I put so much primacy on that because it was so hard for me to belong, that I treasure it, I sanctify it so deeply, that now it's become sort of my superpower.

• 26:24Rich Roll?

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

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. It's funny, it's funny. But I think this is a kind of inventory that everyone can benefit from, candidly. You know, where you look at, you know, these places of Achilles' heels in your own life, and you actually then realize, how can I actually transmute those things into superpowers? How can, you know, PTSD become post-traumatic growth? It is possible.

• 26:57Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Speaking of which, 9/11 is sort of that first inflection point for you, that snaps you out of kind of one experience of yourself, and begins to position you into another.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes I think it's rather incongruous that Bin Laden propelled my wellness journey.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  But in the wake of 9/11,

• 27:25Speaker 01

  my wife Skylar opened up Kula Yoga Project, which was a yoga studio just north of Ground Zero. So, you know, prior to 9/11, I was running and operating this music label and management company just on Murray Street. So just like two blocks north of the World Trade Center. And then subsequently on Warren Street, which is even just one block north of there. And then that tragedy-

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Occurred and then in that first, you know, couple of months, you know, we were in that tight little perimeter around ground zero and sort of cordoned off from getting into, um, getting into our, uh, office. And then finally we got in and it was completely inundated with soot and ash and, um, fair, pretty much everyone that had been in that office building kind of flown the coop. It was mostly creatives and photographers and whatnot. So there was a lot of empty real estate and Skylar did, uh, something sort of quite amazing for the moment, you know, she opened a yoga studio out of the ashes

• 28:36Speaker 01

  of ground zero. And, um, you know, and mind you, this was not some multi-story Tony Equinox situation, you know, this was prior to the advent of a, you know, well-appointed yoga studio on every corner. This was a funky monkey, one-room yoga studio with, uh, the bathroom was actually in the studio. It was about the width of a bread box and there was a, a sort of whistling radiator. And, um, you know, you literally had to walk up these cock-eyed lime green stairs through my office to get up into the yoga studio. And, you know, a lot of people associate lower Manhattan with the financial district

• 29:21Speaker 01

  and that is true, but there were, it is a very densely populated residential area. And this little funky Kula yoga studio became sort of a center of healing for the grief-stricken and kind of beleaguered denizens of lower Manhattan. And, you know, this is really where I got, you know, uh, my first kind of front row seat to witness, you know, the power of, um, kind of spiritual and physical practices, but even more than that, community to, to heal. And so, you know, I would walk up, you know, from my office and stand in that

• 30:04Speaker 01

  tiny little funky vestibule and people would be coming out of class all sweaty and open-hearted and open-minded and collapse on this little futon right there in that vestibule. And I, you know, was Witnessed to a tremendous amount of healing and laughing and crying and story sharing. And I said, wow, this is really quite amazing. And that that moment bent the arc of my, both my personal and professional life.

• 30:32Rich Roll?

  From there, you got to start doing these retreats. This is, you're starting, you're, you're starting to kind of get, you know, steeped in a different way of life as a, as a result of that, while also having a, you know, fun and a good time. But like a good entrepreneur, you decide, well, the next step is we need to blow this up into like a huge deal and, and I'm going to create the world's largest yoga. Like I want to make this experience that I'm having that's so transformative, available to everyone. And the way that I do it in my businessman's mind is to create the, you know, the world's largest version of it.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. In retrospect, I, I laugh at how utterly male this idea was, right? I was, you know, sitting there at a retreat center in the middle of the jungle of the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, you know, waking with the sun, you know, meditating, doing yoga, surfing, you know, just eating the local food right there. And of course, then yes, I had this idea of like, how do I scale this, you know? Could I, you know, put this experience of a yoga retreat, you know, in a more accessible place at a more accessible price point and really, yeah, create the world's greatest and biggest yoga retreat. And that was called Wanderlust.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  And it, yeah, it was a grueling, brilliant, wonderful, awful 10 years of my life in which, you know, my three daughters and I and Skylar traveled like a band of gypsies all over the world in the name of yoga.

• 32:09Rich Roll?

  I love what you wrote about this in the book, so I'm just gonna read, read what you said, which is a tribute to your, your beautiful writing style. You say, "For a decade, wanderlust became my entire life. I worked 16 hours per day, seven days a week. My travel schedule was insane and I rarely slept. Naively, we took on private equity investors. Their edict was simple: grow. But the money didn't come for free. These cigar-smoking plutocrats, perched atop a glass midtown panopticon, scrutinized our every move. Wanderlust consumed me, and eventually it expelled me out its anus like insoluble fiber." I was like, "How long did it take you to craft that paragraph?" That's pretty good, man.

• 32:53Speaker 01

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

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  You're bringing it all together.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  All of the interests, all of my various inquests, from the, the business to the physiological, to, you know, feeding my, my, my gut, which was as leaky as a rusty old pipe, I found out. Yeah, I mean, you know, about four or five years ago, I got a, you know, well, I was presenting in all sorts of ways that are so common that we sort of accept them as ordinary, but really what we've done is we've normalized the abnormal. So I had chronic fatigue, brain fog, I was always irritable, I was looking at my phone like every three

• 33:42Speaker 01

  seconds, I had no ability to focus or concentrate, I was tipping the scales at 206, 210, in that range.

• 33:50Rich Roll?

  That's so hard to imagine. I have a hard time picturing you at that weight.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I did an excellent job camouflaging it. And, but then, you know, there were also, um, you know, just-

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Odeous insults to my vanity, which I talk about in the book. I mean, I, yeah, I kind of jelly belly and kind of the dad bod complex. And but I think the worst was what I clinically known as gynecomastia, but otherwise known as the boobs of man. I think the greatest insult was when my youngest daughter, Micah, left a training bra on my bed. I was like, that's not funny. And then I got, you know, a bucket of cold water, which at that juncture was not a deliberate protocol on my head with a diabetes diagnosis

• 34:42Speaker 01

  about five years ago, four and a half years ago. And, you know, really, it was a shock to me because, yeah, I was the wellness guy. I was running a yoga festival, you know, raising three daughters, shopping at Whole Foods, you know, an upright citizen, paying my taxes, etc. You know, how could I be part of the American nightmare? How could I be one of these statistics of, you know, 50% of Americans are now prediabetic, 11 to 13% are diabetic? And I was well within that American nightmare. And a lot of that was really just the product

• 35:19Speaker 01

  of, you know, my lifestyle. You know, I was, yes, in service of a well-intentioned goal to bring wellness to many, many people, but I was not well. And in fact, yeah, my forays into health and wellness take a U-turn into wealth and hellness.

• 35:38Rich Roll?

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

• 35:42Speaker 01

  You can have it.

• 35:43Rich Roll?

  Wealth and hellness. All this wellness, you know, made you unwell in the pursuit of wealth and hellness.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:51Rich Roll?

  Or arriving you in a place of hellness as a result.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, you know, I had to, you know, I had to wake up and, you know, go on a really significant journey, both physiologically, psychologically, spiritually, really, that sounds a little pompous, but true, to really take a deeper inventory of who I was and how I was living and make some serious changes. And part of me is because I'm...

• 36:26Speaker 01

  I have a very cognitive and sort of intellectual approach to many things. Skylar was sitting there as a specimen of a human being, all ripped, doing yoga, drinking her raw milk and eating her greens and whatnot. I mean, I had everything right in front of me, but I actually had to-

• 36:44Rich Roll?

  This is another thing we share, so.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, true. We certainly married up, or at least sideways, most of the time. But I had to understand it intellectually. I took initially a very cognitive or intellectual approach to understanding human physiology. And originally it was out of curiosity, and then, like I said, it became out of necessity. And so I wanted to understand the empirical values associated with heart rate variability and glucose levels, etc. And what I began to attach to is like, what I could measure, I could improve.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And that slowly led me to essentially jumping into my own Petri dish and becoming an experiment and doing a tremendous amount of research and, like you, interviewing hundreds upon hundreds of doctors and health experts and mystics and sages and trying to distill that wisdom in a way that worked for me. And also, like you, had to do a lot of sifting through the grifting, is what I call it, of this space is full of kooky, crazy, cockamamie ideas and what mode and modality and mushroom and pill and praxis is actually going to work.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  And so it's been largely an enjoyable journey to, instead of being on a downward spiral of health, I found an upward spiral. And I'm still mostly there.

• 38:37Rich Roll?

