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

Hi, I'm Miami Alec, and I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. It's July 4th, 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 overconvenience 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. 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. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Jeff Krasno, and we will see you over on Substack. Break it down. Evening, bias remorse, buy a new car, I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I wouldn't have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no. No, no bias remorse. More like buyers rejoice. I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com. My name is Alex Break and I'm supported by Helix. We can't tell you how excited we were to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix for over five years, Jonathan II, and we've been sleeping great. Jonathan loves his, our kids love their Helix mattresses. All the issues like night sweats, back pain, motion transfer, those things are significantly better. 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Tell people who you are and how we all got here. I'm a jack of many trades. I assume that makes me a thought leader because I'm an expert in nothing. But 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 and I write a lot of ink on paper books and a regular newsletter etc and host a podcast. I'm really, really good at tearing my calf muscles and I'm really good at eulogies. It's funny because commune could also be red commune and a lot of what you do is also kind of gather people in spaces depending kind of on their needs and 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 breeds resilience and I wonder if today we can talk a little bit more about sort of the emotional side of it, the spiritual side of it. You have a really interesting personal health journey. Maybe you can give us a little framework for how dis-ease kind of made its way into your life and also how ease actually plays into disease. Yeah, it was curious that the great yoga 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 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, just brain fog and chronic fatigue. I had like dad, bod, the man boobs, yes, all of the above and then 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 and 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 subsequently didn't cancel my primary care position appointment for once and went and did all the panels and lo and behold I was part of this greater epidemic of chronic disease and so this really springboarded me on a journey to discover why I was so sick but really myself has 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 mental glad stones of maybe 400-500 doctors so I did a lot of interviewing and came up with a primary thesis. When you look at the panoply of chronic diseases, they're really actually primarily lifestyle diseases and we didn't really have much diabetes or heart disease or stroke or fatty liver disease on a serengeti, you know, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years ago, a little bit of cancer but not too much, 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 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 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 and 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, you know, there was calorie scarcity and exposure to crazy vicissitudes and temperature fluctuation, you know, we lived in community, we lived primarily outside, we didn't have, you know, 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. 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 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 was a very stressful time, like that's my most recent, you know, kind of like touch point for me knowing something about this evolution, 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 now we have, oh, medication. And I'm thinking even of diabetes. 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? Alia is a high polyphenol olive oil shot that you take daily before meals to feel lighter, more clear. It reduces brain fog, fatigue, bloat, suppressor sugar cravings. Alia is made with a wild, rare variety of olives from Tunisia. 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Grab the starter kit, use code break. You'll get 43% off. The frother alone is worth it. That's right, up to 43% off with code break. At MUDWTR.com. After your purchase, they'll ask you how you found them. Please support the show and let them know that we sent you. 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, and she said the washer dryer. It saved her 25 to 30 hours a week. So technological innovation isn't all bad. This is definitely not my case. But 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. And population did grow and expand. And 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 synthetic fertilizers and subsidized crops, etc. 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 door dash up like a summer squash in the middle of winter before this podcast ends. I mean, it's absurd. And it'll arrive at its door. In this world of endless, always available calories, 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 loincloth to get a little tight around the middle, around the fall harvest, you know, where I'd gorge on figs because the, 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 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. It's like, yeah, we can go into Yamannaka factor in 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 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 newfangled solutions. That solution is really often masking an upstream issue, which is that we are not, we're our culture, the way we live is hijacking our biology. You started 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. 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. 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 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 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 I think there are protocols that we can and adopt to superimpose some degree of paleolithic lifestyle, of health and parting paleolithic period, environmental stressors. You know, a lot of us have been hearing about, and Jonathan and I have spoken about it, um, 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 I guess 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, 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 the 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? 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 got 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. Not exactly how they sold it to me. 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 preference 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. Jonathan sends them to me anyway. Yeah. It's the gods. Yeah, man. Dude, we're in a constant state of emotional dysregulation. You know, not just because of the phone, but 24 hour news media, etc. And in order to swage 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. 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. You're taking away everyone's fun. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, I'm gonna go back. 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. Yeah, probably not. Yeah, I'm a unique. I didn't put that in my bio. So this is the thing. So this is like why we can take some mastery of, 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, you can examine the provenance of that hunger and ask yourself, is this a biological need or a psychological desire, right? And if you believe in, in Victor Frankl's old adage, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a space in that space of 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 it's a lot of boredom, right? I mean, like, that's really, it's a lot of boredom. Yeah, and it has like, play a tropic impact. 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, 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. And we don't have to call it fasting. We can just call it not continuously eating. Fair. 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 eat for three hours. Like, no, let's just, let's just like bring it all back a little bit. 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, Muhammad received the Quran in a fasted state. I mean, no, no, no, 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, I mean, you're leaving out the other of the Abrahamic, 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, but 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. 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? 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? 