Not Your Average Wellness Podcast for Lawyers

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Jonathan Amarilio: Hello and welcome to CBA’s At The Bar Podcast, where we have unscripted conversations with our guests about legal news, topics, stories and whatever else strikes our fancy. I’m your host, Jon Amarilio of Taft Law, and joining me, recently back from a relaxing vacation in Jamaica Grading Law School Papers Poolside, is my friend Trish Rich of Holland & Knight. Hi, Trish!

Trisha Rich: Hey, John!

Jonathan Amarilio: So, Trish, we are joined today by a long-time mutual friend, Jonathan Mraunac, COO and General Counsel of GCM Partners, a management services organization serving psychedelic medicine, medical cannabis and CBD to patients across the country. Jon is here to talk to us about something we touched on years ago but could always do with some reminding on lawyer wellness. But before we do that, welcome Jon onto the pod. I want to establish some ground rules with you for this conversation. Okay, Trish?

Trisha Rich: Yeah.

Jonathan Amarilio: Okay. So first, cannabis and psychedelic related puns will be kept to an appropriate level. Agree?

Trisha Rich: Okay.

Jonathan Amarilio: Okay. Second, and I want to be blunt. The definition of appropriate dosage will vary from person to person, and I don’t want to get lost in the weeds on that. I know you have really high hopes for this conversation, but this is going to be a joint effort and I just want us to spark up a really good conversation. Okay?

Trisha Rich: You are the worst. My first question as we delve into lawyer wellness is how many segments of today’s program are we going to dedicate to Diet Coke?

Jonathan Amarilio: Let’s get into that. Jon, come in the conversation. Welcome to At The Bar.

Jonathan Mraunac: Thank you. I think my opinion on Diet Coke is going to be unpopular among this audience.

Jonathan Amarilio: Well, you know, I think you’re probably talking to two experts in this field. I know respectfully that you’re an expert, but I had checks mix for lunch and I suspect that Trish had Diet Coke and washed it down with some Diet Coke. So, really, we’re at the forefront of this topic.

Trisha Rich: That is precisely what I had for lunch today, actually.

Jonathan Mraunac: That’s tremendous.

Jonathan Amarilio: So, speaking of Jon, do you think lawyers are particularly susceptible to having poor health?

Jonathan Mraunac: I think that’s a resounding yes, for a lot of reasons. There is a general expectation that we are perfectionists, and that’s what clients expect. Two things, you don’t want to hear from your lawyer ever, if you’re the client, “I don’t know” or “I forgot”. The client pays an exorbitant hourly fee and they want meticulousness and they want 100% perfection and anything less, there’s an attitude that’s unacceptable. And so along with that expectation comes a high level of stress, self-medicating, sleep deprivation. We’ll talk about a lot of these things today.

Jonathan Amarilio: And lawyers, if I recall correctly, have particularly high substance abuse problems, don’t we?

Jonathan Mraunac: Among white collar professionals, some of the highest.

Jonathan Amarilio: Yeah.

Trisha Rich: It’s interesting. I do a lot of CLE programming, and obviously, this is a conversation we talk about a lot. And I want to start by just saying, one of the things I think I have concluded in the wellness space is that to your point, Jonathan, we are perfectionists. We are people that work well under pressure. We are people that are extremely competitive. And I have sort of come to the conclusion that the things that make us good lawyers are just directly proportional to these, let’s just call them not wonderful personality traits.

Jonathan Mraunac: I think that what makes a good lawyer. Having high attention to detail, listening closely, being a skeptic, meeting deadlines, writing and researching and reading complex material, that’s what makes you good. But when it gets into the realm of obsessiveness, or when you’re trying to meet those benchmarks and you’re not properly slept or fueled or attentive, it can go off the rails.

Jonathan Amarilio: Because you are trying to meet those benchmarks, right?

Jonathan Mraunac: That’s right. And the partner and the client don’t really care about your, “personal problems”. There’s an expectation that you will meet the demands regardless of whether you went to bed at 2 in the morning or 9:00 PM.

Trisha Rich: I was at a CLE program about a year ago, and somebody put a study up, a new study on lawyer wellness up on the screen. And one of the stats that really stood out to me the most is of I think it was 144 professions that they had studied. The legal profession was the only one that had a positive correlation between being successful in the field and being a pessimist. And I thought that was really interesting. But also, it makes complete sense if you’re going to hire somebody to go out into the world and manage your risk.

(00:05:00)

Isn’t it somebody that’s constantly looking for all of the bad things that could happen and trying to cure for them? And so, it just goes to my larger point. Aren’t we scorpions to the legal profession’s frog and we’re just saying “look, this is our nature.”

Jonathan Mraunac: To be effective, I mean, what I always used to do in my conversations with lawyer colleagues and friends over the years is you have to think in a backwards way. What is the worst thing that could happen and what’s the worst thing that I’ve heard of? And then guard against that. And sometimes, you think that you have a perfect document or a perfect strategy, and then you hear a piece of news about something, the chat GPT research. I’m sure you guys have both heard about this story now, right?

Jonathan Amarilio: The New York brief.

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah. The thing in the Southern District of New York, yeah.

Trisha Rich: I can’t talk about it.

Jonathan Amarilio: Oh, really?

Jonathan Mraunac: Interesting. Okay, well.

Jonathan Amarilio: Wow.

Jonathan Mraunac: I wrote an article for Law 360 almost five years ago about the risk of manipulated audio and video evidence. But the idea that AI would create case law out of thin air wasn’t even on the radar yet. And now, if you’re a lawyer doing research for any reason, that has to be part of the rolodex in your mind.

Jonathan Amarilio: Well, now that we have AI, we’ll probably have time to exercise, right? So let me kind of just speak from personal experience a little bit here. I can tell you, I do not feel like I have time to be healthy. And I know that sounds like kind of a copout or something like that, but between the job, family, kids, all that kind of stuff, I don’t have time to get enough sleep, much less find time to exercise. Talk to me about how common that is, and is there a solution?

