Substack Live Re-Air: Are Convenience and Comfort Causing More Harm than Good?

This week we are re-releasing a Substack Live from our Breaker community! Mayim and Jonathan speak with Jeff Krasno, co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being. He hosts the Commune podcast and is the author of Good Stress, a collection of wellness protocols that he developed to reverse his diabetes, lose 60 pounds, and reclaim his health. We cover a topic that we’ve heard before, but framed in a new way - how each of us are living in a constant state of emotional dysregulation, and Jeff shares a few unique and novel ways to rebalance - like crying (really hard!) to release stress and restabilize our nervous systems and sense of purpose. He also introduces the “spotlight versus lantern” perspective of conscious experience - how wide can we make our aperture so that we can take in all that life has to offer?! Our lives are filled with ease and over-convenience from morning to night, and it’s adversely affecting our health. We need to put down the electronic devices and build up our psychological immune systems! Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. It's July 4th weekend, so if you're in the United States, hope you're having a good one. Today, we're sharing something special that was previously only available over on our Substack page. It's a conversation Jonathan and I had with Jeff Krasno. He's the co-founder and CEO of Commune, which is a platform for personal and societal well-being. He's also the host of the Commune podcast, and he's the author of Good Stress. Jeff talks about how a diabetes diagnosis led him to explore a number of ways that ease and over-convenience have affected all of our health. He turned his life around, turned his health around, and he shares the wisdom that he has gathered with us in this very special conversation.

• 0:50Jonathan Cohen?

  We cover a topic that we've heard before but framed in a new way, about how each of us are living in a constant state of emotional deregulation. And Jeff shows us a few unique and novel ways to rebalance.

• 1:06Mayim Bialik?

  We hope you enjoy our conversation with Jeff Krasno, and we will see you over on Substack.

• 1:13Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you so much for being here. Tell people who you are and how we all got here.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  I'm a jack of many trades. I assume that makes me a thought leader because I'm an expert in nothing. But yeah, I started a festival called Wanderlust, which developed some repute over the years. And so I was essentially traveling with my significant brood, my estrogen footprint. I have a lot of daughters. For many years, as sort of a band of gypsies, and finally settled into one place, I started a concern called Commune, which is really dedicated to amplifying ideas around health and happiness and well-being.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  And I write a lot of ink on paper, books and, and a regular newsletter, et cetera, and host a podcast. I'm really, really good at tearing my calf muscles.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  And I'm really good at eulogies.

• 2:19Mayim Bialik?

  It's funny because commune could also be read commune. And, you know, a lot of what you do is also kind of gather people in spaces, you know, depending, you know, kind of on their needs. And, you know, wanted to give a shout out to your book, Good Stress: The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things. There's a lot of really wonderful information in there from a metabolic perspective, a physiological perspective. And we've talked about this. We had Dr. Sharon Berquist on the podcast to talk about sort of some of the ways that we've made our lives easier in many cases is not introducing enough of the kind of literal stress to our body that, that breeds resilience. And I wonder, though, if today we can talk a little bit more about

• 3:01Mayim Bialik?

  sort of the emotional side of it, the spiritual side of it. You have a really interesting, you know, personal health journey. Maybe you can give us a little framework for, you know, how dis-ease kind of made its way into your life. And also, you know, how ease actually plays into disease.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was curious that the great Yogle of Wanderlust, which was a clever portmanteau between yoga and mogul that I did not create, found himself in a very precarious health position. But about five years ago, I was about 60 pounds heavier and, but really suffering from not particularly ordinary or extraordinary symptoms, but ones that I think many people listening can find to be extremely ordinary and anodyne, you know, just brain fog and chronic fatigue. I had like dad bod, the man boobs. Yes, all of the above. And then

• 4:01Speaker 02

  my friend had started a continuous glucose monitor company. And I slapped one of those on my triceps. And for people who are not familiar with that little wearable device, it's a little disc that sits in your triceps and measures the interstitial fluid. It gives you a fairly good proxy of your metabolic health. It reads your blood glucose levels moment to moment and zaps it to a little nifty app. And lo and behold, I peered into the app and discovered that I was a diabetic. And, um, and then, you know, subsequently didn't cancel my primary care physician appointment for once and, and went and did all the panels. And lo and behold, I was part of this greater