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 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 that we we get a taste of that when we're in nature. And it's often in that open space where we are the most creative. And we it's where it's in that compost where like the seeds of 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 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 with the ocean or mountains. I mean, I think there's probably so much subjectivity there, but yeah, curious Yeah, so one really interesting thing. So is like how we evolved with light itself Um, and I'll try, uh, I'll try not to mansplain too much on this one. Um, and uh, and if you don't know what mansplaining is I have a workshop about that later. We're obviously Uh, uh, no, uh, uh, yeah. Um, so we literally evolved in relationship to this fusion reaction that's happening 93 million miles away, right? So as part of the electromagnetic radiation that's emitted from the Sun, there's a whole sort of Breath of wavelength 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 the UV scan to try to get as tan as possible, but we also obviously Uh, generator produce endogenous vitamin D in in relation to vitamin R and to in 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 and a wave spectrum when we're in greenery So it's actually not where and we're in direct sun. So this is another reason to get outside. So if you're on or around grass or trees Infrared radiation will bounce off of those anything green and they will actually penetrate the skin up to 8 centimeters 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 base 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 Yeah, you could buy a red light panel or do it near infrared sauna, but really just get outside Into a green environment And that has inestimable impacts on your health. I mean I'm sure Jonathan is already googling how to create a little patch of grass exactly where he likes to sit outside Yeah, I see a tree back there. There is a tree back there, but 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 Do you need to have your skin exposed in order to get the benefit? Oh, he loves he loves to take you shirt off Yeah, I mean that that was with my ploy Just right here on the sunset off right now No You actually don't need to be bare-chested in fact Infrared radiation will travel through even a relatively thick sweater And Where he sweaters outside he just clocked us he likes to be shirtless. I like a thick sweater. You're around 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 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 mine be Alex breakdown is supported by one skin One skin is not your typical skincare brand most anti-aging skincare is built to react To smooth over lines and wrinkles after they show up But one skin started somewhere different working to address how skin ages in the first place Founded by four PhD longevity scientists they studied skin at the cellular level and found that visible skin aging starts deeper When certain cells stop working the way they should and begin affecting the healthy cells around them So they engineered OS one their proprietary peptide to work with skins biology targeting those dysfunctional cells instead of just sitting on the surface It's the foundation of every product they make and what you see over time with their product is firmer smoother skin more tone and radiance Visibly fewer fine lines for skin that both looks and act younger I've been very impressed with one skin my skin does it has more even tone feels firmer I shared one skins OS one face SPF with all of our producers and they also love it as an everyday sunscreen underneath makeup And this isn't just us one skins results are backed by four peer reviewed clinical studies over 10,000 five star reviews And they've been recognized by Bloomberg and fast company as a leader in skin longevity Born from over 10 years of longevity research one skins helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age for limited time Try one skin with 15% off using code break at one skin dot CO slash break that's 15% off one skin dot CO with code break After your purchase. 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Please support our show and let them know that we sent you Support for this podcast comes from progressive america's number one boat ensure We've all made mistakes on the water But there's one mistake you shouldn't make being uninsured with progressive boat insurance You can choose coverage for most mistakes you or other boaters can make helping you float care free all season long Quote today progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates number one rating based on 2024 filings with state departments of insurance Well, I want you to sort of slightly surprising ones because I could talk about sauna and cold plunging and all that kind of fasting and 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 Um, but I'm talking like emotional tears if you were actually too harvest those tears and take them into a chemistry lab You would find stress hormones in those tears So you would find a jeep I think it's a dream accorded tropic hormone And so when you are crying you're literally flushing out stress and we know just by dent of our our own experience when when we have a full Belly throated sob your 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 um our our parasympathetic Um autonomic system. So but we vilify Crying right in 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 stosism, but um 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 metaphorically really comports to our psychological immune system in many ways and in in 2020 I committed to having 27 hour-long zoom calls with people that don't like me Was there a shot in upsheet like yeah, did you literally from one to ten the ways that I annoy you and you just like Sent them out to people who you suspected of having ill will 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 yeah I was writing about just like very neutral topics like covid and George Floyd and things like that um and uh and have 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 my psychological immune system and also with a lot of, you know, breath practices and and meditative practices, etc. 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 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 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. And the output of those six days was nothing less than absolutely incredible. It's really incredible. And just that notion and I've done some studying of nonviolent communication and just that notion that exactly the thing that you think is impossible is the place that it actually is most beneficial for us to sit in emotionally. It's such an incredible skill. 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 in setting was more conducive to cooperation when we had like cold flanges and sonnas 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 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 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 emotion just talking about it. And then that night, unprompted, we all sat down at these big, long dinner tables at one night. We were doing pasta food one night. We were doing Israeli food. And one of them picked out a pencil on a piece of white paper and they just started writing down things like, okay, what do we do about the writer return? Okay, what do we do about the settlements? And it was just by Friday evening, they had put together completely cooperatively like a white paper, not just on 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. When you create that kind of holding place, like the things, and I think that's true for us individually as well, right? Like being able to open up the aperture, right? Are there some open questions that you're sort of most curious about right now? 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, 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, you know, I've had a lot of conversations recently on the nature of consciousness. There's no answer to this. We've heard it out, don't worry. Oh, good. Yeah, you're going to just tease that for the next episode. Yeah, I find this topic endlessly fascinating because there is no consensus on it. So I know Michael Pollan just wrote a book and I sat with him and Anika 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 that's been stoking my curiosity lately. Jeff, where can people find out more about you? Obviously, you're on substack. 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 one commune.com and I'm waxing alternately poetic and pathetic on Instagram. I had Jeff Krasnoff. And those are 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. 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. Well, we wish you good things with that and all of the other wonderful work that you do. Thank you so much for bridging. I think also it can be really, really overwhelming. The number of voices and perspectives and many of us are trying to just kind of get our feet under us in this arena. And so really appreciate all the hard work that you have done so that you can also collect the best of all of these perspectives. We really appreciate it. So thank you so much. Likewise, you guys in parts such wisdom and you do it in a very enjoyable and fun way, which I find to be very important. Support for this podcast comes from Progressive. America's number one boat insurer. We've all made mistakes on the water, but there's one mistake you shouldn't make. Being uninsured. With progressive boat insurance, you can choose coverage for most mistakes you or other boaters can make, helping you float carefree all season long. Quote today. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. 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