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah. I mean, especially in the United States, working ridiculous hours is a badge of honor. It’s the expectation for people, especially in our age range. If you’re under 50 and you want to be successful, most or all of your free time is spent working. And then if you have a family and you have friends, you maybe do some of that. But the client and the boss don’t care what your personal life looks like. If your professional life is suffering because you’re getting eight hours of sleep, then that’s going to be a problem for the boss and the client. So, there’s an old saying, Jon, that “if you don’t make time for your health now, you’ll be forced to make time for your health problems later”.

Jonathan Amarilio: Sure.

Jonathan Mraunac: Right? There is a real thing, like me. If you’re single and you have more time to dedicate to fitness, you can be in the gym. Whereas if you’re married, couple of kids, you don’t have that luxury, so you have to fit in your fitness in more creative ways or when you might otherwise be doing something else, you’d like to do.

Jonathan Amarilio: Right.

Trisha Rich: I don’t know. Jon Amarilio and I, don’t think we’ve ever talked about this, but Jon Mraunac, you and I have talked about these one million times over the years, I think. And I’m with Amarilio, I just don’t have time. And I am not single, but functionally single, right? I don’t have children and my husband has gone a lot, and so —

Jonathan Amarilio: We’ll save that for a different podcast.

Trisha Rich: Yeah. Well, as long as — I think Mraunac was dropping in there that he was single, because he’s hoping some of our lady listeners are going to be reaching out to him. I did notice that, but —

Jonathan Mraunac: Wouldn’t be opposed everybody.

Jonathan Amarilio: And your cell phone number is?

Trisha Rich: I have it if anybody is interested. But I do think — if somebody that doesn’t have kids and doesn’t have the pressures of parenthood, I still don’t think I can find time for it in my schedule, unless I massively rearrange my work schedule. It’s just the demands of this job are never ending.

Jonathan Amarilio: And I can tell you I thought exactly the same thing before I had kids. And now I look back on that time and I’m like “oh my God, I had so much time, before kids.” I was up half the night trying to sleep train my daughter. I’m working on like three hours of sleep right now.

Trisha Rich: Yeah.

Jonathan Mraunac: There are going to be periods in your life if you are on trial or you have a newborn. You aren’t going to have as much time as you will once you hit homeostasis in your life. There are some creative strategies to fit and it sounds like both of you’re talking about exercise really, right?

Jonathan Amarilio: Yeah.

Trisha Rich: You tell us.

Jonathan Mraunac: Of the four categories of health, I like to call them diet, exercise, mental health, and sleep. Most people, when they talk about exercise, they say, “I don’t have enough time to do it.” A lot of people that do exercise do the wrong thing; they take too long doing it. There are ways to fit it in and have it be effective.

(00:10:00)

It’s often the last thing that people want to do when they get home from work. If they have 30 minutes to sit around or let’s go pump some iron or like let’s go do some burpees. It takes a dedicated effort to build the habit and that’s something that we can talk about today too. The marginal difference between someone who doesn’t do any exercise between that and somebody who is physically fit that could take three to six months of habit training in order to get to a place where you don’t tried exercise anymore.

Jonathan Amarilio: Well, let’s drill down on that. And kind of what I’m particularly interested in. First, I would love to hear practical solutions to these problems that we’ve been identifying. But two, for, I think, a lot of practicing lawyers the trade-off, is, yeah, I could go do that half hour of exercise not in my current schedule, but I would just have to sacrifice that and sleep. Like the trade-off seems to be exercise or sleep. And we all know how well we perform when we’re sleep deprived.

Jonathan Mraunac: Well, that’s right. Matthew Walker has really changed the landscape for research and sleep. He wrote a book called “Why We Sleep”. I think was published in 2017 or 2018. And he refers to sleep as the neglected stepchild, because of the four categories I just mentioned. Sleep is the one that everyone’s willing to trade really easily.

Trisha Rich: Oh, no. Mine is definitely exercise.

Jonathan Mraunac: If you think about the four things; exercise, diet, mental health, sleep. If you take a 24 hours period, if you’re sleep deprived, you’re in much worse shape than you are. If you have a bad meal or you’re a little bit stressed out or you haven’t done your workout.

Jonathan Amarilio: Why?

Jonathan Mraunac: Sleep is arguably the most important. The results of one night of sleep deprivation show in imaging studies in animals and in humans that beta amyloid protein and tau protein which are both hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, you’ll see a buildup in one night of bad sleep. And the study of brains among Alzheimer’s patients is that they’re clogged with these proteins. And it’s just something that I can’t talk about it at the molecular level, but I know that good sleep causes the brain to exhaust these proteins overnight. It’s like a residue or waste, and sleep is necessary in order to free the brain up so it functions properly.

There are a host of health risks associated with bad sleep. And this podcast and my material, it’s not meant to freak everybody out, but you need to know what the risks are. When you cross the street, you have to look and it’s just something that is part of life. So, knowing the health risks isn’t meant to stress everybody out, it’s meant to make them aware that if they don’t make changes, there are real consequences.

Jonathan Amarilio: So what are we talking? Seven hours? And I know it varies from person to person, but I think we can all agree that eight hours is obscene.

Trisha Rich: If I get eight hours of sleep, I feel like a superhero the next day. I feel like I could walk out and save an old lady from a bus. So what number are we shooting for, Jon?

Jonathan Mraunac: Would you actually do that though, Trish? It’s a more interesting question.

Trisha Rich: Of course, I would. I mean, it depends on the old lady.