  This begins with you putting on a continuous glucose monitor and realizing your blood sugar is out of whack, right? This is kind of like the epiphany in which you realize like, oh my God, like I thought I was healthy, but I'm very much not. You go down this rabbit hole and being like myself, somebody who can only be convinced when there is, you know, science and rationality to back it up, right? Old Enlightenment values. This strength that we have, like I know that you're somebody who like is very happy when you're sitting with a stack of research in front of you and you're reading it and you're like educating yourself and the like. And as a result of that and all the conversations that you've had, you, you can talk about mTOR and like, you know, all the stuff, right?

• 39:20Rich Roll?

  Like you can throw all the buzzwords out there and you have the understanding to, you know, kind of back up your, your, your use of them. But at the same time, and also what I think makes you and this book so unique and compelling is this doesn't come at the cost of understanding like the why behind it, which is very much rooted in matters metaphysical, right? There's a whole spiritual aspect to this that's so important that you make it the first part of the book before you even get to all the fun mTOR, cold plunging sauna, red light, you know, kind of, you know, sulforaphane of, of all of it, right? You know what I mean? Like, and I love that you did that.

• 40:04Rich Roll?

  So maybe share a little bit about how the lights came on in terms of like, how you came to understand that this is such an important aspect of all of it, without which the protocols perhaps, you know, aren't really going to matter or stick.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Well, this is a bit of a knife fight with my editor, candidly, because as you can imagine, the books that sell out there, you know, they give me the eight protocols for this or that. And I'm like, yeah, but what about the philosophy and the mysticism? Oh, well, you know, put that in a, in a PDF bonus or something. I'm like, no, I can't. Because, you know, to be honest, my journey was as much metaphysical as physical. And in the end, what I saw was the metaphysical patterned in the physical everywhere that I looked. But I guess I'll just say that, you know, my entree into really improving myself was not,

• 41:05Speaker 01

  you know, reading Peter Attia or, you know, Andrew Huberman or, you know, figuring out the difference between anabolic and catabolic pathways and whatnot. It was really studying mysticism, particularly kind of Eastern thought. I'm completely addicted to Alan Watts. In fact, as a caveat, I will say, when I'm talking about this, I often drift into a bit of a transatlantic accent.

• 41:35Rich Roll?

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

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really.

• 41:45Rich Roll?

  Do you need, do you need some vodka?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Well, I say it's ironic that a man so committed to tumblers and vodka precipitated my hellness, my hellness journey, my wealth and hellness journey. No, I mean, you know, well, I'll just say this, I blame the Buddha because, you know, the Buddha's saying that I'm, you know, changing moment to moment in relation to my environment. All I do is listen to Alan Watts and Christopher Hitchens. It won't be the last time that I blame a spiritual figure for my shortcomings. But yeah, I just, you know, if I, if I veer into an upper received pronunciation, like, I wish I was British, candidly.

• 42:24Rich Roll?

  I'll, I'll, I'll take note. I'll call you out if I hear it.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  We were just hanging out with Rangan Chatterjee, right? You know, that brilliant doctor, a British doctor. I mean, that guy, he could read the phone book as far as I'm concerned. It's just his accent is.

• 42:40Rich Roll?

  Melodic accent, yes.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like on the edge of my seat while he's like, John Dooley. Tim Doolingsworth, whatever.

• 42:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and he's a tall glass of handsomeness along the way. Anyway.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  I wish I was British. Oh, well. So, but, you know, Alan Watts and Ram Dass, you know, I licensed both of their catalogs for Commune. And so I listened endlessly to their lectures on Eastern mysticism. And, you know, my inquest into Eastern thought and human physiology kind of converged. And I was having these kind of moments of satori. And I kind of wove up this theory of health called the Tao of health, very much kind of built on the shoulders of the Tao of Physics, which was a very influential book that I read by Fritzoff Capra.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  But, you know, there's tenants without, you know, spending the next eight hours doing a sort of Buddhism 101 course here with you. But there's tenants in Buddhism, you know, that you can see then patterned in human physiology. So I'll just kind of roll through some of them. You know, as the Buddha sort of, you know, canoodled around northern India and then, you know, experimented with fasting. I mean, at one juncture, it's claimed that he was eating one grain of rice per day. I don't know if that's true. That sounds good. But finally, you know, he found his way, you know, to the Bodhi tree. And under this tree, you know, had his great awakening.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  And one of the primary tenants that then informed what, you know, became the Four Noble Truths was this notion of impermanence. So he called it in Sanskrit, añika, which is that everything is transitory. Everything's always in flux, always in change. So attaching to anything is fruitless because everything is always changing. And in fact, that attachment to things is the source of clinging. That clinging, that craving to things is the source of suffering, or what he called dukkha.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Of course, this notion of impermanence punctuates every single thing that's happening here in the human body. And that really violates our sense of identity. It's like Rich gets up in the morning and feels, looks in the mirror, handsome man that he is, and sees a stable, reliable self through this sense of physical continuity. We feel like a fixed thing day to day. But when you actually open up the hood here in human physiology, what we see is total impermanence. Glucose being catalyzed to pyruvate, being then used for ATP,

• 45:44Speaker 01

  electrical signals zipping across synapses between neurons. Or look at the microbiome, for example. That perhaps is like one of the greatest examples of impermanence when you start to look at human physiology. We have these, I mean, the human body is about 70 trillion cells. Thirty-nine trillion aren't even human, right? And they reside and now are found in every organ on our skin, even in our aura. It's like we're no longer even barrier'd by our skin, right? But primarily, they're found in sort of this den of our colon. And these prokaryotes, these single-celled organisms,

• 46:26Speaker 01

  mitigate and regulate almost every system of the body. In fact, we've outsourced a tremendous amount of processes like digestion, but also they sit right there near the immune system because so much of the immune system, for good reason, is in the gut. And they're moderating inflammation levels, insulin sensitivity, all this different stuff. They are disappearing. They're coming and going every four minutes to 24 hours. And so, literally, the guy that sat down here with you to start this podcast is a completely different human if you're talking just about my cellular makeup. All I do is change. And the Buddha intuited this concept prior to any...

• 47:15Speaker 01

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

• 47:59Speaker 01

  And this gave birth to these theories of dependent origination, that everything is reliant on everything else. And then this was echoed across many other eastern fields of thought, at Gigi Muji in Japan, and Zen, and even in Africa with Ubuntu, this notion that I am because we are. And again, if you then start to superimpose this notion of interconnectedness on what it is like to be human, you find it everywhere. And again, this somewhat violates our sense of identity.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Because we feel, we experience life, most times as a low eye of consciousness, kind of crouching somewhere behind the eyes, sort of separate from the world around us, confronting the world around us as something external. But that, under any rigorous examination, that becomes a complete delusion. And so, like, for example, like, you're a runner. What is your experience of running on flat ground versus up a steep grade?

• 49:15Rich Roll?

  Well, they're very different things. But the the common denominator of which is this experience that I am doing it, you know? And it is, you know, me and the decisions that I'm making that are that are individuating me and propelling me through the world, which is, you know, very confronting to this notion of oneness. You know, it's easy to say like, we're all one and like, we're part of a community and all of that. But to really kind of fully grok the fact that there is no separation under this rigorous scrutiny that you're talking about is is something that's deeply uncomfortable to us.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think, you know, I mean, I think about it this way is that hmm, that the behavior and function of an organism is inseparable from the behavior and function of its environment. So, you know, you run slower on sand, you run even more slowly in water, let's just say. It's like the you that is doing it is inseparable from the environment that is around you. And so that's a very sort of like banal example. But we grok this sort of by dint of, you know, our everyday experience, right? You know, like a car cuts us off in traffic or, you know, you're running through the hills

• 50:39Speaker 01

  and you come across a coyote or a rattlesnake and what happens? You have this kind of involuntary stress response, right? Your HPA axis is activated and that's, you know, telling your adrenal glands to create a glucorticoid called cortisol, which is then synthesized from cholesterol all of a sudden. And then that courses through your veins and your respiratory and your heart rates start to increase and glucose then gets flushed out to your extremities to fight or fly and the aperture of your attention becomes super, super narrow and your pupils dilate and you don't trust the world and you become very self-obsessed and that's a actually serves the biological imperative. All those things are happening around you just because you actually see something that

• 51:22Speaker 01

  you perceive as a threat, you know, or someone screams in the other room, that a sound wave can literally become. A hormone in the matter of seconds, you know, that energy becomes matter, that we are completely inseparable from our environment. And so when you merge these two concepts of impermanence and interconnection, what you find is that we are changing moment to moment in relationship to our environment. And that might seem somewhat obvious,

• 52:05Speaker 01

  but for those of us like me who are, who were stuck in their old story of like, I am just this fixed Jeff whose destiny is written in the stars. I'll never be good enough. I'll always be fat. No one will ever like me. The idea that I'm always changing in relation to my environment and that I have some agency to change my environment. That was candidly incredibly liberating.