• 4:45Speaker 02

  epidemic of chronic disease. And so this really springboarded me on a journey to discover like why I was so sick, but really myself as a proxy, like, why is the world or much of the Western world suffer from so much metabolic dysfunction? And so that kicked me off and I jumped into my own Petri dish and became a lab experiment, my own little nematode. And then I went off and probed the, the mental Gladstones of maybe 400, 500 doctors. So I, I did a lot of interviewing and came up with a primary thesis. When you

• 5:26Speaker 02

  look at the panoply of chronic diseases, you know, they're really actually primarily lifestyle diseases. Um, and we didn't really have much diabetes or heart disease or stroke or fatty liver disease on the Serengeti, you know, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years ago, a little bit of cancer, but not too much. Um, obviously we suffer from infectious diseases, but really the diseases that so plague us now are primarily man-made diseases. And, you know, as I began to unpack that a little bit more, you know, my thesis became clear

• 6:10Speaker 02

  that chronic disease is really primarily the result of chronic ease. That, you know, over the last 150 years, but particularly accelerating over the last 50 to 70 years, we've essentially engineered, often in the name of economics, but

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Not always, but engineered our society for convenience and ease. And that convenience has led to, unfortunately, a lot of very inconvenient realities for people. It makes a lot of sense because Homo sapiens for 200,000 years or so, and then hominids for millions of years before that, we evolved in relationship to our environment. And that environment, over millions of years, had a lot of paleolithic stress. There was calorie scarcity and exposure to crazy vicissitudes and temperature fluctuation.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  We lived in community. We lived primarily outside. We didn't have cushy shoes or cushy armchairs, etc. You know, over the last 50 to 70 years, really, our culture has jumped the perch of our evolution and in many ways has hijacked our biology, our engineering, and that's led to a lot of disease. And there's so many different examples to pull on there.

• 7:37Mayim Bialik?

  There's a real illogical, you know, kind of nature to the fact that so many of the things, not only that plague us, but so many of the things that the healthcare system is now responsible for, and by extension, the taxpayers and the insurance companies are bearing the brunt of. It would almost take a paranoid mind to say, I wonder if there's some incentive, you know, to us not being able to get the right kind of, you know, help to step out of this. You know, and I think back to a lot of the things that you're talking about, the ease, you know, during World War II, it was a very stressful time. Like, that's my most recent, you know, kind of like, touch point for me knowing something, right, about this evolution?

• 8:21Mayim Bialik?

  Women went to war, right? Women weren't home the same way that they had been. And this is like a, by and large, statistical thing, right? I'm not talking about the one woman who was already working. I'm saying that by and large, people were experiencing a different kind of economic situation, and a goal was to make house care easier, cooking easier. Women like my grandmother, who had children during World War II, I'm sure really appreciated it. Like, plastic containers was a revelation, right? But what we're seeing is, you know, 50, 60, 70, you know, 80 years, you know, on, a lot of the things that were done for convenience in many ways have created a new set of problems that then now we have, oh, medication. And I'm thinking even of diabetes.

• 9:04Mayim Bialik?

  Well, just take this pill. This is the new world is that you sit in a chair all day in front of a computer, you get diabetes and now you take a pill. Like, that's it. Can you talk a little bit about what that reframe looks like, you know, to try and approach it this way? My and Be Alex Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know, those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? The bag you carry everywhere? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has

• 9:46Mayim Bialik?

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• 10:29Mayim Bialik?

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• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting. Just as a brief aside, I interviewed my grandmother when she turned 100. So she made it to 104, born in 1910. And I asked her, what was the most significant technological innovation of your lifetime? Of course, I was expecting like airplane travel or the internet or something. Sure. And she said, the washer dryer. It saved her 25 to 30 hours a week. So, you know, technological innovation isn't all bad. You know, this is, this is definitely not my case. But, you know, coming out of World War II, for some very legitimate reasons, we were trying to essentially create enough calories, shelf-stable calories for a growing population.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And population did, you know, grow and expand. And, you know, we had what's known as the Green Revolution, where we applied a lot of like our military-industrial mindset to agriculture in the form of, you know, synthetic fertilizers and subsidized crops, et cetera. And yeah, we created a surfeit of calories, sort of available at all times of year. And now, of course, we've taken that to the ridiculous extreme, where like Jonathan can like order DoorDash up like a summer squash in the middle of winter before this podcast ends. I mean, it's absurd, and it'll arrive at his door. In this world of endless, always-available calories,