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah. The state of the research is that the minimum is seven hours a night for any adult no exceptions and between seven and nine. And there are a lot of public figures over the years, and I don’t want to name them, because I don’t want to get into the political divisiveness, but there’s an idea that I only have to sleep four hours a night and I’m at the office late and I’m here before the boss. And it would be great if we all didn’t have to sleep. You could just get a lot more stuff done. You could do all the things that you don’t have time to do. But the reality is that seven is the minimum.

Jonathan Amarilio: Okay. So my interrupted six hours probably isn’t cutting it then.

Jonathan Mraunac: The closer you can get to it, the better. But you have to find a way. That’s the unfortunate message. And I want to read some of the health risks from chronic under sleeping. Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, anxiety, suicidality, cancer. There are more but these are–

Trisha Rich: That sounds bad.

Jonathan Mraunac: — these are not guesses anymore. These are established links.

Jonathan Amarilio: Okay. Well, for those of us who just, that’s not really in the cards right now. Let’s talk about exercise. How do you find the time? Because the example you gave before, I think a lot of people kind of roll their eyes at, because it’s not a choice for many people between sitting around and watching a TV show for half an hour and exercising. They don’t have that half hour to begin with.

Jonathan Mraunac: Unfortunately, the profession is still far behind other white-collar industries that are giving health benefits, gym memberships, allowing for some extra time, because they know that the people that are thought leaders in this area know that if their employees are better slept and they workout.

(00:15:08)

They’re going to perform better. In the UK, there’s a pilot program right now that the government’s sponsoring for the four-day work week and it’s getting–

Jonathan Amarilio: Very French of them.

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah, that’s right. I think the most popular form of exercise for people that aren’t gym rat type people is to just go jogging.

Jonathan Amarilio: Sure.

Jonathan Mraunac: So, trigger warning unpopular opinion coming. Running is very popular in American culture. We love the half marathon. We love the marathon. We think it’s incredibly impressive when people decide to train for this and do this. It takes a ton of effort, don’t get me wrong. But from an exercise standpoint, one of the worst habits is distance running. It’s horrible on your joints. If you’re doing it outdoors, you’re sucking in, automobile exhaust constantly and it’s simply too much stress. Training for a marathon you’re running 60 miles a week. In my experience and first-and second-hand knowledge, I’d recommend no more than ten max.

And a lot of people jog because it’s self-regulating. There’s nobody jogging next to them telling them to go fast or there’s no coach. Let’s separate for a second. Just the mindful experience of being outside and running. There’s benefit to that. But there are better ways to lose weight and be stronger and be in good cardiovascular shape than just running 4 or 5, 6 miles at a 9, 10, 12, 15 minutes pace. What I would encourage people to do are hit exercises and hits high intensity interval training. You can get more done than running six miles in 20 to 30 minutes. But what it requires is like you’re redlining the car instead of just cruising at 30 or 40 miles an hour. You’re going at 80 or 90 for a couple of minutes taking a minute off and the intensity is what brings the results.

Jonathan Amarilio: And that’s a good place to take a break. We will be right back.

[Music]

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[Music]

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[Music]

Jonathan Amarilio: And we’re back. Trish, you look like you had a thought when we took a break.

Trisha Rich: Yeah. So, I’ve been practicing law now for about 17 to 18 years. And I was one of those long-distance runners that you talked about and at some point, my body just started to protest, right? So now, I have chronic plantar fasciitis in one foot. I have joint issues in the other knee and yada, yada. And then on top of that, as my career went along, I just got busier and the demands of partnership and all of those things. And so, I think it’s interesting that you talked about sort of your four categories; diet, exercise, mental health and sleep. And I think that I used to be a pretty healthy person but that’s really fallen off in exact proportion to how successful of a lawyer I was. So, if you’re somebody like me and you’re just like, let’s say, you listen to this podcast and you’re like “wow, this is a wake-up call. That Jonathan Mraunac, guy is really smart and I understand single. I just want to start from scratch, right? I’m starting at square one in these categories. What do I do? What’s a practical thing you can talk to our listeners about in terms of where they would start in each of these categories?

Jonathan Mraunac: Let’s take exercise because we were just there.

Trisha Rich: Should I start watching it on TV?

Jonathan Mraunac: You’re close. YouTube has tons of examples. If you just type in 20 minutes hit workout. There are a lot of people selling programs online and there’s a ton of free content. All of these influencers and whatnot, sure, Instagram too, but YouTube’s got a better search engine. And you want to do things where you’re– I mean, it’s going to be difficult. Even if you’re good at it, it’s still difficult. But marginally, if you’re just starting out and you’re in objectively bad, cardiovascular shape, it’s going to be hard but try 10 minutes.

(00:20:03)

Do you guys know what burpees are? That’s a pretty universal cardio and strength workout. If you did 10 minutes of burpees, like, one minute on, one minute off, but you’re doing them as fast as you can for a minute, that could suffice as your workout for day one. And then maybe if you’re just starting, you might be fairly sore or unmotivated on day two, day three, maybe it’s 11 minutes. But to jog around at a 10 or 12-minute pace for four or five miles is not going to move the needle very much and it’s probably going to bring stress fractures, joint problems, et cetera. Especially, if you’re running on concrete if you live in a city.

Jonathan Amarillo: And it takes more time, right?

Jonathan Mraunac: Right. And you can get done all the work in a fourth or a fifth of the time.

Trisha Rich: But Jon, how do you square that with, and I do want to go through each of these four categories. But how do you square that with the guidance we get from the government that says if you want to lose weight, and frankly, most Americans are in a position where they should lose at least some weight. If you want to lose weight, you should work out 90 minutes a day or something.

Jonathan Mraunac: It’s not that high, but so, if we’re talking about just starting out, if I were to take you to the jujitsu gym and run you through a 90-minute workout, you’d never want to see a gym for the rest of your life period. You have to be a novice for a little while and train yourself up. So, a 20-minute burpee workout doesn’t sound undoable. From a health standpoint, you should probably be working out at a hit rate, two hours a week. That would be enough for you to maintain a good cardiovascular and overall strength and flexibility status.

