Jeff Krasno
speaker
350 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jeff Krasno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, reverence is my Buddhist acolysm. But Of course, now we've essentially denuded that from society. And so we sit at these desk jobs, 94% of our time is spent indoors. You know, again, the body is just doing what it is programmed to do. So there's this... And even...
You know, our approach to exercise is very, I guess, sort of reflective of this kind of our productization or our commodification of everything. So we have 45,000 gyms in the United States, yet our obesity rates continue to raise year over year. Like now they're somewhere around 44%, 45% obesity rates, not just overweight, obesity rates.
So despite having 45,000 places to sweat and grunt, right, on a regular basis, we keep getting more and more unhealthy. So what's going on there? Well, we tend to productize exercise. And I did this for years where there was like a little blip, a little fluorescent blip at the bottom of my Google calendar that says, Jeff will sit, you know,
all day, and then he'll go to the gym from like 6 to 6.45 and sweat it out on the treadmill, you know? And that's just... That approach to exercise simply does not work. It obviously does not work. We see that. So...
As I started to kind of unpack, you know, all of these different evolutionary mismatches, candidly, by necessity, because I got very, very, very sick, and somewhat out of curiosity too, but really, I had to address real serious issues in my life. I began to really examine all of these different aspects of life. And I started to come back to one simple question. How did I evolve? How did I evolve?
Because this organism is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, millions of years of hominid evolution before that. You know, I am really just...
the sum total of the intelligence of the universe experiencing itself as me here and now you know i've am the intelligence brought forward of eight billion years you know or 13.8 if you want to go all the way back so and i started to try to live in alignment with how I evolved.
And that started to, from there, I started to populate kind of an amalgam of what I call good stress protocols, or sometimes the protocols of inconvenience. Like putting myself out, testing the edges of my comfort zone.
So whether that related to lifting heavy things or temperature regulation or fasting or exposure to light, all those physiological things became very, very central to my practice in life. And then I also started to apply some of those stressors or adversity memetics to my psychosocial life.
Really started to lean into really like stressful conversations and pushing myself to have conversations that I really would have generally avoided. And what I realized is that doing hard things has incredible benefits. And it also makes doing other hard things easier.
Yeah, I mean, we so often associate health with downward spirals. But upward spirals are completely possible. And it really doesn't take that long for your body to gain momentum. And the feeling around that is so vibrant and addictive. And it is available to people. But, you know, a lot of my health journey really started with more of a spiritual quest, if you will.
In some ways, there were two inquests converging, sort of a mystical one and a medical one. And because I was deficient in both, candidly. And the more I studied the physical, candidly, the more metaphysical truths were revealed. In fact, for anyone listening who is interested in the metaphysical, study the physical. Because that is where the foundational intelligence of the cosmos is patterned.
So my beginning really required me to take kind of a biopsychosocial intake of my own life, really, kind of an inventory. And so many of us become the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and we get anchored in that identity. That I am sort of this fixed Jeff whose fate was poorly written in the genetic stars, right?
I'll just be that chubby kid that was moving around from country to country. I'll really never be quite good enough. I'll never be liked. And because of that, I will compensate and essentially... compromise my authenticity at every single turn in order to be liked. That was the story that I told myself about myself for almost five decades.
So realizing, having the awakening that change was actually possible was essential to my journey. And I think it's essential to many people's journey because we have been taught as part of kind of 20th century science that essentially our genes determine our fate.
And, you know, this was, you know, in some ways quite an incredible revelation that Watson and Crick had in the early 1950s where they like say, oh, we found the secret to life. It's called the double helix. It's the structure of DNA. And this is how genes replicate so efficiently. And if we can just map that genome, we can discover every source of an origin of every disease.
And then we can address that by addressing those particular genes and those underlying nucleotide sequences. Of course, once we actually mapped the human genome and finished in about 2004 with the Human Genome Project, we realized that we had the same amount of genes as a guppy. We had less than a grape. We had about 22,300 non-redundant protein-coding genes. And so...
It's not really the genes, really. It's the expression of the genes. And this is where a lot of my more scientific study started to bleed into revealing of some of the greater mystical truths about what it is like to be human. This started to populate this concept called the Tao of Health, which has a number of different axioms or tenants to them. One of them is impermanence.
We briefly referred to that at the beginning of the podcast. But this was a revelation that, of course, the Buddha had 2,500 years ago sitting under the Bodhi tree. In Sanskrit, I think it's called anika. But the fact that everything in the universe, including you and me and this rug, this camera, et cetera, is impermanent. It will eventually decay.
So clinging onto anything and craving anything is just futile and will lead to a tremendous amount of suffering because we are all impermanent. That really violates my sense of identity, right? Because, like, I wake up in the morning. Andre wakes up in the morning. We tootle into the bathroom. We sort of, like, flex a tiny bit and be like, there's Andre. Don't jump me in here.
Showing 221–240 of 350 · page 12 of 18
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