• 12:14Speaker 02

  our body is simply doing what it is designed and engineered to do, which is to warehouse fat, which is essentially just stored energy for a rainy day. Because we used to experience the fallow of winter. So it would be totally adaptive for my little loin cloth to get a little tight around the middle, around the fall harvest, you know, where I'd gorge on figs because the paucity of winter was just around the corner. Now we live in a world where winter never comes, really, from a calorie perspective. So our body is just doing what it's supposed to do. We're just warehousing energy. And then, of course, then-

• 12:56Speaker 02

  We try to come up with some technological moonshot to solve the problem that we created. And this is the optionality that is in front of us. You know, to solve a lot of these health problems is like, yeah, we can go into Yamanaka factor and CRISPR and try to change our genetics to meet our engineer, like our lifestyle, I should say. Or we could just simply try to change our lifestyle to better comport and conform with our genetics. And that would be my, that would be a simpler path to pursue. And now, you know, my argument is that we have to self impose some degree

• 13:40Speaker 02

  of paleolithic good stress in order to realign our lifestyle with how we're engineered. Now, to your other question, yeah, we can take a GLP one. And I'm interested in, in new fangled solutions. That solution is really often masking an upstream issue, which is that we are not, we're, our, our culture, the way we live is hijacking our biology.

• 14:14Jonathan Cohen?

  You started by, by explaining how we once interacted with our environment and lived much closer to the elements and the natural world provided a lot of the opportunity for this cyclical environment.

• 14:30Jonathan Cohen?

  The issue really for me is that while some people can think about it and provide any, and execute an enormous amount of willpower to avoid calorie stacking, which is what we're designed to do. So to overcome that requires just an enormous amount of conscious effort. Every single time there is food available that you then don't reach for. The additional issue is that our entire economic survival has been designed to be geared towards sedentary activities for most people that are not outside.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the statistics are fairly jaw dropping. I think we spend 6% as a society of our time outside. I think 80%, 82% of us now have some form of sedentary desk job. Yeah, you're absolutely right. We've built an information economy or attention economy that essentially revolves around a lifestyle that is at friction with health. And how do we undo that? What I found, I mean, here I am, sitting in a, you know, temperature neutral studio in a cushy chair, you know,

• 15:44Speaker 02

  with shoes on and a decent shirt, although that's up for some debate. And so it's not like I'm, you know, living like my hunter gatherer ancestors. But I think that there are my, I think there are protocols that we can adopt to superimpose some degree of paleolithic lifestyle of health imparting paleolithic period environmental stressors.

• 16:12Mayim Bialik?

  You know, a lot of us have been hearing about, and Jonathan and I have spoken about it. And, you know, the irony that, you know, many people kind of flag us for even talking about it. I think it's an important conversation to talk about, not just what it means to fast. And I almost feel like we need to remove that word. But like, you know, for many of us, and myself included, you know, many of us don't think there's anything wrong with like eating twice after dinner, like at all. You know what I mean? Like, I'll eat dinner, but then there's like, okay, but like a substantial dessert. And then I need a snack while I'm like watching TV. Like, that's a completely, I think for a lot of people, it's like a normal thing to just like, you never basically stop eating, except when you close your eyes. And so that notion of like, oh, wait,

• 16:57Mayim Bialik?

  we're actually not supposed to like load up and eat right before bed. And I see my kids who they, you know, they'll eat right before bed and they seem no worse for wear. But this stuff is cumulative, right? These are habits that we're trying to teach. Can you talk a little bit, you know, really about like what happens with? Consumption.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  You're absolutely right. If we take an honest inventory of our lives, we're eating pretty much from the moment that we wake up to the moment that we go to sleep. I mean, that's at least how I was living for a very long time. And I think there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean, as Jonathan, you suggested, yeah, we are wired to consume calories. And we've never existed in an environment where there's such a surfeit of them. But I think that there's some other aspects at play, like, for example, like this caustic little device, you know, this is designed essentially to make us feel inferior or not worthy.

• 17:56Mayim Bialik?