Jonathan Amarillo: That’s total. So just two hours.

Jonathan Mraunac: Two hours.

Jonathan Amarillo: Broken up, however you want?

Jonathan Mraunac: A fairly intense exercise. It could be four thirties’, two one hours, right? I mean, you’re not going to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club or Margot Robbie in the Barbie movie, but you’re going to look and feel and perform better than you do now if you’re doing almost no exercise.

Trisha Rich: Okay. So, step one, for those of us starting from square one here.

Jonathan Amarillo: Trish is actually writing this down. Our audience can see that right now.

Trisha Rich: I actually am writing all of this down, and I think I’m going to see you, Mr. Mraunac over the weekend and we are going to talk about this some more.

Jonathan Mraunac: YouTube.com, Y-O-U.

Jonathan Amarillo: Thank you for that.

Jonathan Mraunac: Okay, you got it.

Trisha Rich: Who you think you’re talking?

Jonathan Mraunac: Okay.

Trisha Rich: Okay. So that’s exercise. What about diet? And I think I speak from experience when I say, I know how to eat healthy, but for the other people that listen.

Jonathan Mraunac: I mean, all you drink is Diet Coke, Trish.

Trisha Rich: That is not true. I punctuate it with beer.

Jonathan Amarillo: I can tell you, my father believes that water is only meant for bathing.

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah. This is like the Hindenburg here already. This one’s a bit easier, because I think everybody knows which foods are healthy and which aren’t. There’s a bit of gray area around certain things. Like, for example, flax seeds, horrible for you but have been marketed as a health food for a long time. They cause the body to release cortisol and it inflames and it’s just something you should stay away from. But for the basics, I mean, if everything tasted like donuts and ice cream, we’d all be ripped. There’d be nothing to talk about. But all of the best tasting foods are the least healthy and the ones that we don’t really love to eat, like, they’re never the feature. You’re not getting to the restaurant and the main course is, like, brussels sprouts. The restaurant would go out of business. You’re waiting for the steak or the salmon or something. Lots of fruits and vegetables, not meat, every day. I mean, the American culture and diet pushes some type of flesh at every meal. It’s simply not necessary. It’s too nutrient dense, and it’s a lot of animal-based fiber. We just don’t need that much of it.

Trisha Rich: How many times a week do you eat meat, Jon?

Jonathan Mraunac: I’d say, two to three meals a week.

Jonathan Amarillo: That’s just an American.

Jonathan Mraunac: It’s certainly “unpatriotic”.

Jonathan Amarillo: It is.

Jonathan Mraunac: It’s very effective, and I enjoy it more when I have it because I don’t have it all the time.

Jonathan Amarillo: Okay. But we can all agree that quinoa is disgusting, right? Like, that —

Trisha Rich: I don’t know if you know —

Jonathan Amarillo: It’s literally guinea pig food, like, that’s what it was developed for guinea pigs in the Andes.

Trisha Rich: I don’t know if you know this, but our mutual friend Jon Amarillo has, like, a really specific hatred of quinoa that manages to come up frequently and all he ever says about it is, it’s guinea pig.

Jonathan Amarillo: It is. It’s disgusting.

Trisha Rich: I don’t know if somebody named quinoa beat you up or something. I don’t know where this comes from, but he absolutely hates it. So, let’s set aside. He’s not going to eat quinoa. And to your point on meat diets, I think as we careen between climate crisis and climate crisis, there are other reasons we should be thinking about it, right?

(00:25:00)

But on the other 16 meals you eat a week, what are you eating?

Jonathan Mraunac: There’s a lot to say on this. I’m someone who loves snacks. If I’m having a meal, I’m thinking about pizza. That’s just my preference. If I ate pizza often —

Jonathan Amarillo: Just no gluten Jon. It’s inflammatory, you know —

Jonathan Mraunac: If I ate it as often as I wanted it, I’d be 300 pounds. There is an element of discipline and diet that you just can’t get away from.

Trisha Rich: Okay. But so, we’re recording. It’s a Friday afternoon. It’s almost 4 o’clock. Let’s just all talk about what we ate today. Amarillo, why don’t you go first?

Jonathan Amarillo: For breakfast, I had a bowl of gluten free cereal with almond milk. And for lunch, I had some check snacks, and a beef jerky.

Trisha Rich: Okay. I usually skip breakfast, but this morning, I ate breakfast and I got a sesame seed bagel with chive cream cheese. And since then, I think I’ve had eight Diet Cokes and I skipped lunch. But I also had two glasses of water.

Jonathan Mraunac: I walked right into this one. You’re going to fucking love this.

Jonathan Amarillo: I mean, this sounds like healthy decisions.

Trisha Rich: I know. Go ahead, Jon. What did you have today?

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah. I haven’t eaten today yet. And so, this is maybe like a nice segue into another strategy is —

Jonathan Amarillo: Starvation?

Jonathan Mraunac: So that’s the most common retort when somebody brings up time restricted eating or intermittent fasting as it —

Jonathan Amarillo: I mean, you could just do like the supermodel diet with vodka and cigarettes, that’s obviously effective, or —

Trisha Rich: Yeah, from the 90s. Yeah.

Jonathan Amarillo: What’s the new version of that? Ozempic? What it’s called?

Jonathan Mraunac: Ozempic. Wegovy at the other higher dose version.

Trisha Rich: So, do you fast regularly?

Jonathan Mraunac: For the past eight years, I’ve been eating twice a day.

Trisha Rich: Okay. When do you eat?

Jonathan Mraunac: Usually around noon and then I try to finish by 9 o’clock, but I don’t stick to this every day. I’m probably 95% honest to it. But the research now around time restricted eating is just not controversial anymore. The smaller the window in which you eat all of your food, drastically improves all kinds of health conditions, better sleep, more energy in the gym, weight loss. There’s a famous study they took four groups of rats.

