Mastering Anxiety: Do THIS To Stay Calm In Any Situation | Jeff Krasno

We have this very ancient engineering. Our genes take a long time to change. Evolution is very, very slow. Culture is very, very fast. We live in an environment that is essentially algorithmically preferenced to stress us. We are enduring the largest scale, non consensual psychological experiment of all time called social media. What you're doing when you're crying is you're literally flushing out stress. So don't ever stigmatize crying.

The more push, the more I struggle, the more I suffer, the more gains I'll get. What's wrong with that? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. This episode was recorded live at the studios here in Austin, Texas. And I just want you to know I got new chairs. So these are a major upgrade from the white plastic Italian chairs that look cheap but weren't. So these are legit. You should watch on YouTube if you're not. And our guest is even cooler than our chairs. It's none other than Jeff Krasno from Commune. Jeff and I have been friends for years, and he's a. What do you call yourself, Jeff? Like a leader in the personal development space. Real conscious guy. I don't. What. What's your deal?

That's fair. Let's say I'm God. You know, I think I'm a community builder.

Very swanky. Yeah, community builder. But that's kind of. Wanderlust is a bit of a big deal.

Yeah.

Giant community. For 10 years, you've been involved with. I've spoken and brought coffee to Wanderlust. I think we might be what would have been danger coffee these days.

Yes.

Someone who, if you're paying attention, Jeff and his interviews with Commune have made a big difference. And you've been at some point in front of the scenes and a lot of times behind the scenes, just making consciousness happen in the world, I would say. I just did a big course with Commune that's going really well. And I think people don't understand the reach that you have in the spirituality and personal development space. And you just wrote a new book about it, so I wanted to talk with you about it.

Yeah, well, I'm thrilled to be here and to be upgraded. I'm looking for every opportunity to be upgraded, and I'm very happy to be christening these beautiful chairs.

You are the first guest in our new chairs. You also are in Topanga Canyon.

I still am in Tpango Canyon by dint of really unbelievable heroics on the ground that held the line. But, yeah, I mean, we're here recording this episode really Just in the very, very alpenglow of the Palisades fire and the Eden fire that happened near Altadena, Pasadena. And I'm a bit of a, I guess you'd call me a canyon rat. I live in Laurel Canyon. And then we have our commune, Topanga retreat center and facility and production facility and sustainability lab on 10 acres in Topanga. And let's say about a week ago I was practicing some serious non attachment. And of course we know we share many common friends who have lost their homes in this fire.

Yeah.

Our place.

Yeah.

By the grace of God is still standing. And I feel very, very fortunate for that. You know, really it's not about the property itself. It's really about the history of connections that I've been able to foster personally, but also among other people there. And, and that loss of, that potential loss of communal space of places where people can congregate and share practices and ideas. So the risk of that was the part that was really weighing heavy on my heart. But this is kind of where the spiritual rubber hits the hard asphalt of reality, if you will. We can practice Buddhist notions of non attachment. Um, but of course when that hard reality hits, you know, this is where, you know, we're tested. Um, and I feel my, I just feel very, very fortunate and also my heart is really grieving for, for my community.

You just wrote a book called Good Stress and launched it in the middle of a kind of stressful time in, at least in la, for people. Good stress, bad stress. What's your take on this?

Yeah, well, I would say that stress needs a, a new public relations agent.

Yes, thank you.

Perhaps I am he. I mean, we are wired for an adaptive stress response that's quote unquote good. Yeah, you know, I'm a big hiker, so I might, you might find me on any day, you know, through the, the hills of the Santa Monica's et cetera. And I might come across a rattlesnake on that path. In fact, maybe one out of every 20 times I do. And what happens? Well, I have an involuntary, quite naturally adaptive response to stress. You know, my heart rate and respiratory rate increase, my liver secretes just the right amount of glucose. It's like sent to my extremities to flee or fight.

Right.

My pupils dilate, the aperture of my attention becomes very narrow and I become self obsessed and distrust the world. And that's a very, very good thing because it serves my biological imperative right to survive. And then what happens? Well, the rattlesnake might eye me, you Know askance for a moment and realize that I will not be on the specials menu. And he will slither off into the tall grasses and I will return to homeostasis. My, my respiratory rate, my heart rate will decrease, the aperture of my attention will open back up and I move back into parasympathetic state, et cetera. The problem with modern society is that for many, many people, the rattlesnake never leaves the path. So stress becomes chronic. And you know, when stress becomes chronic, there are a panoply of very, very detrimental downstream impacts, right? So we often associate it with the release of the, the adrenal hormone cortisol.

Right?

And cortisol can be, again, adaptive in the right moments. But over the course of time, that will degrade gut function. It will prohibit the innate immune system from making those neutrophils and monocytes and macrophages, all those beneficial white blood cells that help our immune system. Obviously, in my case, and this was hit very deeply home for me, it can raise blood sugar levels, so it can cause blood sugar imbalances, essentially. It can lead to imbalances in the body. And really, if there is a signature of disease, it's imbalance, right? So this is bad stress. But we evolved as humans, as Homo sapiens, for a couple hundred thousand years, and as hominids for millions of years before that in conditions of what I would call Paleolithic stress. And these stressors conferred a health benefit. They activated molecules and pathways and systems in the body that led to resilience and longevity. There's so many of them. We can unpack a number of them. And really, for me, this is at the core of good stress. Essentially, for me, they were the protocols that completely transformed my life. But what they really do is mimic the Paleolithic conditions in which we evolved. You and I, we have this very ancient engineering.

Yeah, right.

You know, our genes take a long time to change. Evolution is very, very slow. But what we've seen is culture is very, very fast, particularly in the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, or, but accelerating in the last 50 to 70 years, that modernity, often in the name of profit, has engineered life for comfort and convenience, essentially stripped away all those Paleolithic stressors, that exposure to fluctuations in temperature, calorie paucity, immersion in nature, communal living, all of these ways that we lived for hundreds of thousands of years. And we've been denuded of those things, and now we've been fed a steady diet of comfort and convenience, and that is eroding Our health. In fact, you know, my thesis here is that chronic disease is the result of chronic ease. And this was a very personal journey for me because I had to unpack it because my health was in a very precarious situation.

It feels like anytime someone goes through a really serious health crisis, they're going to deal with whatever the underlying cause is. But you have to deal with stress at some point. And for about the last 15 or so years, I've had a really deep dive on stress and written about it a lot of my books, especially my most recent one. But my body doesn't have a normal stress response because I have a genetic blockade in my liver where my body will not make cortisol, makes very, very low levels. And turns out low cortisol is four times more deadly than high cortisol. And so everyone says, oh, cortisol is a stress hormone, get rid of it. But cortisol is incredibly useful at the right moments.

I mean, I'd still be in bed, I wouldn't be here at the show.

Correct. Right. If you don't have a cortisol spike in the morning when you stand up, you will pass out because you have no blood pressure. And, yes, I might have done that.

That's right. You actually. You know something? I read about this, I think it was Rachel Yehuda, you know, or she studied a lot of epigenetics, et cetera, and what she found was very, very interesting. This has nothing to do with the book, but she went and studied Holocaust survivors in Cleveland, Ohio, I believe, and then was studying the, like, the F1 generation that the progeny of. Of these Holocaust survivors. What she was finding was rampant epidemic, essentially of ptsd.

Yes.