  It's not exactly how they sold it to me.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  That's true. I mean, listen, it's nice to have the history of all the world's knowledge, or most of it, in the palm of your hand from time to time. But I mean, if you spend much time on social media, I mean, it is, you know, algorithmically prefaced to make you feel like shit. I mean, make you feel angry, or outraged, or a sense of fear, or not enough, you know? It essentially projects false images of cultural beauty and excellence, which don't reflect reality, but always make you feel inferior.

• 18:34Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan sends them to me anyway.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. God damn it, dude. We're in a constant state of emotional dysregulation, you know, not just because of the phone, but 24-hour news media, et cetera. And in order to assuage that feeling of discontent, guess what? There's a larder just right there, you know? Filled with dopamine-inducing foods, you know, that are bioengineered to hit that perfect little bliss point of like, you know, fats and sugars and salts to make us feel, ephemerally, great, you know? To get that, stimulate that spritz of dopamine. And it is, it's, it's right there.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And it's not just food. It's also like retail therapy on Amazon, you know? A glass of wine, all of these things that are available to us to assuage the emotional dysregulation that we've caused.

• 19:34Mayim Bialik?

  You're taking away everyone's fun.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 19:35Mayim Bialik?

  You're taking away my-

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm gonna go back up.

• 19:36Mayim Bialik?

  You're taking away my second post dinner meal. You're taking away shopping. I'm assuming wine, drugs, like everything. Can you have sex before bed? Probably not. It's bad for your heart rate.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Probably not, yeah. I'm a eunuch. I didn't put that in my bio.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  So this is the thing. So this is like why we can take some mastery of, and some agency over our own life. And yeah, fasting has become kind of this, you know, overused moniker. It's like a cornhole bag people just throwing around. But really, it's just, you know, when you, here's the most impactful aspect of having some form of fasting protocol. It's, yeah, there's a lot of physiological impacts to it. But if you become a disciple to that practice after dinner, it doesn't mean that Mayim or Jeff or Jonathan doesn't get hungry. It's just that for a brief moment,

• 20:37Speaker 02

  you can examine the provenance of that hunger and ask yourself, is this a biological need? Or a psychological desire, right?

• 20:49Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  And if you believe in Viktor Frankl's old adage, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a space and that space is a choice and that choice lies our freedom and liberation. What fasting can actually provide for you is that little bit of space where you can assess what is the nature of my discontent? And, you know, instead of just mindlessly going to the fridge. And this really has-

• 21:17Mayim Bialik?

  It's a lot of boredom, right? I mean, like, that's really, it's a lot of boredom.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it has like pleiotropic impacts. It's like, it's not just about food. If you can cultivate that space between stimulus, the hunger and the response, just eating, can you not cultivate the space between, you know, like, yeah, having that extra glass of wine? Or like, what is the more appropriate response? To my children when they're endlessly like annoying and screaming, you know, would it be just like a some knee jerk reaction to get pissed? Or would it be like, oh, no, well, maybe they had some issue at school or some, you know? So this is where I think a lot of these physiological practices actually bridge into emotional or psychological practices.

• 22:01Jonathan Cohen?

  And we don't have to call it fasting. We can just call it not continuously eating.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Fair.

• 22:07Jonathan Cohen?

  It is bad branding in a way because people are like fasting. Oh, I need to be in caloric restriction. I need to go 12 hours. No, I need to go 15 hours. No, I need to go 18 hours. No, I only need to eat for three hours. Like, no, let's just, let's just like bring it all back a little bit.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  You can approach these things kind of from a more spiritual perspective. I mean, like not eating is baked into virtually every spiritual tradition from, you know, Buddhism to, you know, Ramadan, apparently like Mohammed received the Quran in a fasted state. I mean, I don't know, go figure. That sounds slightly apocryphal, but, or Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and was tempted neither by the devil or lunch, apparently. So, um, so you can approach.

• 22:53Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, you're leaving out Moses, the other of the Abrahamic, uh, you know? Yeah, he was likely fasting and when he received, I mean, they were, you know, that was a, it was a spiritual practice for sure that we've lost. What are some of the other things, you know, besides not eating constantly? What are some of the other ways to sort of tap into, you know, some of this, I guess, paleo wisdom, you know? I know Jonathan's not done.

• 23:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Just before we get there, just before I can't let this go. The devil never comes with lunch. He comes with breakfast or dinner because your fast should happen on either side. Breaking the fast doesn't happen in the middle of the day.