Trisha Rich: I gotta hate rats.

Jonathan Amarillo: Is this a lawyer joke?

Jonathan Mraunac: It’s not a joke.

Trisha Rich: They always trying to tell us what to do, but anyway.

Jonathan Mraunac: This is not a joke. The first group had what was considered health food for rats, and they were allowed to eat it whenever they wanted. It was in the cage all the time. The second group had the health food, but they were restricted to eating it only in a certain window when it was given to them. The third group had rat junk food at their leisure and the fourth had rat junk food in a time restricted window.

At the end of the study, the order of healthiness of the rats was the time restricted group with health food, the time restricted group with junk food. Health food anytime, junk food anytime. So, it’s more important when you eat than what you’re eating. Now, you can’t just eat donuts all the time and expect to be healthy, but you don’t have to be so strict with the health food content because a lot of the common problems with food choices and weight gain can be eliminated if you just eat in a shorter period of time.

Jonathan Amarillo: Wait, wait. To be clear, what do we mean when we’re saying time restricted eating? Like, just eating your meals really fast?

Trisha Rich: I’ve been doing that for like, —

Jonathan Amarillo: I mean I eat at my desk —

Trisha Rich: — 29 years.

Jonathan Amarillo: — two out of three meals a day, superfast, because —

Trisha Rich: Oh, wow. I thought you were a dedicated lawyer. I eat three out of three meals in my day.

Jonathan Amarillo: I have a family, Trish. Your husband lives halfway across the country.

Trisha Rich: He’s currently in Norway.

Jonathan Amarillo: Okay.

Trisha Rich: You’re talking about intermittent fasting, right? I’ve read about this.

Jonathan Mraunac: That’s right.

Trisha Rich: And I know some people that do it. But I always thought — and what I’m hearing you say right now is something different. I always thought the reason it worked was because you weren’t eating all day and because you were just putting sort of time limits on your eating. But I think what you’re saying to us now is that it’s more than that.

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah. I can go a little deeper into it. If you ate the same amount of calories and even the same food, but you ate it over the course of 18 hours instead of 12, you would feel worse, you’d be heavier, you wouldn’t sleep as well, you wouldn’t perform as well.

Trisha Rich: Why?

00: 29:58

Jonathan Mraunac: So, when you eat, food in the gut produces a version of fight or flight indigestion.  For example, if you were eating raw flesh as a tiger or something in the bush, —

(Voice Overlap)

That’s scaring the other creatures away when they approach.

Jonathan Amarilio: Yeah.

Trisha Rich: There’s a lot we can learn from cats.

Jonathan Amarilio: Yeah.

Jonathan Mraunac: These creatures evolved to get as much nutrition out of the meat as possible and get it out of the system, so it doesn’t go putrid and kill you.  So when you put food into your stomach, the body deprioritizes everything else, so it can extract the nutrients and eliminate the rest of the food waste from the body so it doesn’t go putrid and you don’t die.  So the kinds of functions that we’re used to relying on like critical thinking, attention, athletic performance, memory, all of these are ticked down a little bit while your body is processing food.  So if you shrink that window, you’re not under that kind of stress and your performance doesn’t suffer.

Trisha Rich: Okay.

Jonathan Mraunac: I will admit though, when I started doing this, I was learning a lot about it.  And it would be 10 in the morning, and I’m at my desk, and I’ve just like, I can’t make it to lunch.  There’s no way I’m going to be able to wait till noon to have something.  And then after a few months, then that was 11:00 a.m. and then that was 12:00.  And now I do once every 7 to 10 days I do a 24 hour fast.

Jonathan Amarilio: So all that advice about breakfast being the most important meal of the day, that’s out, like what are we talking about here?

Jonathan Mraunac: Well, utter horseshit, yes.  I never eat in the morning.  I just don’t like the way I feel after I eat because I have stuff to do.  My favorite meal is the one at the end of the day when I don’t have to do anything that’s critically important.

Trisha Rich: So I started by asking, what you’d eaten today, and the answer as it turns out is nothing.  So let’s just take yesterday for an example.

Jonathan Mraunac: Sure.

Trisha Rich: What did you eat yesterday?

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah, I do a lot of raw vegetables, hummus.  I do love quinoa, rice.

Jonathan Amarilio: Gross, we just lost all credibility.

Jonathan Mraunac: Falafel.

Trisha Rich: I think that it’s going to turn —

Jonathan Amarilio: No one likes quinoa.  That’s a lie.  You’re lying.

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah.  I do a lot wraps, grain bowls.  I love Japanese food.  I mean, the Japanese is not a coincidence that they’re the healthiest population on the planet and it’s largely because —

Jonathan Amarilio: With one of the highest suicide rates too, so there you go.

Jonathan Mraunac: A function of the high pressure —

Jonathan Amarilio: Maybe because they’re not enjoying their meals.

Jonathan Mraunac: Quite a theory, yeah. One more thing on that too is that if I can maintain the discipline of eating within the window and generally keeping it pretty clean, I never think about when I go out what I’m not going to get.  That’s burger and fries, ribs, getting dessert.  I just — I don’t have to worry that it’s going to impact me at all because the rest of the stuff I do during the week.

Trisha Rich: Okay, Jon, I’m going to push back on you on this a little bit because you and I were friends.  We have professional —

Jonathan Amarilio: Past tense.

Jonathan Mraunac: We’re past tense, yes, that’s what I heard too.

Jonathan Amarilio: Because she heard you say you liked quinoa and now she knows you’re a liar.

Trisha Rich: I heard you diss diet coke.  So, I don’t know how much — but we are friends, we’ve been friends for a long time, right?

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah, correct.

Trisha Rich: Yeah, okay.  I’ve been to the bar with you many times.