• 52:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the agency piece is, is the kind of leap that you take once you notice that you are a function of your environment. And then the extension of that is to exert it to create this balance, right? Which is kind of the final principle in the Tao of health. And what's so cool about this is that all of these truths are evident in nature, in our environments. And what is true for our environments is true for ourselves and our bodies, right? Like, it's just, you know, this is how nature made it, right? And we're quick to see how these patterns are so important

• 53:17Rich Roll?

  in terms of like the ecosystem of a forest or a, you know, or a, or a, whatever it is, right? A high plain or a, the desertification of a certain piece of land over a great period of time. But we're reluctant to notice those patterns within ourselves or admit that they are equally true.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we don't see ourselves as nature. We see nature as something outside of us that is a threat that we must confront. And, you know, we've been taught that by our Abrahamic traditions, right? It's that, you know, Well, we were made out of a ceramic figurine in which God blew a soul into. This is right out of Genesis. And that matter is the province of the devil, and it's dumb. And of course, it must be sublimated because it's susceptible to vice and pleasures of the flesh, or whatever.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  And that nature is something that must be subdued, right? And that we have dominion over, because it's not trustworthy, because it's out to get you, because it's going to show up as pests and weeds and whatnot. And certainly, there's a part of us, human nature, that's certainly not to be trusted, because it's sinful. And without some sort of old bogey in the sky with a moral abacus sort of monitoring our sexual transgressions, we'd rape our best friend's sister, something like that, some crazy notion like that.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  And this is candidly why I put this blade of grass growing through the concrete on the cover of the book. And I'm sure this is an experience people have had, but have you ever walked through a concrete jungle landscape? It's just sidewalks and roads and buildings everywhere, and you look down, and all of a sudden, there's just like a dandelion or a blade of grass coming through the concrete. And you're like, oh, my God, it's just, nature is irrepressible. And this is a place where we can truly put our faith, not as the typical understanding

• 55:39Speaker 01

  of faith, of belief in the absence of evidence, but actually trust in nature's eternal reliability. It's actually why we exhale. It's like we exhale because we trust deeply, profoundly, that there is another breath waiting for us, right?

• 56:01Rich Roll?

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

• 56:05Speaker 01

  That's it. I mean, that is actually the definition of nirvana. Near, out, fauna, blow, blow out. Let go, let go. Because you must trust in nature. And you know, nature will sometimes let you down. You know, it's perfect by design. It makes mistakes in its execution. You can find that in biology. Sometimes there's mutations, single nucleotide polymorphism, SNPs, right? That predispose you to some disease or sometimes it's actually dispositive towards some diseases. But what are you gonna do? Not trust nature and always be fearful of it?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  And live kind of with these paroxysms of anxiety of like, I don't trust myself. I don't trust the world around me. No, I mean, that doesn't seem like a, like a adaptive way to live.

• 56:58Rich Roll?

  But fundamentally, isn't that distrust not only real? It's what kind of created the modern society that is moving us towards ill health. Right? Because as a defense mechanism, some part of us doesn't trust nature or ourselves, which you know, creates this scarcity brain that Michael Easter talks about. Like, you know, if we have enough resources, we don't trust that maybe nature is going to provide us more around the corner. So we need to, you know, gather and collect as much as we can, when we can, and to consume as much as possible because nature is an unknown that maybe isn't going to provide if we exhale too much. And so gather we must.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. True. I mean, I think that, I mean, if you look at like the cycles within nature that exist, like abundance and scarcity, nature in some ways provides for both. And we adapt in relation to it. So for example, if you can imagine, you know, Jeff and Rich on the Serengeti of, you know,

• 58:10Speaker 01

  The East Africa, some 10,000 years ago, off we go, you know, to forage and hunt and gather. And in the late summer, early fall, you know, we might arrive on this cops of ripe fig trees, right? And, you know, you and I, what would we do? We're just gonna like gorge as many figs as we can and become a little bit fat.

• 58:33Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  And that is completely adaptive. And by nature's design, we were actually designed to be a little bit fat in the fall because nature innately knew, they engineered us for the paucity of winter's fallow that was right around the corner. And this is where we get into, you know, the ideology of chronic disease because we live in a world now where, quote unquote, from a food perspective, winter never comes. So the way that we live, our lifestyle, our culture is hijacking our biology. It's actually using our adaptive mechanisms to store fat, which is just warehouse to

• 59:14Speaker 01

  energy. It's using that, our adaptive mechanisms against us and making them maladaptive.

• 59:20Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  And so this is where you get into these evolutionary mismatches and all that.

• 59:24Rich Roll?

  Right, but this is the portal into the subject matter of the book, which is this notion of stress and distinguishing, you know, good stress from bad stress.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:34Rich Roll?

  So the overabundance of our hyper-convenient world is a recipe for the chronic level of stress that's driving all of these ailments that are making us unnecessarily sick and unnecessarily killing millions of people. The antidote to which, of course, are these acute forms of stress that nature kind of took care of in and of its own, you know, to provide to us, to keep us healthy, but which we've kind of eradicated from our daily experience.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not making good use of our hard-rot adaptations, you know, for tens of thousands of years, really 200,000 years as it pertains to Homo sapiens and millions of years of... Homed life, you know, we evolved these adaptive mechanisms that served us extremely well, you know, and now essentially in a very, very short period of time, really since the industrial revolution, but accelerating in the last 50 years, what we're seeing is all of the artifacts of modernity are hijacking those adaptations. They're upending our adaptive

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  advantages, if you will. And so, you know, you can isolate and identify a whole bunch of them, you know, our continuous eating cycle. I mean, I was, I went to Denny's, I don't often end up at Denny's, but I noticed on the little sandwich board, you know, this was a couple of years ago, on the wall, they had breakfast, right? Served all day, thank God. They had lunch, dinner, and then they had a fourth meal of the day, late night.

• 1:01:16Rich Roll?

  That's probably where they make most of their money, you know, when the bars close, it's Denny's time.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  It's Denny's time. And I was like, oh my God, you know, we just never stop eating. You know, abundance is never balanced by any degree of scarcity or repair. But we know that in that scarcity and repair, all of these pathways in the body are activated that promote longevity and resilience. And this is where we get into some of those like autophagy and ketosis and, you know, activating AMPK, right, and stifling mTOR, et cetera. And those, you know, those enhance the body's ability to be resilient. And so now, what

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  we really need to do in order to align ourselves with our biology, with our engineering, is superimpose some of these old paleolithic stressors back onto our life. And that's really what informed this amalgam of protocols.

• 1:02:20Rich Roll?

  Right. The onus is now on the individual to take responsibility for, you know, ushering in these things that just happened as a matter of circumstance. Of living your life in the days of yore, right?

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Rich Roll?

  And this goes to like the agency piece. Like this is where we need to exert that agency all the way down to an epigenetic level, right, to get certain genes to express themselves as a result of taking actions that are uncomfortable to invite a stress that you would call is good and promoting of health and health span and all these things that, you know, we're coming to understand and lean into for maybe the first time out of necessity because they've been so eradicated from our lives.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, if you, if you go back and you, you really ask this seminal question. This is what the question that I started to ask myself all the time is, because it's very difficult to kind of navigate the wilderness of wellness. You know, we're getting so much deluge of information all of the time. But if you ask this one simple question, how did I evolve, right? How did I evolve in relation to what I ate and when I ate? Or how I moved, or my relationship with nature? Or my relationship with temperature? Or my relationship with light? Or my relationship with the people around me?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Just ask that simple question and the answers will really appear candidly. So if we can pick any one of those, you know, we were exposed to constant large fluctuations in temperature for the overwhelming majority of human history. So on the plains of the Serengeti or elsewhere, you know, there would be 70, 60, 70 degree fluctuations in temperature. It would be freezing cold at night. It would be scorching hot during the day. We were largely living outside or maybe in little tiny huts. So we established mechanisms within the human body to manage,

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  and not only manage, but thrive in these conditions of stress. And so Instead of resorting to the nice digital thermometer or thermostat over on the wall, we actually had an internal thermostat right here, kind of above, you know, the mouth below the nose and the pre-optic kind of area of the brain that communicated with the hypothalamus that when our core body temperature, for example, plummeted, you know, we would have an adaptation to that stress. We would start to shiver. We would start to oxidize fat, stored triglycerides in our fat cells, to then use them in our