• 23:29Mayim Bialik?

  Unless you're my family on Yom Kippur when I was growing up. We only fasted till lunchtime. There's the Huberman School, there's the light, there's the breath, there's the, you know, all these things. You know, it's funny because one of the things that when my kids were younger, and my kids are 17 and 20, so fortunately on a little bit of the older side of the phone. Craze, meaning there's a little bit more space, you know, between phones becoming a thing and it becoming kind of what it is now. When they would sit on their phones, that's what I would say, go outside, go outside. And I was thinking like, you know, that's what my parents would yell at me just when my brother and I were fighting and they wanted us out of the house, go outside. But can you talk a little bit about what it means to kind of get outside, right? What role does nature play?

• 24:14Mayim Bialik?

  I know that's a huge part of a lot of the retreats that you do and sort of this community you've created is about being in nature. Can you talk about that as well?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  There's very identifiable physiological knock on impacts of being in nature. You know, it lowers cortisol, it grounds you in your parasympathetic nervous system. But I think some of the more impactful aspects of it really again are psychological or spiritual. I mean, we know when we spend time outside, the, how would I say it? Like the aperture of our attention widens, you know? Where we spend most of our time inside staring at a little screen or a phone. And just think of like how narrow that experience is versus like going outside

• 25:07Speaker 02

  and literally opening up the periphery of what you're experiencing. And it's almost like spotlight versus lantern consciousness. If you spend all of your time narrowing the spotlight of your conscious awareness, like what are you not perceiving? What are you not experiencing? A lot of people that have like near death experiences talk about that. This kind of like warehouse consciousness that opens up. And I think we, we get a taste of that when we're in nature. And it's often in that open space.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Where we are the most creative and we it's where it's in that compost where like the seeds of I think compassion and and love and kindness and connection sort of the feeling that you are not a separate self, that you are connected to some bigger universe, that happens almost exclusively when you're outside.

• 26:11Mayim Bialik?

  C. Deb asks a fun question. I hadn't thought about this. Is there any research to your knowledge about which types of nature have the highest physiological impact for lowering cortisol levels like at the ocean or mountains? I mean, I think there's probably so much subjectivity there, but yeah, curious.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So one really interesting thing. So is how we evolved with light itself. And I'll try, I'll try not to mansplain too much on this one. And if you don't know what mansplaining is, I have a workshop about that later. No, I'm just kidding.

• 26:47Mayim Bialik?

  It's a mansplaining joke.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we literally evolved in relationship to this fusion reaction that's happening 93 million miles away. So as part of the electromagnetic radiation that's emitted from the sun, there's a whole sort of breadth of wavelengths associated with that electromagnetic radiation. We see in a little tiny band between like 400 and 700 nanometers. But then we know that there's these other parts of the electromagnetic wave spectrum that we connect with. I mean, we're very aware of like UV and UVB. You know, my girls are always checking

• 27:27Speaker 02

  the UV scan to try to get as tan as possible. But we also obviously generate or produce endogenous vitamin D in relation to vitamin or into in relation to UVB. But I think what's actually more interesting is our relationship to the other side of the spectrum, to infrared and near infrared radiation. So we generally absorb these rays, this particular part of the electromagnetic wave spectrum when we're in greenery. So it's actually not when we're in direct sun. So this is another reason to get outside. So if you're on or around grass or trees.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Infrared radiation will bounce off of those, anything green, and they will actually penetrate the skin up to eight centimeters.

• 28:20Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Which is amazing. And you can kind of think about it by analogy with like, if you ever like, pulled up on Sunset Boulevard to a tinted window SUV and all you can hear is like, the bass of like hip hop, right? Those are like low waves that emanate through the steel. Well, these are infrared waves, look like the same thing. They can basically penetrate into the skin. And they have a direct impact intracellularly in our mitochondria, where they actually stimulate the production of antioxidants like melatonin and glutathione that fight oxidative stress and inflammation. So this is what, one thing that I would really say to do.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could buy a red light panel or do an infrared sauna, but really just get outside into a green environment. And that has inestimable impacts on your health.

• 29:18Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I'm sure Jonathan is already Googling how to create a little patch of grass, exactly where he just likes to sit outside.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I see a tree back there.

• 29:27Mayim Bialik?

  There is a tree back there.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  There's a lot of green, yeah.