But then she was doing panels and then finding, and this was very surprising, an anti instinctual, chronically low cortisol rays. And that was like a big head scratcher for the very reasons you just described, because we generally associate stress with high cortisol.

Right. Yeah.

But over time, what was happening is that the excess of any one molecule over time will create a resistance to itself.

Right.

And so over time, what was happening in these people that were managing trauma was chronically low cortisol. And that was incredibly detrimental to their health in a whole variety of ways.

In fact, low cortisol will predispose you to PTSD because your body can't handle stress when it happens. So it becomes a traumatic stress. And so we have this kind of war against cortisol. And I feel like cortisol needs a new PR too.

Yeah.

Like when you travel and you're jet lagged. Taking a little bit of extra cortisol and supporting adrenal function means you don't get jet lag.

Yeah. Right.

Because your body might not be able to handle the stress of circadian disruption, but chronically elevating it equals all sorts of metabolic disaster.

Correct. And if you look at one of the most effective treatments to that old virus, it was dexamethasone, which is an immune suppressant. Right. It's a glucocorticoid, more or less. And so cortisol in that sense can sometimes be adaptive because you don't want an over agitated immune system. Everyone thinks we need to bolster our immune system. Really we need to balance our immune system because candidly most of those, the cytokine storms is basically an overly abundant agitated aggravated immune system. So cortisol, it's all about, like I said before, the signature of dis. Ease is imbalance. I mean if that's true and you're going to buy that, then I would say the signature of ease or health or well being is balance.

So.

So if you're in a good state. Took me a long time to figure that one out. Neurochemically and biochemically, you're, you're cruising along, you're in parasympathetic. And then a stressor, whether it's a good stressor, like a workout or we'll call it quote bad, but it's an environmental stressor like a rattlesnake is not good or bad, but something that your body interpr a possible threat or maybe just criticism.

Right. Whatever.

You have a brief spike and then it returns. And you weren't disregulated. And that's the holy grail. What percentage of people do you think manage stress that way?

Very few.

Very few. Very few.

Of course, we live in an environment that is essentially algorithmically preferenced to stress us, to tickle the human negativity, bias the perception of threat. So of course, while I very much am a proselytizer for emotional regulation techniques and we can talk about some of them, I also understand why people are walking around triggered. Because we are enduring what I might call the largest scale, non consensual psychological experiment of all time called social media and 24 hour news and everything that knows that it is in their benefit to essentially trigger you to make you outraged and angry such that they can then serve up more content and bake in more advertising. And that is the, that is the advertiser driven revenue model of modern media. And this is the world in which we live. I mean. I mean, I just was like in the middle of these fires, but 99% of my experience of them was actually staring into my phone. Even though I was evacuated twice, I only saw the flames once from a distance with my own eyes. So my whole reality of them was my perception of them through filtered through news media or social media. And so of course I'm going to be on edge. And this is obviously a very intense example, but I don't know, we're getting served up things that are hyperbolically sensationalist all the time, and then the question is, how will we manage that?

Yeah.

With all the work you've done on yourself, when you look at social media, do you still get triggered?

I mean, I won't lie and say that I'm. I just wear like a. Like a suit of armor at all times, but I am a stoic, right? So the best way to disarm an insult is to be unaffected by it.

Right?

You know, be like the rock, you know, Aurelius said, with the crazy, wild, tumultuous ocean, you know, swirling around you. So there was a point in my life because I was a perpetual people pleaser, that insult or any kind of trigger on social media would really, really send me for a loop. I mean, I won't lie. I'll say I've spent nights up brooding over clever rejoinders, you know, holding that ember of resentment, waiting. I'm gonna wake up and throw it, you know, like. And of course, who's getting burned all that time?

It's you.

It's you. So eventually, through a whole variety of different techniques, I became a much, much more proficient emotional regulator, which all that really means is that I'm better at moving myself back to center. It doesn't mean that I don't. I'm completely unaffected by something, but just like the rattlesnake and you come back to homeostasis. I'm like a Weeble Wobble, Remember those? Yeah, right, a Weeble Wobble. But I won't fall down. And this is really the key, I think, to mindset is that refining that ability to always be able to move beyond back to the middle, equipoise.

I remember this is back in the. The early days of. Of biohacking. I invited Tim Ferriss onto the show before he had a podcast and asked him how he dealt with the stuff on social media. And it was really good advice. And he said, dave, watch the clip from Ratatouille, the old movie about Critics. And I watched. I was like, wow, that's. That's good advice.

And.

And then there's a few other people who. Who've educated me over time on the show. And I got my master class in that. When Joe Rogan, overnight, I'd been on three times, and he had a financial investment in a competitor, and suddenly was like, we can't talk about Dave anymore. So he's like, you know, Dave Astri is a bad man. And I had literally thousands of Joe Rogan supporters, he called themselves the death squad, just come to my social media and just, like, the worst insults. And went from Dave, thanks for changing my life, to like, you're a con artist. Overnight. I was like, what? That really dysregulated me. I had to go in and do, like, heavy duty forgiveness work and with neurofeedback, and. And I just realized the people who are critics online, like, that they were all just bullied.

Yeah, right.

They're going back to fifth grade. So I. Sometimes I'm like, I'll just delete that. And. And someone else said, you always win because they take a long time making the insults. And if you just ban delete, like, you can relax. What I've done now, and I want your feedback on this. So I realized we're back in fifth grade, and I can just point out that's what we're doing. So what I do now most often on social media is I just respond with, that's not what your mom said. And they just get livid. I'm like, guys, if we're gonna play the fifth grade game, like, let's play. But I'm not doing it out of anger. I'm doing it out of hu. Because, like, curiosity and humor now, so I don't get triggered at all, but I'm just like, I know the game.

Yeah.

I think that is an interesting approach. You essentially pop the balloon of outrage through humor. And humor is incredibly useful in that. In that regard. I mean, I think about it this way. You know, during the virus time, I became sort of amateur everything, including amateur citizen microbiologist. So, of course, I learned how you build your physiological immune system. Well, of course, you have this adaptive immune system that's kind of this floating brain inside your body, and it's on alert for outsiders. So pathogens, viruses, bacteria, et cetera.

Right?

And then when it encounters one, it says, hmm, we better spin up some proteins as part of the defense mechanism. And it spins up a bunch of different proteins until it finds that, like, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Ding.

Oh, there's the match. And then we call that an antibody. And the antibody essentially neuters the antigen on the virus, bacteria, et cetera. And over time, if we ever then encounter that virus or bacteria again. The amazing thing is that these B cells have this memory such that they have the built in defenses for that virus. So I started to think about that as I began to understand more about the physiological immune system. And I say, I think this has some applicability to the psychological immune system.

It does.

Where the right exposure. And this is not to like sort of exonerate abuse or neglect or racism or forms of like just odious behavior.

Right.

But some degree of exposure to insult, you build your psychological immune system. And I had a front row seat to doing that during 2020 and by the end of 2020, for various reasons, and we can go in that direction if we want. You know, I basically became quasi untriggerable through that process.

In your book Good Stress, you talk about experiencing discomfort. That's something that's important. Was experiencing discomfort a part of becoming untriggerable?