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  mitochondria to make heat, to up-regulate ourselves back into that Goldilocks zone of 98.6. So getting cold on a regular basis was actually incredibly adaptive. You know, the same thing for getting really, really hot. You know, we have mechanisms to cool down, perspiration and sweating, but also there were all of these other proteins that were activated when we get really hot. There's these things called heat shock proteins that kind of maintain the three-dimensional shapes of proteins and the functionality of proteins, you know, particularly, you know, in the brain. They're, they also stimulate what's now known as BDNF, brain drive neurotrophic factor, right, that actually maintains the

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  functionality of neurons and potentially the creation of new neurons. So there's so much benefit in getting extremely hot and extremely cold, but now we live primarily indoors in thermo-neutral environments. In fact, we don't even really generally have to get up off the couch to maintain a 72-degree little snuggly nest because our thermostats actually learn our own proclivities. And so, you know, you can see how this endless march towards convenience and comfort actually create a lot of inconvenience and uncomfortable

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  truths later down the line because no exposure to fluctuations in temperatures makes us weak. It makes us unresilient. It lowers metabolic function. It lowers emotional resilience. And so, you know, you can find these areas almost everywhere, you know, you look. It's like most of us now wrap our feet in kind of... Big casts of vinyl and plastic, talking about shoes, right? That's not how we evolved. You know, we evolved with minimal shoes or we went barefoot. Most of human evolution. And so in the last, you know, 50 years particularly, but even kind of going back.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Actually, the history of shoes and high heels is actually fascinating. It actually started with the Persian cavalry. This is a piece of interesting trivia. So the Persian cavalry, like in the 10th, 11th century, they domesticated horses and they had stirrups. And so they were wearing boots and they developed the first heel. Because they wanted to be able to stand up straight in the boot to shoot arrows and to maintain their stability. That's the origin of the heel. That's the origin of the heel. And then they brought it, like there was a Persian emissary that brought it to Europe. And the European nobility just like loved the heel.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  And so the heel was initially established by, you know, some of the kings of, you know, King Louis XVI? I can't remember which one he was, who then brought it into the court and the men were all wearing heels. And, you know, then eventually it caught on with the women. And then the French Revolution happened and it wasn't too cool to be part of the aristocracy anymore. So men ditched the heels, but then, you know, women ended up inheriting them. And obviously now we see that kind of in the high heeled shoe. And, you know, the high heeled shoe undermines the health of the human foot in so many different ways.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  And so, you know, part of good stress or my good stress protocols is trying to be more barefoot more of the time. Align ourselves with how we evolved, you know, or wear minimal, you know, minimal shoes with bigger toe boxes and minimal soles. So you're actually leveraging the biomechanical masterpiece of the foot. You know, all of the muscles and nerve endings and joints instead of letting your shoes do that work for you. So, yeah.

• 1:09:33Rich Roll?

  How do you distinguish what's valuable from these lessons around like how we evolved? From what we are understanding is in promotion of thriving? So for example, I'm not sure that it's all that helpful to look at what we ate over the course of our evolution as a predictor or a proxy for what we should eat now because human beings were evolved to be, you know, very adaptable to their environments. And as a result, you know, we can kind of eat anything, right? And we needed to in order to survive. So how informative or helpful is that in terms of like trying to figure out what we should eat now?

• 1:10:18Rich Roll?

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

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we evolved as opportunistic omnivores, I would say. You know, we ate a massive variety of food of, you know, in terms of what was available, you know, maybe 800 different plants and seeds and nuts and tubers. And then, you know, if Rich's luck was good on a particular day, his stone spear might, you know, puncture the belly of an odd toad ungulate and we'd have some wonderful like lean wild game around the, around the fire. And this is, I think, primarily how, you know, we evolved, at least, at least in Africa. There was no obesity.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  I mean, we don't have any census data, right? From this time, but you know, I think it's safe to say that there was very little obesity. There were, there was very little metabolic dysfunction. There was very little heart disease. There was a little bit of cancer. Um, there was virtually no dementia, Alzheimer's or other neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, there were very few of those diseases even as late as 1900. I think the obesity rates in the United States in 1900 were about 3%. And, you know, moving forward through kind of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, which were times of significant scarcity in the United States, the obesity rate really didn't move very much.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  It wasn't until really after World War II, when we started to industrialize food, that we started to see obesity issues and other kind of metabolic issues creep into the American landscape. And so, you know, I think it is fair to say that nutrient deficient, shelf-stable, ultra-processed foods that have been introduced over the course of the last, maybe, seven decades, but certainly accelerated in the last, you know, three or four, are a very, very significant contributor to the scourge of chronic disease right now. Our genome really hasn't changed much, right?

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  You know, evolution is awful, is awful slow, and, and culture, in this particular case, is very, very fast. So, you know, I would say we know what not to eat. I mean, if we had a million years, could humans evolve to sustain themselves on Twinkies? Maybe, maybe. Well, I'm not sure what we would look like. We would look like sort of like a blob or something, but, but, but the, the problem is, is that evolution is that slow. And so, you know, for me, because I had significant metabolic, metabolic dysfunction

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  issues, you know, you know, what I, I know what worked for me, which was kind of the adoption of this kind of keto-terrian approach towards diet, you know, which was essentially low glycemic, which flies in the face of like ultra-processed refined grains and sugars and starches, right, which predominate. The standard American diet. But it was also plant focused because I really needed the fiber to feed my gut, and to take care of my gut bug friends. So there was this kind of low carbohydrate, high fiber diet that then I combined with

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  kind of intermittent fasting, which again, really is just like a reflection of more or less how we evolved, where I consolidated the consumption of food more or less into an eight hour window. And that little tryst, that little combination yielded tremendous results for me.

• 1:14:30Rich Roll?

  How long did it take to really reverse all the metabolic dysregulation?

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Not really that long. So when I put on the CGM, so I still wear it, just kind of for Hawthorne effect, just anything under observation will behave differently. So even if it's your own observation, it keeps me somewhat on the straight and narrow. So when I put it on, I had fasting glucose levels of 125 to 130 milligrams per deciliter. So that's the highest end of the prediabetic spectrum, the lowest end of the diabetic spectrum. Then I went subsequently in and actually kept my appointment with my PCP and got a hemoglobin A1C test and that was six and a half or something.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  So that was reflective of what I was seeing on the CGM. And then it took me about four months to get down into sort of more of an acceptable range and then about six months to really more or less reverse my prediabetic diagnosis. And so. And this was really due to a kind of fairly fundamentalist approach towards my health at that juncture. I wouldn't necessarily recommend now that people become sort of neurotic fundamentalists about health because there's other risks associated with that. There's this

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  whole kind of world of orthorexia, right, where you can become over obsessed with with being healthy. But in the early days, you know, I did need to take some relatively severe measures to address a relatively acute problem. So, you know, it was the stacking really of a number of different protocols that really yielded kind of the best results. And, you know, for those of people that just like really kind of like want, hey, just tell me what to do, Jeff, I will first, you know, give the asterisk that everybody is different. Everyone's a bio individual. But there are, there was a stack of protocols that I self-applied that had

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  results that I found almost miraculous, which was, you know, really these. So I kind of pointed to a couple of them already. It was really the adoption of a low glycemic diet. So I was essentially reducing my consumption of carbohydrates, which would become glucose essentially. And then an intermittent fasting protocol to consolidate all the consumption of food in an eight-hour window, more or less between 11 and 7. So 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Although, if you really want to get optimal about it, probably shift that window earlier because we're a little bit more optimized to metabolize food a little bit earlier in the day. But it's not very friendly. And I have three daughters who like to eat dinner with me. So that was my window. So it was kind of this

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  ketogenic approach to diet, an intermittent fasting protocol. And then where I really saw the kind of incredible results was layering in a cold water therapy component to this at a very particular time of day. So this will make total mechanical sense for people that kind of understand just general rules about metabolism. But because I had a low glycemic diet, I had low glucose. I was limiting my glucose. Because I was on an intermittent fasting protocol, at about 10:30 a.m., you know, I wouldn't have eaten for about, you know, 15 and a half hours. So I would have relatively

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  low glucose levels, even though, you know, you generally have a little cortisol spike in the morning that will stimulate some glucose. I had pretty low glucose levels at about 10:30 a.m. And then before breaking my fast, I would get into the treacherous ice bath, right?