Jonathan Amarilio: Oh, man, she’s setting you up here.  This feels like a cross, keep going.

Jonathan Mraunac: Yeah.

Trisha Rich: Some of those instances have happened past the hour of 9:00?

Jonathan Mraunac: That’s right.

Trisha Rich: Okay.

Jonathan Mraunac: Admits.

Trisha Rich: Okay.  I’m thinking, I know, we’ve been out to dinner many, many times and we don’t tend to — I don’t think we tend to eat late.  But certainly we have ingested alcohol past 9:00 together.

Jonathan Mraunac: Correct.

Trisha Rich: How does that fit into your diet?

Jonathan Mraunac: It is an exception that happens sometimes.  If we’re working in a perfect world, I’m never eating past 9:00.  But I didn’t come on this podcast to tell everybody that they should take the last little joy in their lives and not drink and not drink caffeine and only eat plants.  Like you have to maintain social relationships, you have to enjoy your food, you should do things that you’d like to do.  If you can be disciplined in your diet 90% of the time, 85% of the time, and then you can eat whatever you want outside of that, like that’s a healthy balance.

Trisha Rich: I will say I have noticed about you and I’ll ask you this question second, but do you know – me and you we’re going to the bar, do you know what I’m going to order?

Jonathan Amarilio: Diet coke.

Trisha Rich: Well, I will actually get diet coke.

Jonathan Mraunac: I think the margarita is a frequent culprit, I remember.

Jonathan Amarilio: Oh, sugar.

Trisha Rich: Just honestly it was just that once.  I do not normally get margaritas.

Jonathan Mraunac: Okay.

Trisha Rich: I will normally get an IPA but I know I think what you will normally get, and I could notice this, you seem to really get a vodka water or vodka soda or like vodka — I think I see you drinking a lot of clear things in instances we’ve been to the bar, and I’m hurt, frankly that you do not know that I will get the happiest IPA at the menu.

00:35:12

Are you doing that on purpose?  Is there a reason you’re not drinking IPAs and margaritas with me?

Jonathan Mraunac: There’s another method to the madness around that.  Liquor has what’s called congener in it, and I can’t spell it for you.  But a good rule of thumb is the darker and tastier a liquor is, the more of this it has, and this is the primary contributor to hangover.

Trisha Rich: Okay, well that answer some questions.

Jonathan Mraunac: So, if you drink vodka or gin and you take out a lot of the sugar like soda instead of tonic, or take out the coke mixer, whatever it is, and I do it because vodka gives me the least horrible hangover, and the water in there is keeping me hydrated to a better degree than if I were drinking beer, just whiskey straight or something.

Jonathan Amarilio: But that doesn’t apply to red wine, right?

Jonathan Mraunac: Certainly it does not.  Red wine, I can’t even touch the stuff because of how bad my hangover is.

Jonathan Amarilio: This barbaric, this is barbaric.  I can’t even —

Jonathan Mraunac: One glass, maybe.

Trisha Rich: But I do have a red wine question before we move on.  And Jon, maybe, you know, maybe I’ve asked you this before.  At some point, maybe like five or six years ago, something started happening when I drink red wine, and it’s that I wake up in the middle of the night at about 2:00 or 3:00 and I’m up for about an hour and a half or two hours, and then I tried to go back to sleep.

Jonathan Amarilio: You just need more practice, Trish.

Trisha Rich: What is going on?  Why is it that red wine has that reaction in me?

Jonathan Mraunac: I couldn’t — alcohol has that impairment of sleep generally for people, I don’t know why red wines, the one that’s keeping you up.

Trisha Rich: I’m probably going to get some listener emails about that and some — will actually people, so.

Jonathan Mraunac: The red wine lovers love this old piece of research that it’s two glasses a day is good for you because it’s the antioxidants.  The resveratrol is the compound in red wine that’s — and now sold as a supplement.  So, it’s not red wine with the alcohol, the alcohol is still detrimental.  It’s just the resveratrol, which you can get in a pill at a grocery store.

Jonathan Amarilio: I don’t want to hear any more badmouthing of red wine.  Let me ask you something else.  What is mindfulness and why does it annoy me so much?

Trisha Rich: Well, I think — sorry.  Before you answer, like generally, can you talk about the mental health capacity of this into the extent mindfulness is a component of that?

Jonathan Mraunac: Sure.  Mental health is just the way we manage stress, I think is the simplest way to think about it.  Stress has been called the silent killer, I think there’s a documentary by the same name about it.  It’s probably better to talk about stress first.  So stress is nothing more than some degree of the fight or flight response taking over our bodies.  And the fight or flight response for the listeners that don’t know is if you perceive to be in some type of physical danger, your body’s flooding you with neuro chemicals, cortisol and adrenaline, because it’s powering you to either run away from this thing, or to be in a fight to the death so you survive.  But because we’ve largely emitted four legged predators that will eat us now from modern society.  We’ve created conditions where our bodies are trained to respond to an impending deadline, the same way that we do is if there was a bear chasing us.  We can’t say it’s evolved but we’ve trained ourselves to stress ourselves out constantly.  And so, if you are under stress, you are swimming in these neuro chemicals that aren’t meant for you to be exposed to them for any long period of time.  And so, you can understand the exercise link here is that if you’re in the midst of a fight or flight reaction, and you don’t either run or fight, you’re not exercising and burning off those fuels.  And so, they just sit and they create all — you know, if you want me to read some of those, it’s not good either.  But metabolic disorder, cardiac disorder, arthrosclerosis, sleep apnea, depression, anxiety.

Trisha Rich: I feel like you’re just reading my medical records at this point.

Jonathan Amarilio: But I mean, lawyers are notoriously stressed.  I mean, it’s like our one constant state of being, right?  If I see a lawyer who looks really relaxed, I’m thinking, “Oh, they’re probably not very in demand right now.”