100%. I mean, it's no fun to be insulted. So very quickly at the beginning, as we kind of anchored into port lockdown in March 2020, my more than capable business partner Jake encouraged me to start writing a weekly newsletter. We had a pretty big distribution list. I had like 1.2 million people. So, you know, I didn't take it lightly. But I signed on naively to write 15002000 words every Sunday. Because during that time there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty, a lot of fear. And if I could just deploy these little missives of hope or buoys of, you know, enlightenment or spirituality, then I felt like, okay, people will feel less alone. And I started doing the kind of rigorous analyses of different issues and things like that. Of course, then about four weeks in, I was like, what did I agree with? This is a lot of work.

Yeah.

But fortunately for me, and somewhat unfortunately for the rest of the world, 2020 provided a lot of compost, a lot of fodder about which to write. So I was tackling, obviously, Covid, but you know, the national reckoning around social justice in the wake of the George Floyd murder. But then like the election and QAnon and like all of these very incendiary issues, I was writing 2000 words on them every week and deploying them out and connecting my personal email to the bottom of those missives. And then Monday morning I'd wake up and it would be like the deluge of Opprobrium cresting the bow of my inbox. And many, many of the emails are actually very kind and encouraging, but you get this too. A one little turn of phrase or something is bound to offend or insult people. And they didn't, didn't bat an eye at letting me know. So I would just get hundreds of emails of like, you know, you libtard, or you conspiracy theorist, or I was.

Both sides, you know, in the same post.

They'll.

They'll be, take both sides. Yeah, like, so which am I?

Right?

It's like whatever the enemy for them is, is what you are, but totally.

Am I a conspiracist or a shill for Pfizer? You know, but I don't know, somehow it was both at the same time. So I wrote this one article in August 2020, and at that point there was an interesting amount of data that was emerging that seemed to suggest that the people that were contracting the virus most severely had multiple comorbidities. There were high rates of obesity, high rates of diabetes.

You talked about the data. How dare you?

Yeah, I know, but. So I wrote an article about that, as rigorously researched as I possibly could. Yeah, but there was also a contemporaneous body positivity movement happening at the same time. And so many people felt very.

You mean obesity normalization movement? That one.

You can dub it any way you want.

One of my love languages is putting words in other people's mouth, so they're always helping.

I mean, the thing is, I grew up a very, very chubby kid.

Me too.

Yeah.

And so I thought that that might shield me in some ways because I've written about that publicly quite a bit. But anyways, whatever. People were offended. And because my audience is mostly female, it was mostly women were offended by this particular article that it was really not obviously just trying to point out not any of the cultural or beauty dimensions of obesity, simply the health dimensions of obesity in relation to this particular virus.

You said that if you're fat, your chances of dying from all cause mortality go up.

Okay.

Oh my gosh, yes.

In so many words. So, so anyways, I got probably, you know, 200 emails there that week. And you know, some of them were. There was nothing to do with him. They were just like, you know, fuck off, unsubscribe dick or whatever. Those are the, you know, more for those.

I usually say, this is not a train station. You don't have to announce your departure.

True.

It's like, okay, but there were some that were very heartfelt and thoughtful.

I wasn't into those. Do you.

So I took it personally to respond to all of them. And after like three or four volleys, you know, between on email, I. I pulled what I call my David Copperfield act, which I would ask these people, would they like to join me on a zoom?

Wow. Yeah.

Individually or in a group?

Individually.

Okay.

And I say it's David Copperfield because I made most of them disappear because.

They wouldn't do it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Just like, poof.

But 26 people took me up on it, and so I had 26 hour long zoom calls.

Wow.

Over the course of August and September 2020, with people that didn't agree with me, and this was like a very cathartic experience where I grew a tremendous amount from this experience. It was really a personal growth exercise.

I learned a lot from being curious.

Yeah.

And being open to recrimination and insult and leaning in. I mean, I interviewed these guys on my podcast, the Gracie brothers. Their grandfather basically invented Brazilian Jiu jitsu, and they gave me this lesson about jiu jitsu. It's like the way to get hurt is to stand maybe two and a half feet from someone so they can leverage all of their body weight and punch you right in the nose. The way to avoid getting hurt is to run away or to lean in so close and essentially hug the person, and all they can do is, like, pat her on your back. They can't hurt you when you're that close. So I opted for the latter. I was going to get in really, really close. And, you know, at that juncture, I didn't have any training in nonviolent communication. Subsequently, I did go get some. But what I learned was having stressful conversations can yield unbelievable benefits.

What did you learn?

I learned in this particular case that people really just wanted to be heard and seen and that I was providing with them with a safe, emotionally regulated space to be heard and seen. And candidly, most of the conversations that I had over that time period, we never talked about the initial issue that had put us at loggerheads. They just wanted to be heard and seen. And I learned all these techniques. I learned listen to understand and not to respond. That was a big one.

Yeah.

Because so often when someone's talking to us, we're already concocting our rebuttal, and they haven't even finished saying their thought.

You stop listening to. You start thinking about what you're going to say.

And this is actually a Japanese custom. I spent a lot of time in Japan, and I would go, I was in the music industry. I'm like a refugee from the music industry, basically. And I would be pitching all the time. So I'd be in these executive offices pitching a band, right? Being like, oh, they're gonna sell them more tickets and more records than anyone, and they've written the best songs, and da da, da, da, da. And then, you know, I'd finally end my pitch. Pregnant silence doesn't work great on a podcast, but pregnant silence in those rooms. And I was like, of course, so uncomfortable with the void that I needed to fill it.

Oh, no.

So I'd be like, oh, no, no, no. But they're the best band that you will ever sign, right? You know, on and on. Finally, I asked this wonderful interpreter that we had at Tomoko. I was like, what's going on? Meeting after meeting. I think I'm making a great pitch. And I'm just, you know, at the end of it, I'm just confronted with silence. She's like, oh, no, no, Jeff. That means that they listened to every single thing you had to say. Then they synthesized it. Then they were forming their response. It's actually a sign of respect.

I was like, oh, Japanese culture is so much beauty, and there's a peacefulness and a intentionality there. And it isn't my native or your native culture, but when you learn those things, it can be a source of wisdom for sure.

Just to bookend the stressful conversations bit, on the other side of these conversations, I made this Rolodex of frenemies. Basically, we didn't agree. I got it from all sides, too. It was heavy Trump, Trumperland, Drumistan. It was also super Wokeistan. It was all sides, you know, but by the end, I had all these frenemies, and we would text, and it was lighthearted, and we didn't agree, but we found connection. Wait a minute.

You're not allowed to have friends who disagree with you. Who do you think you are, Jeff?

No, please don't say it's so. And so. What I realized is, if I can have these hard conversations with people that I don't even know, can I lean in and have stressful conversations with the people that I care about most in my life?

Yeah.

My friends, my siblings, my parents who are 81, 82, 83 years old. Because the possibility of what stands on the other side of these stressful conversations is so beautiful. In fact, it is these very stressful conversations that stand between us and a human condition that our hearts know is possible. And so, yes, in a way, it's different than fasting or cold water therapy or heat therapy or resistance training. You know, those are physiological good stressors, but really very similar in some other ways that leaning into hard things have just incredible benefits.

Including those hard conversations.

That's right.

I've been a huge fan of cold therapy. I've been teaching people how to do it for 15 years now. And it's a part of what we do at upgrade labs. In my new book that comes out in a couple months called Heavily Meditated, I found out about a neurochemical benefit of doing hard, uncomfortable things that I think hasn't really been talked about as much. But you hit on some of this in your book as well. I call it bicep and it's not this bicep, by the way. There's an excuse like looked at, Boom. Gotta show off the guns, right?