• 29:29Mayim Bialik?

  That's very interesting. And I'm also just, you know, kind of as a, you know, a human experience of it, you know, you think about what it's like to like, sit in a field of grass or like, if you've ever been, you know, it's like the field in Central Park. Like, there's something about sitting in grass like that, the heat feels different, like, and now I'm thinking about all of the bouncing waves going everywhere. That's really cool.

• 29:52Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you need to have your skin exposed in order to get the benefit?

• 29:56Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, he loves, he loves to take his shirt off.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that was my ploy, just right here on the sunset.

• 30:04Jonathan Cohen?

  I will take it off right now.

• 30:05Mayim Bialik?

  No, no, not what I meant.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  You actually don't need to be bare chested. In fact, infrared radiation will travel through even a relatively thick sweater. And

• 30:18Mayim Bialik?

  Because I like to wear sweaters outside. You just clocked us. He likes to be shirtless. I like a thick sweater year round.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why you guys are such a good pair. You're like electron and proton. And it's actually the warmth that we feel like on our back, even when we're wearing a shirt, that is infrared radiation.

• 30:38Mayim Bialik?

  This is really interesting. Can you tell people, kind of, what are the things, especially in the journey that you've been on? What are the things that you have discovered that either bring joy, you know, bring a sense of wonder, make you feel like I made the right decision in life to, you know, kind of turn my health around? You know, whether it's benefits to your, your family, you know, your kids. What are the things that kind of feel the best for you in this phase of, of your health?

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Well, I'm going to do two sort of slightly surprising ones because I could talk about sauna and cold plunging and all that kind of fasting. But I think the world has quite enough of that. Surprisingly, one of the good stresses that I discovered was crying. Crying is an adaptive emotional response to stress. And there's different kinds of tears. I'm not talking about the tears that are induced from an onion cutting session. But I'm talking like emotional tears. If you were actually to harvest those tears and take them into a chemistry lab, you would find stress hormones in those tears.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  So you would find a, I think it's adrenocorticotropic hormone. And so when you are crying, you're literally flushing out stress. And we know just by dint of our, our own experience, when, when we have a full bellied, throated sob, you're you're forced to take a deep breath. And we don't. Really do that much in life, you know, we take these snippy little choppy breaths. And of course, it is that deep breath that helps move us back into our parasympathetic

• 32:29Speaker 02

  autonomic system. So, but we vilify crying, right, and vulnerability, particularly in the manosphere. I would say, you know, be crying is actually a really adaptive response. The other one taps a little bit into Stoicism, but it's building your psychological immune system. So we hear about our physiological immune system a lot of the time. So, you know, you you come in contact with a virus or some bacteria and, you know, your adaptive immune system spins up these little proteins that we call antibodies. And then when you come into contact with that bacteria or virus, again, you have that built in immunity, right?

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Metaphorically, really comports to our psychological immune system in many ways. And in 2020, I committed to having 27 hour long Zoom calls with people that don't like me.

• 33:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Was there a signup sheet, like? Yeah, did you literally? From one to 10, the ways that I annoy you and you just like sent them out to people who you suspected of having ill will?

• 33:39Speaker 02

  More or less. It was, it was more harvesting from the endless stream of incoming appropriate. So, yeah, I write a newsletter. 2020 was a, people were on a short trigger. And, you know, I was writing about just like very neutral topics like COVID and George Floyd and things like that. And, and how dare a white man center himself at this juncture. So I got a lot of incoming there and I grew up like a people pleaser. So I was very defensive initially as I was receiving a lot of incoming insults and criticism. But over time, I built

• 34:20Speaker 02

  my psychological immune system and also with a lot of, you know, breath practices. And meditative practices, et cetera. And I just started asking some of my more thoughtful detractors if they would jump on a Zoom call. I got basically a in vivo lesson on nonviolent communication. And how to disagree without being so disagreeable. And it was amazing learning experience for me to to sit through. These 27 Zoom conversations. Because at the end of the day, what I realized is like, we often didn't even get around to.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  The issue that had put us at loggerheads in the first place. People just wanted to be seen and heard. And if you can create that container in a safe way. And really listen to understand and not to respond.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  And find points of connection and not solution. That is an invaluable lesson to the broader society. And I ended up, from that experience. Hosting a six day summit. At our retreat center between Jewish Israeli students on a number of campuses and Palestinian students on some of the. Columbia and Brown and UCLA. So administered this week long. Retreat of nonviolent communication and sitting in each other's narratives.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  And the output of those six days was nothing less than absolutely incredible.