Trisha Rich: Yeah.

Jonathan Amarilio: They’re not doing it right.

Trisha Rich: There’s so many of us that say we work best under pressure, right?

Jonathan Mraunac: There’s even research that shows that the way that we frame our stress has an impact on how unhealthy that stress is on us.  So, like, conversely, if you’re stressed, it’s easy to get stressed out about how much stress you’re under.

00:40:02

And mindfulness and maybe a nice segue is a way to retrain your brain so you don’t exacerbate the stress, minimize it and you can weaponize it in a healthy way to perform better, not worse.

Jonathan Amarillo:  I think the natural follow up question is how?

Jonathan Mraunac:  Mindfulness is simply the act of paying attention closely to what is happening in your momentary experience and the antithesis of mindfulness is rumination, where you are thinking about the past or the future and you’re lost in thought.  You’re paying attention to something other than what’s happening right now.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Constant state of being.

Jonathan Mraunac:  Most professionals, almost all lawyers, they say, I can’t shut off my brain.  I’m replaying what happened this morning, what I’m going to say tomorrow to the judge, what I’m going to say to the client during the presentation and all of that —

Female:  The judge ran out of you.

Jonathan Mraunac:  Yeah.  All of that actually makes your forthcoming performance worse.  And it’s really hard to wrap your head around because we’re so used to operating — our default mode is to ruminate constantly because we feel like we have a handle on all of the mental checklist and it’s making us worst performers.

Jonathan Amarillo:  So don’t prepare.  Just wing it.  Everything’s going to turn out okay.

Jonathan Mraunac:  Yeah.  You’re conflating preparation with the worry about whether you’re prepared enough or if you can’t actually do it in the moment, let’s say you’re at the desk and you’re writing the outline for whatever it might be, a public speaking engagement or a cross-examination, the only way you can impact the quality of that is to do it.  But when you finish the outline and you put it away and then you’re at dinner with your family and you’re running through it in your head, you’re not present and you’re not being a good dad or mother or sibling or friend or spouse and you’re not actually doing any work on it.  You’re just worrying about whether it was good enough or complete enough.  So, if you are that concerned, the only way to impact the quality of it is to go sit down and work on it.

Jonathan Amarillo:  I don’t know. I have ideas about oral arguments, like when I’m in the shower doing household chores and I’m just thinking about it.

Trisha Rich:  Driving.

Jonathan Mraunac:  Sure.  And we’ve trained ourselves to work that way.  If you could not have these just spontaneous thoughts about a lot of this can be just — you’re stressed about it being good enough.  And if you can train yourself into only working when you’re working and knowing that it’s good enough, you won’t have to burden your free time with the thoughts of and while you’re ruminating, you are by definition under stress.  You can’t ruminate and not be under stress because you are concerned with something other than what’s happening in real time and that concern is driven by stress about it.

Trisha Rich:  So, John, I kind of feel like we’re back where we started, which is where we’re like, we don’t have time and you’re like, yes, you do.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Quinoa is terrible.

Jonathan Mraunac:  So, the mindfulness and to a higher degree meditation, this is a way to train the brain.  It does take time.  It’s a practice like yoga or like your regular workout.  The good news with mindfulness and meditation, and this explain that meditation is just highly focused mindfulness at the highest level of attention.  You’re meditating and paying attention to a singular thing.  It can often be the breath, a mantra, some people use a guided meditation with someone speaking, instrumental music.  There are a lot of ways to do it, but theoretically anything can be the object of your attention.  And what that does is train your brain to just be present and momentary.  And with enough training, the rumination will stop and you’ll become more reflective, less reactive, memory improves.  And with enough training in mindfulness and meditation, your brain actually physically changes.  There are enduring results, just like building bigger muscles or a faster mile time.  And you can train meditation.  You can start as few as two minutes a day and build up from there.  There is a place to fit it in.  I’m not saying it’s easy, but it can be done incrementally.

Trisha Rich:  John, do you think you can, at home, start telling Sloan that it’s not a time out, it’s a meditation?

Jonathan Amarillo:  I mean, I can try in the throes of a two-year old’s temper tantrum.  I think that might be a hard sell but I’m willing to try anything at this point.  In the meantime, why don’t we take a quick break and everyone can meditate on how disgusting quinoa is.  We’ll be right back with stranger and legal fiction.

00:45:04

[Music]

All right.  And we’re back with Stranger and Legal Fiction.  Our audience knows the rules.  It’s pretty simple.  Trisha and I have done some research on the Internet.  We found one law that is real but probably shouldn’t be for some reason.  We’ve made another one up and we’re going to quiz each other and our guest, Jon, on who can distinguish strange legal fact from fiction.  Jon, Trish, are you ready?

Jonathan Mraunac:  Let’s do it.

Trisha Rich:  I’ve never been more ready.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Well, that lead us off.  Come on, champ.

Trisha Rich:  All right.  Okay, so Amarillo loves this about me.  I’m going to just re explain the rules real super quick.  I’m going to say —

Jonathan Amarillo:  No.  And don’t mention Michigan.  The two things that’s all I asked for.

Trisha Rich:  You’re not allowed in Michigan anymore because of this podcast.

Jonathan Amarillo:  That’s a loss.  That’s a real loss.  Thanks.

Trisha Rich:  Okay.  In Iowa, the length of a kiss is legally limited to five minutes or in Lanjaron, Spain, it is prohibited to die.

Jonathan Amarillo:  What was the second place in Spain?

Trisha Rich:  Lanjaron.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Yeah, it’s definitely how you pronounce that.

Trisha Rich:  Yeah, I know.  I’ve been practicing it and I think I nailed it.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Yeah, Jon?

Jonathan Mraunac:  I mean, those are both aggravatingly stupid.  I think the Spanish law is fake.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Do you want to take a minute to meditate on it?

Jonathan Mraunac:  If you’ll allow it.