Yeah.

It stands for brief intentional conscious exposure to pain, not stress. And studies show that doing that for a minute to three minutes a day has an entirely different effect on dopamine signaling and dopamine sensitivity versus say the physiological effects of cold therapy or heat therapy or intense exercise. Is there a difference between good stress and pain?

Well, I would say that good stress really does sit on the shoulders of the dosage.

There you go.

Like the dose makes the poison, right? Pain. I think you want to get right on the edge of it, but I'm not sure I would ever encourage anyone to go out and experience pain per se.

Not self harm like getting in an ice bath.

Right.

It hurts.

It hurts.

Especially if you make it a little bit colder.

Yeah. So today I was in 44 degrees. That's kind of the.

We have 41 in the backyard.

Okay. Well that's a little sort of right at the bottom edge of what my tolerance is, but that's kind of right where you want to be right is right on the edge of the saber. And cold is, is very subjective in that way.

Right.

Because you can accrue the benefits as long as it just feels subjectively cold.

Right.

So it's different for men and women too. Women usually don't need as much of a colder temperature as men to get the benefits.

Okay.

I mean, yes. I've also read about the dopamine impacts and, and it, as I understand it, they are over a protracted period of time. So you're going to get dopamine production over maybe 48 hours, even post session, is that right?

Well, there, there's a dopamine production, but it's more sensitivity.

Sensitivity, yeah. And.

And when you choose to do the thing that hurts. It could be eating a really spicy pepper. And at the higher end of things, a lot of people dealing with addiction, well, they'll do cold plunges or cryotherapy, but they also are covered in tattoos because when they're really pushed, they're going to do something painful because getting the tattoo hurts. But then they're regulated for sometimes up to six weeks because the dopamine receptors become more sensitized. And it's only if you choose it and it hurts.

Right.

It doesn't have to be for a long period of time. And you look throughout history, you know, monks used to whip themselves. Called self flagellation.

Sure, right.

Celis in Christianity, right? Oh, that's right.

The little thing on your leg that, that binds you. And there's native American practices, even, you know, the, the sun dancers, you know, where they're piercing themselves or there's a whole BDSM world where there's a spiritual component to it, not a self harm at all. And you realize, oh, these are all people speaking.

I used that strategy with my wife. Yeah, this is a spiritual endeavor.

Exactly. I'm just regulating my dopamine right now.

Note to self. Hold on one second.

Yeah, that. So it seems like pain might be a good stress, but more importantly a stimulus that you quickly recover from whether it hurts or not. How do people control they recover?

Yeah, well, I mean, I will say that. I mean it seems like going to the dentist would be completely disconnected from a cold water therapy, but. But not really. Because when Dr. Nikki has a 12 inch syringe hovering above the most sensitive area of my body, about to plunge it into my mouth, that's not the most sensitive. Well, this is the most sensitive one I can currently mention in this environment. Although there is a lot of erogenous tissue kind of in there, I think in the nose.

Trophgasms are also possible too. Okay, I had a Gaston talking about that.

Interesting. Send me their name privately in the dm.

Is there humor?

But you look at what's happening in the nervous system when dear Dr. Nikki, wonderful dentist is putting me in through this experience, this very, very similar phenomena as getting into a cold plunge. Right? The epinephrine coursing through my veins. Ah, my God, I want to fight or fly, but of course I can't because I'm in this bloody chair and I can't get out. So what do I have at my disposal? I have conscious top down pressure to apply onto involuntary bottom up response. And the more I can train Myself to leverage breath. Sure. You know, or my neo mammalian brain, my prefrontal cortex, my locus of reason and rationality to tame the wild tiger of my nervous system. Then that can be that, that can be so protean in life, you know, because you can apply it to traffic, to your annoying, obscurious bloody children. Like any, you can apply it so many different places. So this is why choosing pain, if you will, or like that, the right dosage of stress. Yeah, yeah. It's great for metabolic function and it's great for other things and we can talk about those. But I think really where it has its most potent benefits is in mindset.

It does when you choose it and you learn how to receive it without struggle, without even suffering.

Yeah.

I got in a debate once with a Navy SEAL doctor on stage at an old paleo conference. A question from the audience, what do you struggle with? And other people answered. And I said, I can say I don't believe in struggle. I said, what do you mean? And I think it was triggering for the Navy seal. Sometimes you just gotta struggle. So no, I'm happy to work until I fail. And every amount of struggling that I do represents wasted effort. So it's possible to apply every ounce of energy to picking up a weight or to doing what I'm going to do and to fail. But along the way, if I'm like all those, that's actually just wasted energy. So for me, the most beautiful and the thing I'm seeking for is to just to tunnel all effort, every electron into the action and to be at peace with whether I succeed or I don't succeed.

Okay.

Yes.

You just want the bap.

Yeah.

You want the reality of the bat, the doing of the thing without the attachment to it. So yes. So there the, in Buddhism there's this notion of the Brahma Vihara, which is these four attributes to transcendence, I would call it, one of them is, is upeka. So we generally translate that as equanimity.

Right.

That is the goal.

But I think humans tend to misunderstand equanimity and often conflate it with sort of like a limp conciliatory approach to life.

That's the opposite of equanimity.

No, as I have grown to understand, it is actually bringing your own full self to the present moment.

Yeah.

Passionate full self to it without the attachment to result.

There you go.

It perfectly stated. And the image of equanimity, when I'm teaching this, it's the monk who meditates in the middle of a storm. And nothing on earth can take them out of their state. And if something did, they would be non reactive and just return to their state as much as they could. Where they're going, oh, woe is me. I'm going to struggle, I'm going to suffer.

Yeah.

And so people have learned though, the more I push, the more I struggle, the more I suffer, the more gains I'll get. What's wrong with that?

Well, I think we do have this notion of like, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

Right? Yeah.

So Nietzsche or Kelly Clarkson, depending on your cultural anchoring. But, and we, we most like the most obvious place to witness that is in like muscle hypertrophy, for example. So you overload a muscle until it fails. Like you said, you'll work till it fails. And then what happens? Well, you tear the microfibers in there and then the body, what does it do? It has an adaptive response to that stressor and it, you know, activates structural proteins, actin, myosin, and these things built on top of these branched chain amino acids, et cetera. And you give the thing enough restrictions and what happens? It grows back bigger.

Yeah.

And so there is that idea. But does that have to involve a tremendous amount of struggle? No, no, no, it doesn't.

It doesn't. In fact, if you overdo that training, you can do what I did. You could tear both shoulders, which hurts. You can also create muscle spasms that won't let go with something called pseudo hypoxia, where the local system in the body, which has its own dumb little intelligence, goes, I'm not safe. And then you start getting a muscle that just keeps firing and firing to make sure you don't go through that much damage again. And you have to do PT on it.

Right.

And you realize what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Except for overtraining or gunshots, because, you know, well, the gunshot didn't kill me. It sure didn't make me stronger. And auto accidents and mercury. So that, that especially as a man, like I grew up with that, I'm fully capable of pushing myself way beyond injury. I've had three knee surgeries and all of us are capable of that. And I realized I was doing it in the gym. Yeah, I'm 23 years old, I'm 300 pounds, like the gym will set me free. And I worked out 90 minutes a day, religiously, six days a week. And I did this for 18 months. And it turns out I wasn't doing good. Stress, like your book says, I was never recovering. And so how would.