• 1:18:33Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  And, you know, what would happen? So my core body temperature would plummet, and my body would just engage in an adaptive response. It would start this process of thermogenesis to up-regulate my body temperature back into that Goldilocks zone, because my body is always trying to find homeostasis, right? In order to up-regulate my body temperature, it would start to look around for an energy substrate, because it needed that energy substrate to make heat in my mitochondria. But there was not a lot of glucose around, so then it had to opt for an alternate energy substrate, and that was fat, right?

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:39Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Rich Roll?

  And how long?

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:47Rich Roll?

  And what was the exercise regimen?

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was...

• 1:19:51Rich Roll?

  Along the way?

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  It was... Candidly, like, sometimes I call it my Jesus protocol,

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  which is, um, or Jehovah's Fitness.

• 1:20:02Rich Roll?

  Jehovah's Fitness?

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sorry, had some dad jokes all day over here.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Is a lot of zone two walking in the desert. Come back on a Friday, eat some fish, you know, do a little CrossFit.

• 1:20:20Rich Roll?

  Jehovah's Fitness.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  This goes on, a little CrossFit, you can probably get that one too. By Saturday, I'm totally dead. By Sunday, eh, come back to life, eh, Jehovah's Fitness.

• 1:20:31Rich Roll?

  There you go.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:20:32Rich Roll?

  I see, yeah.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 1:20:33Rich Roll?

  If you, look, if you ever are like, hard pressed, you know, to put a few nickels together, I think, you know, I think you could sell that.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  I'm gonna keep, I'm, yeah, I'm keeping that in my back pocket, Jehovah's Fitness. Yeah, the CrossFit references is a little off color. But in any case, no, it was like a lot of zone two walking, candidly. I mean, look at Jesus, the guy was live, he had a great body composition. I mean,

• 1:21:02Rich Roll?

  At least as, in the way that we conjure him.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Depicted.

• 1:21:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  But yeah, so it was a lot of zone two walking and then resistance training for the first time in my life. You know, I was, um, I was sort of a disciple to what I call now chronic cardio. So I would like, sit around in front of a computer all day and then go and like huff it out on the elliptical or the Stairmaster for 45 minutes. And then, you know, back to my life. That was not a profitable regimen for me. In fact, that's what, how most people approach exercise is that it becomes this commodified, productized, little cubbyholed part of their life. And the rest of the time, they're just sitting around.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  And you look, and I mean, we have 45,000 places in the United States to sweat and grunt and lift and run. And at the same time, you know, we have a 45% obesity rate. So that whole approach towards,

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Productizing exercise, it's this one little part of your day, it's just like, for me, it didn't work. And again, if you ask yourself, how did I evolve? I was moving all day. I was walking like crazy. I was climbing trees and building structures and lifting some heavy things. And that's more or less what I did. I mean, you could even categorize zone five as like escaping, you know, from a tiger from time to time, you know, whatever, getting your heart rate up. So I kind of combined those. I was walking every day. I was lifting some weights and then I was probably, you know, getting my heart rate up to, you know, zone four, zone five, maybe twice a week. And that, that sort of elixir of things, you know, really had incredible effect.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  But I mean, you know, you think about good stress and probably like the most obvious example of that is muscle building. Right? So you overload a muscle, you tear the microfibers in that muscle. You give that thing enough rest and enough protein, enough leucine, and it grows back bigger. Right? So, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. You can see that mapped on a bicep or a, or a, you know, quadricep quite obviously. And then you apply it to other places like, I don't know, have you ever trained at high altitude?

• 1:23:31Rich Roll?

  Uh, periodically, but not for extended periods of time. Yeah.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  But, you know, this is a very common practice, like for Olympic athletes, right? And, you know, why? Because there's a form of deliberate hypoxia, right? At high altitudes because the air is less dense and so there's less pressure of the oxygen to diffuse into the lungs to then get delivered to, you know, the cells for, for energy production. So what does the body do under that stress of hypoxia? It has an adaptation. It starts to make, you know, this particular kind of protein called EPO that then makes more red blood cells, which are basically more couriers for oxygen to deliver, you know, to the cells for, for energy creation.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  And your mitochondria then adapt and become more efficient in relation to the environmental stress. So like hypoxia is like one of the, like a deliberate form of hypoxia is, is another like.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  You know? Or you don't want to be hypothermic.

• 1:24:55Rich Roll?

  Or too much exercise, or too much fasting, or too much cold water exposure. Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  You don't want any of those things. And, you know, in fact, when people come to me about, about advice around protocols pertaining to their health, you know, I always say like, you don't run a marathon after never, after never having run, right? You know, you ease into it. And, and you know, this is very much true with like cold water therapy or ice plunging. You know, you can get a tremendous amount of benefit from that, even at a relatively high temperature. It just has to feel cold for you. And then, you know, you slowly can, you know, elongate duration and decrease temperature.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  But, you know, these things take time. But what's amazing is that, you know, we often associate health with downward spirals. That's how we generally experience kind of the degradation of health. But upward spirals are equally possible. And, and you can generate a tremendous amount of momentum when you get on these upward spirals. And, you know, this is the, the amazing thing about seeing health as a process is that day to day, you know, you can be on the trajectory towards wholeness. That's healing.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Or you can be on the trajectory towards disease that's ailing and you have a tremendous agency over which direction that you're going.

• 1:26:39Rich Roll?

  The impermanence of it all, on some level, we are all on the spectrum, you know, towards this trajectory of ultimately, you know, death, right? Like, so it is degeneration on a macro level, you know, from an absolutist perspective. The agency piece comes in to, you know, kind of direct the depth and level of acceleration towards it, right? Like, and, and, and these, you know, the, the agency is exerted in the form of these interventions, which you call protocols, all of which are different variations on, on hormesis, right?

• 1:27:18Rich Roll?

  Like, you're introducing an acute stress to, like, disrupt this pattern, to, you know, kind of introduce something that deregulates whatever your body is doing and causes it to, like, stop and take notice and then have to kind of repair itself. And, you know, as the muscle gets stronger in that recovery process, so do we, right? It's this, it's, it's Alan Watzian in the kind of macro sense of, like, what is true in nature is true in our bodies. And you drill down on these various things. We've already talked about a bunch of them: fasting, cold water exposure, exercise, of course. But you have a whole bunch more of them here. I guess, since we just talked about cold water therapy, like, then there's the other

• 1:28:03Rich Roll?

  side of that, which is heat exposure.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:25Rich Roll?

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

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was on, I was on tour with, you know, you have to be efficient. I was on tour with...

• 1:28:37Rich Roll?

  Holding a crystal.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  I was on tour with Herbie Hancock, back in my music days, kind of a refugee now of the music business. And, and he is a Buddhist and...

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  He follows kind of the Nichiren school. And so, you know, he would have this inner sanctum kind of beyond the green room. And he would invite everyone kind of backstage, hey, you want to join me? Before the gig. And for people that don't know, he's a legendary jazz pianist, just incredibly brilliant guy. Played with Miles Davis, et cetera. And so then he would start in with this chant. Nam Yo Ho Renge Kyo, Nam Yo Ho Renge Kyo. And, you know, he would be reading it out of like Buddhist scripture. But really, I don't know what the, I think the literal meaning of it is sort of the, you know, the blooming of the lotus flower or something. But that wasn't even the point.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  The point was that you actually get consumed in the vibrations of the chant, such that you just completely inhabit the present moment. And he used this as a tool to become sort of non-judgmentally present prior to every show. This is my- This is your chant in the- This is my chant- This is your naked chant in the sauna. This is my naked chant in the sauna. It really stayed with me. Because I use it as sort of the sauna, because it's a very safe, enclosed, consistent environment. I use it as my meditation place.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  And, you know, I don't always chant, but chanting mantra is a, is a very effective gimmick, almost a tool to get you into the present moment. So yes, I'm in the, I'm in the sauna, you know, generally for about 20 minutes. You know, the, you know, the suggested protocol there, from, at least from the data that primarily emerges out of Finland, which I believe has like two and a half million saunas in a very small country.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  You know, the data that's, I think, organized mostly by Rhonda Patrick. I think she's the one that has-

• 1:30:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, she was just in here the other day.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Oh, cool. Yeah. You know, she's put together these meta-analyses from all these different studies that have emerged out of Finland. So, the going protocol is 20 minutes, about 180 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe a humidity level of like 10, 15 percent. And then, you know, in terms of frequency, four to seven times per week. And then, that's where you're really gonna get, you know, the massive cardiovascular benefit, et cetera. And of course, you know, just by kind of dint of your own experience and sensory experience, you know, you get into the sauna, and it is a form of sort of low-grade exercise, right? You can feel that your heart rate is going up a little bit.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  But there's all of these, you know, other benefits. It's obviously a vasodilator, so you're gonna start to move circulation, move blood around the body, move lymph around the body. There's all of these other proteins activated. We touched on them quickly before, but the heat shock proteins and the BDNF, et cetera. And then, you know, I combine that and do sort of a counter-bathing deal with my cold plunge. And so, if you're kind of going between cold and hot, what you're getting is, you know, vasodilation, vasoconstriction, vasodilation, vasoconstriction. And so, that's really beneficial for your circulatory system. So, yeah.