Jonathan Amarillo:  No.  Why is the Spanish law fake?

Jonathan Mraunac:  It’s just more preposterous than the kissing thing.  And I can see people in Iowa, especially of certain denomination, having laws against kissing too long because it could lead to other things.

Trisha Rich:  Impure thoughts.

Jonathan Mraunac:  That’s correct.

Jonathan Amarillo:  A long standing rule of thumb in stranger and legal fiction is the dumber it sounds, the more true it is.  So, I’m going to go with the Spanish example.  Trish?

Trisha Rich:  Is that a final answer?

Jonathan Amarillo:  Final answer.

Jonathan Mraunac:  Final answer.

Trisha Rich:  One Jon is right, one Jon is wrong.  Amarillo congratulations.  As always, you have gone via our constant — the only constant we have on this podcast.  The more ridiculous it is, the more likely it is to be true.  So, the kissing prohibition is not true.  It’s a widely circulated internet rumor.  The prohibition in Spain, the law in Spain is true.  And it’s part of a movement that some places have done to protest not having enough land for cemeteries and not having places to bury people in sort of these limitations that we now have.  And so, there are a number of places around the world that have tried to make dying illegal so they can bring attention to this being a sort of ongoing land use issue.  So, that’s one for Amarillo, zero for Mraunac.

Jonathan Mraunac:  I feel like a garbage human now for insulting this law because it has such a meaningful thing behind it.

Trisha Rich:  Do you feel like you just drank a diet coke?  Do you feel that bad?

Jonathan Mraunac:  I’d rather subject myself to public embarrassment on a podcast than have one of those.

Trisha Rich:  Okay.  What you got, Jon?

Jonathan Amarillo:  All right, round two.  Mississippi, the state with the highest rate of obesity in the United States banned its cities and counties from requiring restaurants to post nutritional information about meals and prohibits them from banning toys in fast food meals.  That’s option number one.  Option number two, in Vermont, it is illegal to walk a pet giraffe on Sundays unless accompanied by a licensed zoologist or conservation biologist.  Anyone?

Trisha Rich:  What do you think, Mr. Mraunac?

Jonathan Mraunac:  Oh, boy.  I can see the government in Mississippi doing something like that to its population, but I think that the Vermont one is real because it’s more obscure and ridiculous.

Trisha Rich:  Oh, you’re a quick learner.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Trish?

Trisha Rich:  I agree.  I am guessing that the Vermont law is an animal restriction and not specifically about giraffes.  Although you never know every once in a while you get a crazy neighbor who gets a giraffe and you get like a weird law because of it.  But the Mississippi one to me feels like the sort of thing Jon Amarillo would make up to trick me.  And it’s a little too neat.  It’s like exactly on point for our podcast episode.  And if there’s a thing I know about life, it’s that you cannot trust Jon Amarillo.  So, I’m with Mraunac.

Jonathan Amarillo:  That’s unfair.  That’s deeply unfair and insulting.  And I would add wrong.

00:50:02

My red meat and red wine addled brain tricked both of you, despite the fact that apparently it can’t function because it’s over and old with Alzheimer’s plaque.

Trisha Rich:  It’s a suburban air.

Jonathan Mraunac:  Just give it 10 years, Jon.  You’ll be right there.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Yeah, great.  The Mississippi law is the real law.  You cannot have nutritional information on restaurant food and you cannot prohibit giving toys to children in fast-food meals.

Trisha Rich:  The party of small government friends.  That discerned me a disclaimer on the podcast episode, didn’t it?

Jonathan Amarillo:  I looked at the governor’s statement on that because I was really curious, right?  Like, exactly how stupid was the explanation for this.  And he said that the impetus behind the bill was to get government out of the way of people making their nutritional choices.  Of course, the question that came to my mind was, if you’re not telling them the nutritional information, how are they making those choices?

Trisha Rich:  Well, and also, it’s saying to the sweet grains and the subways and those companies of the world, you can’t provide X information to your customers.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Yeah, Trish, you’re probably the only person who thinks of subway when they think of healthy eating.

Trisha Rich:  Yeah.  It seems like part of their advertising pitch is like, this is only X calories, this is only Y calories, right?

Jonathan Amarillo:  Yeah.

Jonathan Mraunac:  Subway is permanently divorced from any kind of healthy choices after Jared.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Let’s not go there.  We’re not going to talk —

Trisha Rich:  We do have to bring this to a close.  But I do want to say, isn’t it weird that no matter where you walk by one, anywhere, they all smell exactly the same?  I feel like if I was a blind folded person and you put me in front of a subway anywhere in the world, I would know exactly that I was in front of a subway.

Jonathan Amarillo:  So, they’re probably not going to be a future sponsor.  Jon, bud, thank you for joining us today.  This was an intellectually nutritious conversation.

Jonathan Mraunac:  How clever.

Trisha Rich:  You’re the best, Jon, thanks for doing this.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Yeah, and you are too, Trish.  You are such a great co-host.

Jonathan Mraunac:  Thank you guys both for having me on.  I really enjoyed it.

Trisha Rich:  Good.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Thank you to our executive producer John Byrne, Adam Lockwood on sound and everyone at the Legal talk Network family.  Remember, you can follow us and send us comments, questions, episode ideas, or just troll us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at cba@atthebar, all one word.  You can also email us at [email protected].  Please also rate and leave us your feedback on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitch or Spotify, Audible, or wherever you download your podcast, it helps get the word out.  Until next time, for everyone here at the CBA, thank you for joining us and we’ll see you soon at the bar.  Drinking a clear colored liquor.

[Music]

Jonathan Mraunac:  I must say, my trap, Jon, very good, way to tie it back in.

Jonathan Amarillo:  Yeah, you know.

Jonathan Mraunac:  What I’d say is imagine you on some quinoa and vegetables. You might be unstoppable.

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