Right.

How would you advise someone to know how much stress is good stress and when does it flip over to being too much stress?

Yeah, it's a good question. I really, I think this is when it moves from the empirical to the intuitive.

Oh.

So I'm very into bridging the medical and the mystical, sort of the hard empiricism of the west with sort of the intuitive wisdom of the East.

So you want to put like Andrew Huberman and Joe Dispenza in a blender, right?

Or like.

Yeah, sure.

Andrew Huberman and Alan Watts. There you go. So I think, you know, by dint of your own experience, if you have interception, you know, you will know. Like for example, let's just say you go skiing. I'm not a big skier, candidly, but I spent a lot of time in alpine environments because of wanderlust.

Right.

And so I never was very susceptible to the high altitudes. But some people are and they have a degree of hypoxia. A degree of hypoxia. And what does the body do in response to a degree of hypoxia? It produces this little protein called EPO that makes more red blood cells, which are essentially just couriers, More couriers for oxygen because there's less oxygen out there, because the partial pressure of oxygen is lower. At higher altitudes, the air is less dense. So the body has an adaptive response to it. Your mitochondria become more efficient. Ta da. Like, amazing, right? And that is essentially the current with which you need to swim. You need to swim with the current of your body, of your organism's miraculous adaptive mechanisms. So we have. But obviously too much hypoxia. What happens?

Well, you kind of die.

You kind of die, right? And it doesn't take that long. So this is the thing. I mean, the same logic could be applied to thermoregulation. Hypothermia ain't great. Hyperthermia not great either. But we have a built in mechanism for the warm porridge for the goldilocks zone of 98.6, although it's not quite 98.6. It varies across the day, but we won't really get into that detail. But it's like you raise your core body temperature, what do you do? You sweat, you bring yourself back to center, you get really, really cold. You, your body then engages in thermogenesis, brings your body back up to center, et cetera. So it's like. And the interesting thing is, is that the more you push the edges, the better. Your body gets at finding the center. That's the ironic thing. But, but obviously you don't want hypothermia or hyperthermia. And I think this is where we really need to refine our intuition, our physiological intuition to know your body. It's like my wife is a yoga teacher and an anatomist if you will. She can move any muscle in her body.

I want that.

I'm working on that. It's so cool. I'm like this oblique over there and she goes, yeah. And that is a very sort of physiological manifestation of interoception.

Yeah.

But there's also something even more refined than that. There is a place where you will even know your own levels of inflammation.

Yeah, you know, I'm there, you're there.

I don't have all the movements down, but I got a lot.

Yeah, but you're a highly refined human.

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It's funny when, when we talk about these things, I'm reminded of a couple experiences when I was in Tibet going to Mount Kailash. The trip where I had the idea for putting butter in coffee instead of tea. That kind of created a revolution. There I was at the top of a pass in the Himalayas and there was about a hundred foot hill with a little prayer flag thing. So I'll run up to the top of that to see what happens. And I got up to the top and I laid down like a fish. I mean I. It turns out you can die from that. It was really dumb. And I laid there and I didn't get heart lock and arrhythmia. But I think I came really close and it took 10 minutes. And they're like, let's go. I'm like, I can't move.

Just.

And so that's bad hypoxia.

Right.

But you come to upgrade labs today we have equipment that deliberately induces hypoxia and then returns you back to normal.

Yeah.

And if you do that for about 20 days, your body becomes acclimated to 15,000ft of elevation.

Wow.

Which has all kinds of metabolic benefits. I Wish I'd have done that before I went.

Yeah, well, it's no wonder that Olympic athletes are training at these places of high altitude.

Turns out you don't have to train, you just have to do that. How do I stress? With good stress, my hemoglobin and oxygen management system so the body becomes better at it. And then how do I de stress?

Yeah.

And then with cold therapy. One time I was at a hotel, this is very early in my journey and I was religiously doing ice baths and I got one of the rooms for people who are disabled. And so there was no bathtub. I'll just get some ice packs. And I fell asleep with ice packs all over my shoulders and abs. An hour and a half later I wake up and it's actually relaxing to be an ice when you're used to it. I got first degree ice burns over about 20% of my body and I had the worst inflammation and pain for six weeks. Another time I was, I have this habit of getting on Instagram live when I'm doing a cold plunge, answering questions. Well, this, normally I'm 41 degrees. This was in a, a hotel and I'm foot, there's ice floating. So this water is 33 degrees. And I went for 15 minutes because I was just having fun and I felt so good. And I got out, I'm like walking back to my, my hotel room and I start shaking. I got real hypothermia. I had hot water, or actually it was hot danger coffee. But I'm trying to drink it and I'm shaking so bad. It's just like throwing it in my face. And I, I should have gotten in a hot bath, but I couldn't. I didn't have the presence of mind to do that. I turned the hot water on the shower and I just laid down. I'm like, eventually I'll warm up. But I got true hypothermia. So both of those could have been good stressors, but I pushed myself too hard, too far.

That's the thing is like, you need to ease into these stressors. I mean, you don't go out and run a marathon having never run before. You don't get in a 34 degree bath having never been in an ice bath.

You won't be able to breathe.

No. And so this is, I think where, I mean, obviously with cold you can increase, you know, duration and decrease temperature, et cetera, but this is where I think, you know, people need to be intelligent and play with the edges of their own endurance and their own thresholds. And it's also fun because you get, you do what you can measure, you can improve, and you do improve over time. And so. And the protocols stop being effective if they're too easy. So. Yeah, right. So there's an interesting thing that I came across the other day and I. This was not in the book, but it has to do with crying. You know, crying, as it turns out, is a kind of a stressor in a way. It's an emotional regulation technique. And we tend to in modern Western society, you know, really stigmatize crying as something weak. But I was reading this article, it's fascinating, and we were talking about the nature of tears that are produced by these lacrimal glands in our eyes. And mostly they're just basal tears to keep your eyes lubricated, et cetera. Then you can be cutting some onions and garlic from time to time and have a reactive, but emotional tears actually have their own chemical signature such that if you analyze them, you put them in a lab, you will find stress hormones in the tears, adrenochordotropic hormone, E, C, T, H. And so what you're doing when you're crying is you're literally flushing out stress. And the other thing often when you're crying is that forces you to take deep breaths, which is also an emotional regulation technique. So really crying is an adaptive mechanism that are built into human beings to again bring us back to center. So don't ever stigmatize crying. Crying is actually a totally adaptive response to stress.

Joe Dispenza, who is going to be speaking at my biohacking conference, biohackingconference.com guys when I go to his events, he's got guys there gathering tears and tears of joy or healing and measuring what's in them.

Get out.

For hundreds and hundreds of people showing that meditation, the tears change.

Wow.

So what you're saying, it's backed by science.

That's cool.

And.

And there's another kind of tear that's very, very rare. So in esoteric tantric practice, there's something called Amrita that women make. And there's the most common form, which is known as squirting, which by the way, is not pee. And this is during exalted states. And there's two Amrita glands underneath the tongue which are. It's a much more rare form. And if you're ever with someone who has that kind of Amrita format, heights of call it spiritual experience, kissing someone like that, it, it, it's a very different experience. But the rarest form of Amrita, which is very highly spiritual, is a different kind of tear, but it comes at the outer edge of the eye, not where the tear glands are in the middle.