• 1:32:21Rich Roll?

  It also makes it easier to get into the cold plunge the first time if you're coming out of a sauna. But I like the going back and forth. I find that to be, you know, kind of the most impactful in terms of mood as well, and also, later on that evening, my sleep quality. I know you're supposed to end on the cold.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  End on the cold, yeah.

• 1:32:41Rich Roll?

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

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really when you're gonna get the most metabolic benefit for those reasons that we talked earlier, is that, you know, your body is engineered to find homeostasis. And so, if you're lowering core body temperature, you know, your metabolisms have to click into effect to up-regulate, you know, body temperature. Interestingly, you know, I think sleep is generally hated- By kind of some sort of heat therapy at night because and it's slightly anti-instinctual because your body, your core body temperature actually decreases in the evening. So if you get it, if you get yourself hot, like in a warm bath, or even in a sauna, your body

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  will does do what it's supposed to do. It'll immediately, you know, activate mechanisms to cool your body down and bring it down. And so that's why oftentimes, you know, taking a warm bath actually helps with sleep. You know, sometimes people attribute that to you know, calcium salts or magnesium, et cetera. But it's really more to do with your body's relationship with temperature.

• 1:33:58Rich Roll?

  We don't have time to go into all of the protocols, but you know, just in terms of kind of flagging them, you talk about red light therapy, which is super interesting. Then of course, the protocol of like interrupting our, our, you know, attention deficit disorder to work on focus. And, you know, that comes of course with mindfulness practices and meditation. We talk a lot about that on this show. The stressed plants, I think is interesting because again, that's another like mimicking of like nature, like what nature does and the impact that that can have on our bodies. But I think, you know, one I would like to

• 1:34:39Rich Roll?

  kind of drill down on, because it's sort of counterintuitive for a book like this, is the good stress of engaging in difficult conversations. Because I think this is something, you know, that we're all, that we're all kind of like, you know, debating in our own minds right now. I think, you know, in this moment of division, where, where it does feel like there's an edge that wasn't there, it's easy to kind of retreat from. Having challenging conversations, but the community that we're trying to engender in our lives, that's so much of your thesis

• 1:35:18Rich Roll?

  and a part of what it is to feel whole and be a human being, is sacrificed in our unwillingness to engage in that activity. And I know I feel my own resistance with doing that.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, if I ask myself, how did I evolve? Well, probably in a tribe of 80 people where we had to work it out. We didn't have a digital screen to anonymously sit behind and hurl vitriolic barbs at each other. We actually had to work it out face to face.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  I unwittingly got myself into a whole series of very, very stressful conversations. So it was a little bit trial by fire for me because as I freely admitted earlier in the show, I was a people pleaser.

• 1:36:10Rich Roll?

  Right. This is the most uncomfortable experience for a people pleaser.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  Totally. Where you're avoiding conflict really at all costs. And that's the way I spent really the first almost five decades of my life. But in March 2020, as we anchored into port lockdown, my business partner Jake really encouraged me to start to write a weekly essay to my burgeoning commune community because he felt that people were really scared and feeling very alone.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  And if I could package thoughts in words and share those vessels of emotions, people might feel less alone. It was a nice idea. And so I was like, okay, sure. I naively agreed to doing this. And so I was producing 1,500 to 2,000 words every Sunday and sending them out to like 1.2 million people. That's a pretty significant list. And for better or worse, I put my personal email at the bottom of that missive. And of course, I was tackling pretty...

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  Difficult contentious issues because 2020 provided plenty of fodder for that, right? So, anything from Covid to, you know, the reckoning of social justice in the wake of the George Floyd murder, to the election, the rise of QAnon and every other emanation out of Trumpistan, etc. And, you know, I was trying to, you know, be thoughtful and rigorous and find some middle ground with these essays. But inevitably, over the course of 2,000 words, in a time that was very, very triggering, I managed to offend people.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  And Monday morning, I would send this email out on Sundays, and the opprobrium would come flowing in Monday morning, sort of cresting the bow of my inbox with recrimination, if you will. And, you know, I'm slightly exaggerating. Much of the response I got was encouraging and thankful. But I got tons, hundreds of emails from people that, you know, didn't agree with me. And some of them were just like, there was nothing I could do with them, candidly, because it would be like Trump 2020 pasted 5,000 times in an email. There's

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  nothing I can really respond to that. But I also won't paint it as coming from any particular political wing. They were actually from all over the political map. You know, there were people I was writing about race, and there was plenty of people on the left that didn't feel like a white man should be centering himself in that discussion at that time. Okay, so I was getting that. You know, there were plenty of people on the right that felt like I was a shill for Pfizer. But then I was also a conspiracist at the same time. You know, it was crazy. So with the more thoughtful detractors, I would send them an email and I'd say, hey, you know, thank you for your note. I appreciate that. And after a couple volleys of these emails,

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  I pulled what I call my David Copperfield routine. I would actually ask them to join me on an hour long Zoom. And I call it David Copperfield because I made most of them disappear at that juncture. But about, you know, 26 people took me up on it. And so, over the course of two months, kind of August and September 2020, I had 26 hour long Zoom calls with people that really did not like me or disagreed with me about a number of things. And initially, like, I didn't have any training in nonviolent communication,

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  or, you know, subsequently, I got schooled in that whole field of Marshall Rosenberg, who did this in kind of the most immiserated parts of the world and, you know, brought, you know, tribes together around this technique for having compassionate, empathetic conversation. I was just kind of going in cold. And I just, I'll give you like, an example. So like, in August 2020, I think I wrote an essay about COVID. So there was a lot of data coming out at that juncture, that, you know, the people that were most severely afflicted by COVID, that ended up being hospitalized, or, you know, died, tended to be people with

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  multiple comorbidities, or obesity, or diabetes. Or elderly. Or elderly, yeah. So I wrote an essay about that topic. And this was also right during the body positivity movement. Right. I mean, that was third rail at that time. Yeah. And so I got just a lot of, particularly women, that felt like I was like fat shaming people. And of course, growing up as a fat kid, I thought I was, you know, very, very sensitive to that issue. And I was just writing a sort of rigorously researched essay. But whatever, I offended people. So I started getting on these Zoom calls.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  And it was so interesting, Rich. I mean, the pattern of these Zoom calls basically just repeated themselves over and over again. You know, I would get on the call and at this juncture, like, people weren't as good at Zoom as they are now. So it would be like jabbing at buttons and stuff. And then there would be, you know, the exchange of a couple of pleasantries. And then I would generally sit there for 45 minutes and not say anything. And people would essentially just gish gallop their entire life story about me, their relationships with their pets and their children and their spouses.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  And, you know, really kind of what I learned through this experience is that people were just so desperate to be seen and heard. And that I was providing an opportunity for them to be seen and heard. And I was doing that in a relatively like safe set and setting, where they felt, you know, trustworthy. They felt like that they could, that they weren't going to be attacked. And, you know, over time, as I got better at this process, I started to kind of annotate areas of convergence in my life as they, as they were telling me their life.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  And so, oh yeah, you know, they have daughters too. And, oh yeah, they, you know, were born in Chicago and they drove cross country and their car broke down or whatever. And so finally, when they had exhausted themselves, I would, um, I would essentially bring up these areas of convergence. So it's like, oh, so funny, like, I have daughters too. And, you know, mine are about to go off to school. I'm not sure how I'm going to manage that and stuff like that. And what I was doing kind of unwittingly was really seeking connection and not seeking solution. And many, many times, Rich, we never actually got around to discussing the original issue that had put us at loggerheads.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  You know, we just found some sort of deep level of human connection. And, um, and, you know, I basically built this kind of whole rolodex of frenemies. Um, you know, because I was talking to people, you know, Rural voters who were super Trumpers and, you know, who were really just telling me about the quality of their lives, about, you know, working, you know, two minimum wage, part-time jobs, not being able to afford their insulin, living in towns with like boarded up main streets, like shopping for all of their food at 7-Eleven,