• 36:12Mayim Bialik?

  It's really incredible and just that notion, and I've done some studying of nonviolent communication and. Just that notion that. You know, exactly the thing that you think is impossible is the place that it actually is most beneficial for us to sit in, you know, emotionally. It's such an incredible skill.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  This one particular experience where we're receiving all these kids, and these were the most involved kids on these campuses on both sides of the equation. The set and setting was more conducive to cooperation. We had like cold plunges and saunas and yoga studios and things like that, you know, but the process was very good, stressful, if you would. I mean, we spent the first two days just in active listening. And so each student would come up, would get up and tell their story. And then we would breathe and sort of integrate and assimilate. And then we'd flip to the other side. And then on Wednesday, the middle day, I paired up a Palestinian student with an Israeli student

• 37:16Speaker 02

  and had them sit right across from each other and me in the middle. And the Palestinian student would tell the narrative of the Israeli, the Israeli student to that person. And they would essentially tell each other's narratives to each other. And it was one of the more emotional, it's just even like I can feel the, the emotion just talking about it. And then that night, unprompted, we all sat down at these big, long dinner tables. And one night we were doing Palestinian food, one night we were doing Israeli food. And one of them like picked out a pencil and a piece of white paper and they just

• 37:58Speaker 02

  started writing down things like, okay, what do we do about the right of return? Okay, what do we do about the settlements? Like, and it was just by Friday evening, they had put together completely cooperatively, like a white paper, not, not just on, on

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Various different solutions in Israel-Palestine, but also for solutions on campuses. And they ended up taking those back to the various administrators on campus. It was quite amazing.

• 38:31Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and just, you know, when you create that kind of holding place, like the things, and I think that's true for us, you know, individually as well. Right? Like being able to open up the aperture. Right?

• 38:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Are there some open questions that you're sort of most curious about right now?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  It does feel overwhelming because you need to hold a tremendous amount of information in your head, if only for risk of embarrassment. You know, like we're sitting down and like you guys do with, or I'll speak for myself. I'm sitting down with people 100 times smarter than me about a specific topic every week. And I try to be a sort of rigorous reader and researcher going into that. And then, you know, unfortunately, a lot of the times you finish the interview, you're right off to the next thing. And, and a lot of that information just, you know, dribbles out one side. So that's frustrating sometimes. But I, you know, I've had a lot of conversations recently on the nature of consciousness.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  There's no answer to this Gordy.

• 39:34Jonathan Cohen?

  We figured it out. Don't worry.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Oh, good. Right. Yeah. You're going to just tease that for the next episode.

• 39:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  I find this topic endlessly fascinating because, because there is no consensus on it. So I know Michael Pollan just wrote a book and I sat with him and Annika Harris and Sam Harris. I think that topic is fascinating. I think some of the new theories around consciousness and the neural correlates of consciousness are really quite interesting. So that's been stoking my, my curiosity lately.

• 40:11Mayim Bialik?

  Jeff, where can people find out more about you? Obviously you're on Substack.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Well, I have a podcast called The Commune Podcast. Really, my platform, Commune, is just this repository of incredible knowledge of other people, other experts. So you can go to onecommune.com and I'm waxing alternately poetic and pathetic on Instagram. At Jeff Krasno. And those are the the primary places. And tomorrow I have my pet project is launching. I'd be remiss if I don't mention it. I've been writing this memoir on raising my three daughters called Diaries of a Dance Dad.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  And I write a lot about science and human physiology, biology, and a little bit of philosophy. But these are just stories from the heart. They make me cry and laugh in equal measure.

• 41:09Mayim Bialik?

  Well, we wish you good things with that and all of the other wonderful work that you do. Thank you so much for bridging. You know, I think also it can be really, really overwhelming, the number of voices and perspectives. And, you know, many of us are trying to just, you know, kind of get our feet under us in this arena. And so really appreciate all the hard work that you have done, you know, so that you can also collect, you know, the best of all of these perspectives. We really, really appreciate it. So thank you so much.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Likewise, you guys impart such wisdom and you do it in a very enjoyable and fun way, which I find to be very important.