Right.

And that is very, very potent. And they have entirely different compounds in them.

Wow.

And so just understanding where the body does all these things that we've barely measured.

Right.

It's fascinating. And the more we start understanding and measuring, the more of the esoteric and the ancient practices that we're both interested in, the more we're validating that the stuff is real.

Yeah.

That's amazing. I mean, it really does usher in a sense of awe and wonder about how we've evolved. I mean, to think that we produce these chemicals in these tears as a product of, well, yes, you know, millions of years of hominid evolution, but that this is a product of some supernova explosion 8 billion years ago. Right. That under this unfathomable pressure and temperature, you know, this iron core star somewhere in the universe exploded and vomited its elemental guts throughout the universe. And then some 4 billion years ago, a hydrogen cloud and all these atoms came together that were essentially forged in the crucible of that 8 billion year old supernova to, you know, to create our little solar system and our little rock called Earth and lend itself then to prokaryotes and single celled organisms. And then, you know, whatever, some archaea tried to engulf some bacteria, and all of a sudden, like, a mitochondria was formed and those started to, like, allow for multicellular life and one Adam self assembled with another. And like, then here we are as a product of that cosmological experiment, now at the cusp of being able to analyze what's in our tears. I mean, it is truly quite awesome to be alive.

It is mind boggling. You think about all that and it feels like everything's so big and we're only here for a brief period of time.

Yeah.

I have a question for you that's not about good stress.

Sure.

What do you want your legacy to be?

Curious.

You're a wise, wise human being. What would you say?

I mean, you can think of this, I suppose, in some ways as like, what's chiseled out on your gravestone or something. And, you know, we often see our legacy through the eyes of our children. So I have three daughters, you know, and. And, you know, yes, on some level, like, I want them to be proud of me. Like, I want them to remember their father for something, assuming that I don't outlive them. But I might, given what they're up to these days. And when I look at my own life and I try to be honest, you know, what I see is a common thread that kind of my Achilles heel, my greatest weakness, became my greatest superpower over time. That my people pleasing desire to fit in as a young chubby kid getting moved peripatetically around the world, kind of to a new school and a new language with a new clique, whatever, that sort of fat worm that I was squirming into new social situations, doing anything, compromising any authentic component of myself in order to fit in to belong, that was my greatest weakness. And over time and a lot of heartache and a lot of, I guess, me search and self work, I had to become honest with myself about that and really transmute my greatest weakness into my greatest superpower. And if I look back at my life, what I've done, you know, is to create sort of the world's largest series of events around wellness. Now I have a company called Commune, I have a retreat center. I'm like, duh. It's about bringing people together. And I think because it meant so much to me as a young kid to belong, that now I have committed myself many times unwittingly to creating that sense of belonging for other people, of bringing people together in space. And if you really think about.

What.

We'Re here doing, Dave, I mean, we are just essentially animated energy. You know, we are kind of links in this continuous chain of captured sunlight, right? And in this brief miraculous moment of our lives, what we do really is connect. We are animated energy seeking connection. And you know, eventually, you know, my light will go out, you know, my. I will go to sleep, you know, and my life will be rounded by that experience. And I will just essentially my energy, you know, we'll move on. So how in that brief magical lifespan was I able to connect? How much connection could I foster? That would be my legacy?

That's a. It's beautiful. In the, the world of longevity where I spend a lot of time, as I recognize biohacking when I started was to make longevity interesting for young people. There's something in it for you to start early. And it's not just living a long time. It's having good energy. It's having the ability to show up the way you want and to do it for as long as you want. But anyone who enters biohacking will eventually, when they solve the short term stuff, I want to live a very long time and I want to be happy and more conscious. So all my efforts around consciousness and longevity ultimately. And it feels like there's a role for good stress and longevity where you've got to be able to know that you're getting enough good stress so you can live a long time and you're not getting enough bad stress because then you won't live a long time. But then people worry. It's like orthostressorexia, if I just made it for it, like what if I'm not doing my stress management, right? What's your advice for people about that interoception, that inner feeling of stress? What does it feel like intuitively when you know you've hit that end of good stress and you're going over into overstress?

I think it, it comes down to our experience of ease in our lives and I think we're fooled about what ease often is. You know, I mean, yeah, certainly delightful from time to time to curl up in a warm temperature regulated room with a pint of chubby hubby and binge some Netflix, right? That sounds like a life of ease, but not really. It's not really the ease. That's not really the ease that we seek.

It's a life of suffering and short term pleasure, right?

That's right.

And I mean we can taste real ease and it's cloaked ironically in stress sometimes. So like, like if you went to the regular old grocery store and you bought like an ethylene gas tomato and you brought it back here, you would never do that. But, and taste that, really taste it, what there is to taste and compare that to the taste of the tomato that you grew through a lot of inconvenience, right? You had to cultivate that soil, you had to plant the seed, you had to prune the plant just right, etc, you had to water it in the right proportions, you had to murder the.

Tomato worms, those worms, sorry, Vegans, right.

Don't trust nature comes up as pests when you, you know the taste of the true ease that we really seek in that tomato because it is the product of a lot of hard work, a lot of inconvenience, a lot of stress. In some ways much more stressful than going to the store and just buying one. And you know, if you extrapolate on that feeling of ease that you really seek in the human body and human psychology, I think we often experience, I think we're experiencing it right now, right? It's like I'm not thinking about like how my pants fit right now. They fit just fine, right. And because I'm here with you And I'm completely here, I'm nowhere else.

Right.

I'm having an experience of connection, an experience of collective enterprise here. We're doing something all together, we're creating something. There is an element of like immersive creativity that's happening. I literally don't know the next word that's going to come out of my mouth. But I have to trust myself and that's like. And becoming comfortable with that unpredictable sense of what's going to happen to like go through life with some sort of a trust in that there's a spontaneous intelligence hidden in here with this organism that will yield the life of real ease. I mean, I feel right now a complete sense of ease with you, you know, And I mean sometimes we feel this in sports with like flow state, right? You know, where it's hard, I'm sweating, I've been out here for two hours on the tennis court. But I have perfect awareness of my body in space and time. I can almost intuit where that guy, that specimen across the net is going to hit the ball. Like I'm truly in flow. Like I'm in a state of true and real ease, you know, And I think we know that, you know, so there's an in like an internal knowing about that ease. And then when it's not ease, the.

The research on on flow states is interesting. Extreme sports, intense exercise can do it. That's why a lot of people get addicted to a long distance cardio because they're getting a flow state, but service to others. Flow state, public speaking. Flow state, yeah. So we've got service others. That's the intent of the show. And this is a form of public speaking, so there is some flow. And plus you've got trained yourself to be present, as have I. So I'm sure people say that too. Like you're really present with me versus, you know, glancing at your phone and distracted and all that. Like that's something you can cultivate and that you clearly have. And it's much easier when two present people are, are together or more than two are together. Then you have these amazing conversations versus you, the one chaotic person who's, you know, constantly twitching around. It doesn't work. I look back on all the times I've injured myself. I would intentionally suppress my interception or I just didn't know what it was or my intuitives, my intuitive side. And I would do it out of like societal rules or self judgment or shame.

Right.