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  you know, kind of this, you know, in some ways, really sad stories that people would tell me about their lives. And so I really developed, candidly, a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for those people. And from kind of that experience of connecting with so many different people, um, you know, I, I, I built kind of a protocol around having these stressful conversations. And part of which was building my own psychological

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  immune system. Um, because I was very susceptible to insult for most of my life, you know, as a people pleaser. It's like, and so, you know, when I first embarked on this process, when people, you know, would call me like a libtard or an asshole or be like unsubscribe you dick or whatever, all the emails that I get, I would take that quite personally and I would be very defensive and I would be up all night, you know, concocting various rejoinders and rebuttals and like driving myself crazy, like holding that ember resentment,

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  waiting to throw it and getting burned all the time. But over time, you know, I built my psychological immune system very, very similarly to how you build your physiological immune system. So if you think about that. You know, we build our physiological immune system through low-grade exposure to viruses and bacteria and pathogens, you know, and they enter the body, you know, this floating brain of the immune system sees, you know, some sort of insult and, you know, starts to wind up different proteins than we know as antibodies that then neuter that particular insult, that pathogen, and, you

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  know, through the miraculous immune system has a memory such that these B cells can produce these antibodies if they ever come into contact with that pathogen, that virus or bacteria again. And so, in a very, very similar way, I built my psychological immune system through low-grade exposure to quite a bit of insult, to the point where I start to look forward to being insulted. In fact, sometimes people would send me these emails, I'd skip the laudatory parts and I'd get into the place where, you know, that were recriminatory because I really started to lean into the discomfort of it. And, um,

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  and so, this, you know, led to kind of the, the development of, you know, a protocol around how to have stressful conversations that, that I, that I outline in the book. And then it kind of came to a head this past August, and this is not in the book, where I hosted a summit at Commune Topanga, which is, you know, our, our retreat center, just not far from here, between Palestinians and Israelis. And in this particular case, I was not the one having the hard conversations, I was actually the one moderating the conversations. And, uh, yeah, so this was a-

• 1:48:10Rich Roll?

  And how did that go?

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  It was so interesting and very, very emotional. So everyone arrived and obviously they were coming, so they were already open on some level. But you know, the Israelis, and these were Israelis that were raised in settlements in the West Bank. You know, these weren't just like Americans that had visited Israel or something like that. And these, the Palestinians there, a number of them, had grown up in refugee camps in the West Bank, like in Jenin and near Hebron. And so, yes, they had come and they knew who was going to be there, but they were

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  very, very anchored in their own political identities and certainly in advocating for the rights of their own people. And you know, there was a really interesting professor there from University of Michigan. He actually zoomed in, named Mark Tesler. And he said that the key to successful mediation and peacemaking is through understanding each other's narratives. So really, we spent the first couple of days just in storytelling mode, where you know, the Palestinians present would tell, you know, their narratives of growing up, of what

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  it was like to grow up in a refugee camp in the West Bank. And then, you know, the Israelis would get up, and these were all students, I should say. These were all students from Columbia, Brown, and UCLA. And they were actually the students that were leading the movements on their campuses. So there is that extra level of intensity that was just coming out of the whole season of encampments that happened on college campuses. So after a couple of days of sharing each other's stories, I got, I started to pair up the Palestinians and the Israelis at a table very, very much like

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  this one, except I was sitting in the middle. And then I would turn to the Israeli and I would say, now, you know, we spent the last two days, you know, Aharon, learning about Mohsen's story. Can you tell Mohsen's story? And they had to look each other in the eyes just like this and tell each other's story. And it's actually just like emotional talking about it.

• 1:50:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, as a way, that's that that being like the pathway to empathy on some level.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Rich Roll?

  Right? Only by, only by really trying to inhabit that other individuals' unique experiences, can you begin to understand it.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And by not only understanding each other's narratives, but by telling each other's narratives, it was like a damn broke. And so that was like the Wednesday, and this whole summit happened from a Monday to a Friday. And then by Wednesday night, everyone was sitting around a big table with their sleeves rolled up, writing white papers together. They were like, okay, what does a confederation model look like? What does a two-state model look like? What does a one-state model look like? What are we going to do about the right of return? What are we going to do about the settlements? They were then able to get into the hardcore political structural work. But it wasn't until the

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  psychological and trauma work had already happened. And man, it was a, it was an incredible learning experience.

• 1:51:58Rich Roll?

  Have you kept tabs on them? Like, how has that, has that, like, I'm curious around how fragile that that sort of state is. Like, as soon as it's disrupted, when they go back into their lives, does, does, do you just sort of rubber band back into your?

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  I think a little bit that does happen, except that the students that were present at this were also, you know, as I was saying, the heads of the Palestinian student unions and movements on campus and then, you know, other Israeli Jews that are very involved in their own campus. So then they had, they still like are on the same campus together. So they, and they have this level of bond now that I think is so deep and powerful that they're, that they list towards cooperation and common ground and, and compromise. And,

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  you know, I think coming out of that experience for me, what, one of the challenges that I started to sit in was how, how hate and violence scale so easily, but how healing is such deep, lengthy work? And how does one institutionalize and scale the kind of healing work that we need in order to solve some of the world's biggest problems in some of these areas? So I started to think about it in terms of actually creating structures

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  for the work to then bring back into these campuses such that more environments like the one that I created for a very short period of time in Topanga, you know, could be replicated within the campus environment. And, and the students at Columbia have largely done that.

• 1:53:54Rich Roll?

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

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  I guess the, the punctuation there is that we tend to avoid these stressful, hard conversations because they're so easy to avoid, but we really have to ask ourselves.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  What is the opportunity that sits on the other side of them? Because it's often these very, very thorny conversations that stand between us and the world that our hearts imagine is possible. And if a Palestinian and an Israeli can do that, can you not do that with your sister or your spouse or an ailing parent? You know, just think about how important that stressful conversation could be.

• 1:54:51Rich Roll?

  On some level, all the, all the growth is on the other side of, you know, whatever it is that we're avoiding, right? And in the context of a difficult conversation, the avoidance is a function of some, you know, emotional wound, right? That we perpetuate through that avoidance and will never be healed within ourselves until we can compel ourselves to engage in that sort of thing. But the bigger gift is the kind of domino effect or the downstream impact of those conversations, which ultimately, like, we avoid them because we think that they're gonna separate ourselves even further from other people. But it is only in doing them that we are kind of brought closer together on the other side of that, right?

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:38Rich Roll?

  It reminds me of Susan David's work on emotional agility. She says, like, discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life. And it's easy to restrict our idea of that discomfort to the physical things, like the exercise and the diet and, you know, all of that. But, but the real richness is in, is in the emotional discomforts, right?

• 1:56:00Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:56:02Rich Roll?

  Like, we can go down all that stuff that is sexy, but honestly, you know, the, the real work is in this emotional landscape. Cause it's amorphous and easy to avoid and easy to overlook. And even more so when we're like, yeah, but I'm, look at my diet and look at my, look at what I'm doing every day to like introduce all of these discomforts in my life. Sometimes that is a way of, of, you know, it's an avoidance technique in and of itself to avoid those other things.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  I a hundred percent agree, a hundred percent agree. I mean, what started honestly as

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  It was actually my ability to emotionally regulate, to find space between stimulus and response. You know, just because I stopped eating at 7:00 PM didn't mean I didn't get hungry at 9:30.

• 1:57:37Rich Roll?

  Can you sit with your own discomfort?

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:39Rich Roll?

  And how do you apply that in other areas of your life?

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  Totally. And instead of just mindlessly walking to the cupboard to assuage some sort of discontent, I actually had to witness the source of the stimulus and ask myself, is this hunger a biological need, or a psychological or emotional desire? And when I was forced to actually find the space to witness that, it was almost always emotional or psychological. I was bored, someone insulted me, and I was eating my feelings, right?

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  And because the calories that are engineered to hit your bliss point are right there, it is so easy just to fall prey to them. But... When I was really able to then create that space between stimulus, the hunger, and response, either eating or not eating, you know, that space actually became so useful in other parts of my life. Like when my children were inevitably annoying, how was I going to respond at that juncture? Was I going to just yell at them and have a reactive kind of knee jerk response?

