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
Totally. It doesn't necessarily have to be the clinical terminus of respiratory and cardiac function or whatever. It can be other forms of metaphorical death. But if I look across human history... We spent an inordinate amount of effort and time killing off all of our predators. For thousands and thousands of years, we basically forced into extinction the most...
fabulous, wonderful megafauna, like these wombats and giant massive 4,000 pound bears and like saber tooth tigers. And we have this hostile relationship with nature because we're so scared. Of dying. And then, you know, Louis Pasteur comes around in the mid-1800s and says, oh, no, no, no, no. It's not just the things bigger than you that are going to kill you.
It's also the things smaller than you. The ones that you can't see. They're pathogens. They're viruses and bacteria. Beware. So now we've spent, what did we do? Very human response. We spent the last 165 years killing off everything smaller than us. All the bacteria, all the viruses.
And, you know, I'm joking a little bit because in some ways that was a very good thing, for example, to develop like a smallpox vaccine or something. The point is that we've essentially eliminated all of our predators. And when you eliminate all your predators, you only have yourself to kill. And in that respect, we seem to be doing a fine job.
Yeah, I think that so much of our freedom really is in some ways reframing our relationship with nature. Like our Abrahamic traditions are pretty harsh about nature, right? They're like, okay, humans, you're the CEOs, you are supposed to subdue and have dominion over nature. because it comes up, in the best case, as weeds and pests, right? So spray it and kill it.
But particularly spray and kill the part of yourself that is nature, because it's sinful, right? We call that human nature. And if we didn't have, like, a Merlin in a wizard's cap, you know, with a dusty old scroll sitting above us with some moral abacus, like, monitoring our sexual transgressions, we might, like, rape our best friend or something like that. I mean, it's fucking crazy.
So we're taught to really distrust the part of ourselves that is nature because it's made out of clay and it'll go back to dust. And what we're really supposed to focus on is this other part of ourselves called the soul because God literally breathed it in through our nostril in the book of Genesis. And the soul is eternal and it's divine.
So it has to sublimate the part of ourselves that's nature because nature sucks. right it's it's it's mangy you know like and this i think is like a massive myth apocryphal myth about who we are because of course we are nature You know, we are the products of it, and we are... It's not something that pushes us around.
You know, we are, as you say, a participant in this grand, massive experiment of the universe. And to see yourself as nature, and to trust yourself as nature, is... It's so... It's incredibly... It's just liberating. And, you know, like nature, I've kind of thought of it this way, is a brilliant architect, but an imperfect carpenter. Because the design is fantastic, right?
But the execution is sometimes faulty, like nature will let you down from time to time. In human physiology, there are mutations. There are single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs, that sometimes predispose us, sometimes dispositively, to disease, like sickle cell disease or whatever, or APO4 alleles. You're 10 times more likely to get Alzheimer's and things like that.
But you can't not, not, not trust nature, right? Because evolution is a product of those mistakes. Because every once in a while, that mutation turns out to be adaptive. And then nature selects for the best of it. And we improve.
And so that's why, like, even in a conversation like this, where I simply do not know the next word that's going to be emitted from my mouth, I still have to trust myself because I might land on something incredible inside of the mistake. And this is really how I encourage people to live, to trust themselves. I mean... Like, I'm sure you've had this experience.
And this is actually what influenced the cover of my book. But, like, I lived in New York for a long time. But even here in Los Angeles, when you're walking, like, on a sidewalk, you're walking down in Santa Monica or downtown, and it's asphalt as far as you can see.
And then you look down in sort of a moment of pause and you see like a flower or a blade of grass like growing through the pavement of the sidewalk. And you're like, oh my God, nature. It's just, it's irrepressible, you know? And this is somewhere where we can put our faith, right?
I mean, not faith as belief in the absence of evidence, but like trust in the eternal reliability of what it is to be nature.
Yeah. Well, those monks, first of all. Yeah. I'm nowhere even close to those monks. So I think what you're referring to is this whole practice of like drawing of the sheets. And this was actually the early inspiration of Wim Hof, this notion of building inner fire.
Yes, yes. Sometimes against my will. Yeah. Yeah, just as an aside, as a little storytelling aside, Wim and his beloved brood planted themselves at Kamyon Topanga just a few miles from here, which is our funky little wellness laboratory. And for one reason or another, they couldn't find their way out the driveway. But it was wonderful while it lasted.
And, you know, we had a commercial ice delivery in the morning, right, for the cold plunge, and then a commercial wine delivery in the evening for other purposes. Anyhow, it was a very jovial, jocular crew of people. But I will give Wim much credit for... Every morning, without fail, I would see him toodle across the cobblestones and out to the cedar ice plunge.
And it would be like naked, first of all. And it would be just above freezing, like 32 and a half degrees. You know, ice bobbing everywhere. And like a Buddha, he would just... immerse himself with a little kind of half smile across his face and sit in there for a good 10 or 15 minutes. And I'm sure the anti-inflammatory impacts of the ice are very good for hangovers.
But of course, there's many, many, many other attributes metabolically and mood regulation and everything else. And we can go into that at some other time. But then Wim would get out of the ice bath and he would go over and he put on the most diminutive pair of shorts known to mankind, but thankfully something, and go over and weed the garden. Unasked, every morning, same thing.
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