Like, well, if I don't, you know, do whatever this thing is that is going to injure me, then I won't be good enough. And then my unconscious, like, then you get kicked out of the tribe and the tigers will eat you, or, I don't know, the human stuff. So then you do it anyway. And what I. I teach today is intuition is the first thing, and it's not as strong as the second thing, which is much stronger, which is the emotion. And then the third thing is the thought that says that emotion is wrong, or I'm going to believe it and all sorts of stuff. But by the time you're thinking about it, it's long after the intuition happened. So when I'm pushing myself on something, having the wisdom of having torn plenty of muscles and having, you know, injured my knees over and over in skiing and soccer when I was ignoring the intuition, I finally think I tapped into it. And what I work to do with a show with my books is like, if you're. All of them are done. If I was 19 and I saw this, would it have been worth my time? And if there's a voice in your head somewhere that says, not, I don't know if I can do it. That's a good voice because, well, let's see if you can do it. And there's another voice that's not fear that says if you do that, you're going to get injured. And there's a louder voice that says you might get injured. And if you're worried about that, do the walking on coals thing.

That.

That's I'm going to get injured voice.

Yeah.

But there's something else. If it was a real fire, it was, you know, the Terminator scene with molten lava. It's a different thing than fear and teaching that. And this is advanced meditation stuff.

Yeah, it's. It's interesting, actually. Like the. The greatest warriors, like, we often associate courage, you know, with warriors with war.

Right.

Because it's, like, so obvious, like you're making yourself vulnerable. You could get hurt if you go in there.

Right.

But there is. I mean, this comes from stoicism as well, that it's actually the blend of virtue that makes the man. It's being able to be both to recognize what is the courageous thing and what is also the sort of moderate thing and the just thing and the wisest thing. And it is like solving that Rubik's Cube that can be a wonderful guide, you know, for the way you live your life. Because the greatest soldiers aren't just, like, running, you know, into a minefield. They're like, no, they're doing some degree of risk analysis.

Right.

They're, they're combining some degree of bravery with some degree of temperance. And it's like it's in the same way that the strongest individual has a degree of suppleness to them. It's like there is always a little bit of yin in the yang and a little bit of yang in the yin.

Right.

It's like if you look at like the boughs of a willow tree, for example, right. Very strong, but yet very supple. That under, like a heavy snow, those boughs will bend a bit and the snow will slough off versus like a tree, like an oak that has very, like stiff boughs. That. Underneath that weight, boy, there's more, there's more probability that the boughs will just snap.

Right.

So it's just that it's that tenuous, delicate balance. The same is true for flexibility. Flexibility requires a degree of strength.

2. Oh, yeah.

If you're flexible without strength, that's called injuring your ligaments.

Right? Yeah.

You don't want that.

Yeah.

I mean, there's all these forms of stretching where, you know, it's very reliant on strength, like holding your leg up in the air, not against some sort of resistance, for example. So like dancers do.

My dogs.

Yeah. Or advanced martial arts if you're going to kick really high. That's not just flexibility, it's muscle and flexibility. Right?

Correct.

You mentioned stoicism several times. And Ryan Holiday is also speaking at the biohacking conference in May.

Neil, good for you.

That's great, guys. May 28 biohackingconference.com and I remember I read one of his books with my son during the pandemic. We'd get in the sunlight and infrared sauna and we'd sit there and sweat. And of course, when you're. He was probably 12 at the time, sit there sweating, just, you know, it's uncomfortable. And we'd read this in one page. It was the daily stoic. We read through that.

Yeah.

And it was, it was, I think, really valuable. It was father son bonding time and just important lessons. And where I ended up is stoics will receive so much stress that they, that they'll break because, like, you're going to be stoic until it. It's beyond your ability to, to withstand it. So now you could take the world's best stoic. So I've got a candle burning here, and just hold your hand over it and they're like. And then pretty soon they're not Going to show it? Not shows it, no.

And then.

Okay, it takes a while to recover. And it's also possible to move your hand over the candle and not be burned.

Right, Very good.

And there's something between the willow and the oak and equanimity or resilience or even enlightenment, which is another word for equanimity in the East. It comes from trusting the inner intuition. But if our societal programming, our belief systems or our trauma teaches us that discomfort equals death, then we become weak. And if they teach us that chronic, endless discomfort beyond our body's capacity to endure, well, if we think that's life, that also leads to death and aging. So that longevity path is walking with one foot and oh my God, that's almost gonna hurt me, but not. And one foot in. I'm not lazy because I'm recovering.

Yeah, it's Zen in that sense.

Yeah.

It's really the ability to cultivate an intelligence that allows you to move spontaneously through the present moment and this present moment and this one now, you know, and trusting yourself eventually just to do that. And it's very funny. Like we're taught in the west to distrust nature, right?

Right.

Because it shows up in the best case scenario, just shows up as weeds and pests.

Right?

But of course we distrust nature because it's out to kill us, right? Like, so we spent thousands of years killing all the megafauna of the world, the giant wombats and these 4,000 pound bears and all these wonderful door just want us. Yeah, no problem. And then Louis Pasteur came along and said, oh no, it's not the big megafauna that are going to kill you. So there's little things that you can't see. So then we spent the last 150 years killing off all the tiny things, right? Because nature, it's out to get us. And particularly the nature inside of you is out to get you. That is also known as human nature. And it's bad, right? It's sinful, right.

Dirty microbes.

It's dirty and it's prone to indulgences and vice and sex and drug taking and alcohol consumption or whatever, and this. So we've created this dichotomy in the west and in Abrahamic traditions, kind of, you know, between the soul, which is eternal, right? And that would. That's the thing that we must cultivate and we must sublimate the corporeal body that is made of dust, you know, and to dust it will return because it's no good. And so I think we need to Reframe our relationship with nature, including human nature.

Right.

And trust it because it will let you down.

Right.

It will let you down. Nature is a immaculate designer, but makes mistakes in its execution. We do have mutations, we have single nucleotide polymorphisms that predispose us to certain diseases, sometimes definitively.

I've got some of those like that stress one.

Yeah, yeah.

But what are we going to do? Not trust nature? I mean.

Yeah, A very old friend used to say nature is a harsh mistress.

Yes. Right.

You got to listen to nature. But if you ignore nature, you probably will never connect your inner nature as well.

Right? That's right.

I mean, the spiritual traditions of the east, if anything, they. They teach you to swim with her current.

Right.

And this is what I love about kind of bridging mysticism in medicine, is that there's wonderful empiricism to human physiology. It's fascinating to study. Oh, mtor and ampk and glucagan and insulin and excitatory neurotransmitters and inhibitory neurotransmitters and the balancing act, the teeter totter that exists between all of these counterposing molecules and pathways. I love studying that stuff. I love it. And yet there is the middle way. There is the madhyamaka of the body. You know that if we align with her current, you know that all of that empirical knowledge will find its delicate tenuous balance. We will find that balance between anabolic MTOR and sort of restorative autophagy activated ampk.

Right.

We'll find that balance between the right amount of GABA that allows us to be relaxed and calm and go to sleep and that right amount of glutamate that allows us to be alert and hear and going for it. You know, we'll find that right balance between cortisol to get sleepy head out of bed and melatonin to get enough restorative sleep. You know, this is always, I think the key to really holistic well being is to both understand the mechanism and then swim with the current of our adaptive, essentially of the foundational intelligence of the cosmos of which you are it, you are the entire intelligence of the universe as it's existed forever, experiencing itself here and now in the organism of Dave. Isn't that amazing?

