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
And man, I really offended a lot of people with that particular essay, because of course, there was also a simultaneous body positivity movement happening at the same time. And so people felt like I was really shaming them for being overweight. And I was just actually writing about the health implications of obesity as it pertained to this particular disease.
And I had also written tons about being a chubby kid and like dealing with it and my self-image issues and my self-worth issues. But I offended a lot of people. I would kind of exchange emails with folks. And after like three or four exchanges, I would ask them if they would like to join me on an hour-long Zoom call.
Individually. It's a lot of time. It was a lot of time. And this is generally what I call my great David Copperfield routine because I made most people disappear at that point. Most people were like, I'm out. But 26 people took me up on it. So in August and September 2020...
I put aside an hour, a couple hours every Monday and Tuesday afternoon to have hour-long Zoom calls with people that did not agree with me. And I just gave you one example, but they were also coming from the far right, from the far left, all over the place, you know? And I just really committed myself to this process.
And for those of you who listened to the earlier part of the podcast, you might realize that this might be very difficult for me because I was a people pleaser. I didn't like offending people, right? And at first, when I would get this kind of recrimination, I would feel like very personally attacked, very defensive.
I would stay up all night sort of brooding over like my rejoinder and like holding that little ember of resentment, like waiting to throw it the next morning. Of course, the great moral of that story is I was the one getting burned. You know, I was not sleeping. I was like, so I was like, you know. Over time, I started to actually really build what I call my psychological immune system.
So we're very familiar with our physiological immune system. We build our immunity through a certain amount of exposure to pathogens, viruses, and bacteria, such that our B cells spin up these little proteins, and then ding, ding, ding, ding, they hit the right one, and we call those antibodies, and those antibodies then neuter the antigens on these pathogens.
And then they have memory and it's amazing. But in a metaphorical sense, you can also build your psychological immune system through a certain amount of exposure to insult. And I had plenty of it. And so by the time August 2020 rolled around, I was very unaffected by being insulted. In fact, I became like quasi-untriggerable in some ways. In fact, I even looked forward.
to being, you know, not insulted per se, but like I look forward to a little bit of conflict. So when I started to go into these Zoom calls with people, I was very, very emotionally regulated by it, you know, going in. And, you know, if you remember back then, we were still developing our fluency with Zoom, right?
So I would get on a call with one of my detractors and, you know, people would be like, you know, jabbing at buttons. Am I on mute? I'm still on mute or whatever. And we would exchange, you know, a few pleasantries. And then, Drew, it was so interesting. You know, these conversations took on such a consistent pattern. I would sit there and they would tell me their entire life story for 45 minutes.
And what I realized in short order is that I was essentially creating a safe and trustworthy set and setting for people to be seen and to be heard. I got better at this skill over time.
And I started to actually consider it part of one of my adversity memetics, candidly, is like the importance of actually leaning in to stressful conversations and the possibility of what's on the other side of them. And so, you know, I didn't have any training at that juncture in nonviolent communication.
I subsequently did go get some because I was so interested in this whole world of being able to connect with people that disagree with you. And then I started to build my own sort of regimen or protocol around actually having, how to have these really stressful, hard, thorny conversations. And so there's just like a couple key tips. Please.
Because I think we live in a world where we tend to avoid stressful conversations, right? And that's okay. Sometimes it is best to create space and disengage yourself Particularly when the behavior is really odious, if it's racist or abusive or really neglectful. What sits on the other side of these stressful conversations really can represent a world that our hearts can imagine as possible.
The first key to having a stressful conversation is doing work on yourself, is becoming emotionally regulated. And that could be through building your psychological immune system, as I've described, but it also could be through breath work, through meditation, even through the psychological benefits of ice plunging or fasting, candidly.
So you have to go into stressful conversations yourself, emotionally regulated. You have to be what Stephen Porges called sort of in ventral vagal activation. You know, you can't be shut down, you know, in totally in your parasympathetic, but you can't also be amygdala hijacked because if you come into a conversation all up here, it's never going to go anywhere, right? You're just going to fight.
So you come into a stressful conversation regulated. That creates the opportunity for coherence and attunement. And then one of the key skills to develop is really listening, deep listening to understand and not listening to respond.
And this is really hard because even in our conversation today, you'll say something and I'm so excited about what you're saying that I'll almost interrupt you, right? And vice versa, just because we're in the flow of each other. But also sometimes that makes a good podcast. Totally.
Yeah, and oftentimes we are concocting a rejoinder or a rebuttal in our heads before our adversary has even finished speaking. We don't even know what point they're going to make. We're already so obsessed with making our own point.
So this was a big one, you know, really listening to understand and not to respond. It actually came out of experiences that I used to have in Japan. I used to go to Japan quite a bit on business and I was pitching bands. I was in the music industry and I'd go into like some CEO's office or Toshiba Yama or something and I'd, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, and I'd be done.
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