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  Or could I apply that same space that I had cultivated from fasting to the way that I treat my children or the people that I love in my life? And you know, the same is true, honestly, with cold water therapy. What happens when you get into cold water? You know, you have an involuntary stress response, like the adrenaline starts to flow in through your veins. You feel like a sense of panic. And then you have that brief moment to apply conscious top down pressure on top of involuntary bottom up response. You can do that often by leveraging the breath or by leveraging your prefrontal cortex.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  But again, that space, that ability of putting top down pressure on top of involuntary response, that can then punctuate your life in so many other important ways. It's not just about the metabolic benefits or the dopamine of getting into the cold water. Sure, that's great. But what's it like when then you're in a very, very stressful situation? For example, when you walk into a room and you walk into a stressful conversation, can you use that same ability that you've enhanced yourself with in the cold plunge or with fasting? In that situation that requires a tremendous amount of emotional regulation? And that's again, I think you nailed it.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  That's where I think a lot of these protocols are way, way more powerful.

• 2:00:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, beautifully put. What, what still trips you up? Like what's the outer edge of this horizon for you? Where you still find yourself challenged more than you would like?

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm a million miles from my best self, man. And if you don't believe me, ask my daughters. They'll happily tell you. You know, it's a, like I said, you know, it is a process. Being healthy or being emotionally regulated is not a product, you know? You know, I've recently had kind of a falling out with someone. It didn't really have anything to do with me, but anyways, it's happening. And, you know, I've been up at night, kind of brooding over it and kind of questioning myself of like, wait, Jeff, you're so evolved here with your emotional regulation techniques.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

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

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  And confronting elements of inevitable mortality and transience. And, um, and kind of navigating that as I see my, my parents, you know, get older and older. And I think that, you know, this really kind of speaks, I think, to the ultimate challenge or potentially the, the ultimate target of the spiritual and examined life is how we manage our awareness of our own mortality, you know? Or freedom from the fear of death, I suppose.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  And, uh, and that is something that I'm thinking about a lot right now. I mean, you know, we sit in a really curious place in the human story, kind of in the evolution of our species where.

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  By dint of some fortuitous combination of atoms in our brain, like, we have this thing that we call consciousness, that you and I can sit here across this table and be totally here and engaged with each other and find words as vessels for emotions and thoughts and feelings and package them up and share them such that we can enjoy that and feel each other.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  And that's just amazing. I mean, it's one thing to be connected like this. It's another thing to know that you're connected. You know, it's one thing to be happy or sad. It's another thing to know that you're happy or sad. You know, humans just have this incredible capacity to know that it is something, it is like something to be themselves. And we often kind of attribute that quality to this concept of qualia. But, you know, consciousness also has a shady side, which is this awareness that everything that we love and know, including ourselves, is totally transient and gonna die.

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  And, you know, this fear of death has, you know, caused paroxysms of anxiety across human history. I mean, we've gone out for millennia and, you know, we killed off essentially everything bigger than us. You know, all of the wonderful bears and dire wolves and mammoths and tigers, you know, and all the megafauna of the world. And then, you know, Louis Pasteur came around and said, "Oh, well, it's not just the big things that kill you. It's also like the little things that we can't see." And then we spent the last 170 years or so killing off everything smaller than us.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  And, you know... We've been paralyzed by this concept of death for so long, you know, such that, you know, we've created these myths that somehow, you know, promise eternal life if we, you know, subscribe to a series of edicts, you know, created by some old paternalistic bogey in the sky, whatever. We keep, we keep trying to cheat it all, to the point now where a lot of our friends, you know, are into this concept of like escape velocity, right? That, you know, our organs are going to regenerate faster than they're going to degrade, you know, and we're never going to die. We're never going to do it. We're going to cheat the whole game. You know, we're going to become immortal.

• 2:06:05Speaker 01

  You know, I'm really, you know, working on trying to kind of reframe my relationship with death. And, you know, there's certainly been practices in various traditions. You know, you've probably had Ryan Holiday and some of those folks, you know, Memento Mori is, is one of those that's baked into Stoicism. Buddhism has, you know, Marana Satie. But I think a lot of getting comfortable with death is really kind of reframing our relationship with the natural world and with nature.

• 2:06:43Speaker 01

  And, you know, realizing that, yes, my five senses is kind of circumscribed by sight and sound and my ability to hear and tasting. Those things may be coterminous with the cessation of my heart and my brain. But there is something about me that goes on. And, you know, if you start to, again, kind of delve into the sciences and the sort of improbability.

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  You know, that eight billion years ago, there was some supernova, you know, made of hydrogen gas and very much like in the sun, these hydrogen nuclei were fusing, you know, and becoming helium and helium was becoming, you know, carbon and carbon is becoming oxygen and so forth, to the point where there was so much pressure and so much temperature that this supernova exploded and vomited all of its elemental guts all over the universe. And somehow those clouds then reformed and formed a rock called Earth in the middle of this solar system. And all of those same elements then self-assembled

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  to become a freaking woodpecker and a bear and rich roll and me. And in me and in you is one of these seven octillion atoms that was in Lao Tzu and in the Buddha and in Martin Luther King. And when we die, we simply go on and we are just these links in this sort of continuous chain of animated, captured sunshine. And, you know, when you start to,

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  I think, really cognitively understand yourself as part of this greater intelligence, you can begin to at least cognitively let go of some of that fear of like, as Alan Watts used to say, like, look up at sea, you know, that star in the sky and point at it and be like, look, that's me, you know, that's me up there. And, you know, I think what we're inevitably seeking, you know, is not the ease in life that comes with sort of a pint of chubby hubby and, you know, a Netflix binge. I think we're seeking like

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  a different kind of real ease in our life. And we tap into that kind of moment to moment, you know, when you're running or when you're in some sort of creative activity or some sort of collective enterprise. Sometimes we associate that with flow state, right? Like this true ease of like awareness of yourself and body and space and some sort of Transcending outside the fluctuations of time and space and location and form. And then you're just kind of pure essence for just that one brief, tiny moment. You're it. You're all there is. You're the entire universe experiencing itself in the here and now as your organism. You actually feel that and then it's gone.

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  And so, you know, this is the place that I'm trying to inhabit as a part of experience more, not just in here. I can say it to you here, you know, in this beautiful podcast studio, but can I truly feel it? Can I truly let go, blow out all of that fear? That's the biggest challenge.

• 2:10:28Rich Roll?

  I can't imagine a more beautiful or eloquent way to capture those ideas. And, you know, as much as I have many things to say about it, I think, I think it's best that we end the podcast here because this is, this is, this is what I want to leave everybody with. That was really beautiful. Thank you. I have tremendous respect for the work that you do, the rigor that you bring to the work, all of the synthesis of which is found in this beautiful new book that I think is incredibly helpful and again, very well-written. So, thank you for your gifts, my friend. And I think we should point out though, just in the event that people might be confused,

• 2:11:12Rich Roll?

  you have this place in Topanga that is called Commune.

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:17Rich Roll?

  But I think people might be like, is he running a commune? Like, what is, who is this guy? He's like doing all this stuff? He is literally running a commune, this guru across from me. So, it is called Commune. Your podcast is called Commune. You have a digital platform called Commune where you have courses and you have like, you know, filmed lectures with all of these very interesting people. But it is not in fact a commune. I can say that as somebody who's been there.

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Unless you think that you may be attacked by a wild group of hippies on acid. No, I'm sorry. That's not going to happen sadly.

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we use the physical property to host retreats, generally around yoga and spirituality, or in some cases longevity and physical health. And I also leverage the property to host these masterminds like the Palestinian Israeli Summit, but also ones on ecology and sustainability, et cetera. And I know you've been up on the property many times to celebrate some of our friends, like Paul Hawken, we've done book releases up there. And then we also use it as a production facility. So we film all of our courses. I think we filmed 150 courses up there now that sit on the online platform.

• 2:12:43Speaker 01

  And then I do host a number of the podcasts up there. But Rich, I just want to say before we conclude, you've really just served as the model exemplar of a rigorous and thoughtful human being for so many people, but specifically for me. I've just seen you hold the course for a really, really long time and eschew some of the more glittering, tempting ways of being out there.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  And I really just have tremendous respect and thank you for your footprints in the sand. I've tried to follow them.

• 2:13:31Rich Roll?

  Appreciate that. Thanks, man. Until next time, let's do this again. This was great.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  Awesome. To be continued.

• 2:13:38Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 2:13:55Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page. At richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep

• 2:14:39Rich Roll?

  this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website

• 2:15:23Rich Roll?

  management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.