It's pretty mind boggling.

Yeah. Really is.

And we just got to get with it. We just got to get with it. Get with nature.

My grandfather co invented the. The process for making plutonium, the still one, the one we still use today.

Wow.

And he was also a Scout master. We spent huge amounts of time in the mountains in New Mexico, leading young people in nature. He was a master gardener. And he told me, he said, oh, yeah, I had the idea for that in a dream. And I. I never got a chance to ask him because I didn't have this level of knowledge. But I don't think he would have been able to do that if he hadn't spent the time in nature.

Right.

Like, there's some deep connectedness that seems to happen.

Yeah, well, there's space. Someone really smart said, wisdom comes in the spaces. And we know that. Like, how often, you know, is there a thought will probably never happens with you because your mind is so facile. But with me, like, I'll forget someone's name, for example.

Yeah, that happens to me.

Yeah.

But I know what their name isn't. You know, like, oh, you remember that guy? Oh, was his name Tom? No, it wasn't Tom.

Yep. Yeah.

Was it Fred? No, it wasn't Freddy? Oh, maybe Jake? No, it wasn't Jake. Like, I can't quite shine the spotlight of my conscious attention on it, but I know what it isn't.

Right.

And then I say, fuck it, whatever. And then you go out for a walk in nature and then, oh, it's Bob.

Right.

Of course, there's one case where it won't work. I've learned over time, if someone has two first names, like their last name is another first name, you just shouldn't trust them because you're gonna call them by them all the time. You're gonna call them by their last name instead of their first name. So, you know, if your name is Bill Dave, like, I'm sorry, it's something deeply wrong with you, and I'm true.

Well, now, I'm sure in Texas there's probably plenty of those.

I don't mind if your name is Billy Joe Bob Smith, but if your name is Billy Joe Bob, Richard, I'm gonna call you Richard. And like, it just happened. And I. I digress. I have a couple more questions.

Sure.

As we get to him, I'm having a great time.

If we could redesign the world just from the ground up to make more resilient humans, you could change one thing today. What would it be?

Well, since the Supreme Court banned Tick Tock, or not quite, but I would say, I mean, you know, it's hard to rank these things, but I think humans at this very moment are suffering from distraction in a way that we've never really experienced. And I think that, you know, what we Might call the attention economy or the persuasion economy, me, which has taken Dave's time and attention and commodified it and sold it and you don't even know that it's happened, you know. So if I could denude the world of all of the insidious forces competing for your time and attention, I would try to do that.

That seems like you would destroy churches along with marketing agencies though, wouldn't you?

Those would be the top two on my list, in that order.

Oh.

Oh yeah.

I have a very open atheist so I've got, you know, taken plenty of flack for that.

Oh God. I'm, I'm very open minded and agnostic and I feel like there's a lot to learn from all the different religious traditions, but none of them owns me.

Very good.

I mean, I will modify my statement and say that I respect all the different truly honest pathways that exist on the out outward spokes of the wheel that are truly dedicated to getting to the hub. And that might be Judaism, that might be Islam, et cetera. In the same way that dance has mazurkas and tangos and waltzes, you know, different varietals. Yeah. And as long as it's honest.

Yeah.

And there's value in community. But I, I, my general take on this is that just this is from 40 years of Zen, Some of the Zen, the new heavily meditated book. It's a, to reach that state of resilience. There's a few core skills and there's forgiveness. That is one of the major world religions. That's a Christianity side of things.

Sure.

You also want compassion, which is more the Buddhist and the Eastern side of things. And then you would also want surrender, which is what you do with psychedelics or breath work or pushing your edges and just says I'm going to have to let go or the surrender experiment kind of thing. And that is the path of Islam.

Right.

So these are the core parts of each of these. And I haven't been able to fit Judaism into that framework. I was one class away from a minor in religious studies in my undergrad. And the thing that sets the historical Judaism apart is it was one of the few matriarchal religions going back in time other than some of the more shamanic very, very old things. And there's probably something in there for that yet. And also the community that each of them forms is beautiful. Yet how would I pick one? So I'm not going to.

Yeah, well, there's mystical components of most of these, you know, dostile religions. You know, gnostic traditions, et cetera, that.

Were.

More geared around the transformation of feeling like a separate isolated self to the sensation of being utterly interwoven and connected with the universe. That is for me the definition of a mystical experience. Now we tend to associate that more with Buddhism, for example, or even Daoism and Zen to some degree. Yeah, but we see it of course in unity consciousness and Christ consciousness, et cetera. I mean I very much believe that Christ probably had what we might call sort of a Buddhist experience of Indra's Net or of mutual interdependence. He probably walks out into the desert and was like, oh my God, I am connected to the entire thing.

This was seven years. He probably went to India in there too.

It could be it was last year, we don't know. But I wouldn't doubt it. And, but you know, of course as these traditions have become, you know, institutionalized and leveraged for power, you know, they have been largely denuded of their mystical elements. Agree. And I think that that's why people, you know, every 30, 40 years turn to psychedelics, you know, because there is no other forum for mystical experience, for feeling part of something bigger than themselves. And so it's filling a void that is not, you know, being serviced by some of the more prominent religions.

I would say that's, that's a fair.

Way to put it.

No, what's one uncomfortable truth about consciousness or health that people aren't ready to hear?

One uncomfortable truth. I mean I, I think that the most uncomfortable part of the human experience is likely its terminus. And what I mean by that is death. You know, it's kind of the.

This.

Sort of double edged sword of consciousness. You know, it's, I mean obviously there's a sunny side to it. I get to be here with you and taste your wonderful coffee and be in this wonderful environment. And there's like this experience of what it's like to be me right now. This qualia is wonderful. But of course I also do know that I will die and that everyone that I know and love is going to die. And this is probably the ultimate target of the spiritual self examined. Life is freedom from that fear.

Being alive is a life threatening disease.

That's good.

You put it in a quote card for me. Thank God someone on social media take note.

It's funny, talking about death is probably the only thing worse than talking about laziness. And I, and with my last book, like there's a faster way to do it and I acknowledging that laziness is a part of your nervous system that you didn't choose, but that the body will always make easy look more attractive than hard. And that's the root of laziness, and it doesn't mean anything's wrong with you. But talking about that does not drive clicks. And neither is talking about death, because the ego shies away from it. So that is an uncomfortable truth that. That most people won't be into. And, yeah, I finally got there at some point where I'm. I'm convinced via lots of quantum physics and via lots of ancient practice that death and time are both pretty much illusions. Just when you're in a meat body, you see them.

Right.

But if you're not in a meat body, you probably don't see him because, like, we can mathematically prove that there is no time. It's just our framework for reality. So Einstein messed everything up and other quantum physicists after that. Like, damn it. Why does the reality we can prove look nothing like the one we see? And that's annoying. Any thoughts on that?

Well, yeah, I mean, I think death appears to be kind of coterminous with the cessation of our perception of the world, essentially, like our sensory instruments shut down. Right. So. And this is how we know life. We don't know it any other way, but, you know, we were all dead once, I suppose you could say.

Right.

And was it that bad? Probably not.

Either we didn't know or we knew and it wasn't that bad. Oh, we knew it wasn't that bad.

So, I mean, I think that the. The first step on this journey of getting comfortable with the discomfort of death, if you will, happens cognitively. It's like forgiveness. It's either it's easier to forgive in the head than the heart.