by Jeff Krasno
I’ve just returned from the Eudemonia Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, where I had the dubious pleasure of moderating a panel that was unofficially billed as “MAHA vs. Anti-MAHA.”
On the stage with me were two brave souls I consider friends: Dr. Will Cole and Dr. Jessica Knurick. Both have appeared on my podcast, Commune, where I explore the ideas and practices that help us live happy, purposeful lives.
Jessica has become a very prominent, articulate critic of the MAHA movement, particularly on Instagram and TikTok. She’s well credentialed, with a PhD in nutrition, and has spent many years working in public health. Will hails from Pittsburgh, where he runs a functional medicine telehealth clinic. He’s written a number of bestselling books, and while he’s very much an independent thinker, he’s become closely associated with the MAHA movement and many of its prominent figures.
So that was the setup: two smart, thoughtful people who profoundly disagree on some very consequential issues in public health, sitting on stage together with me in the middle.
My goals for this session were two-fold.
The first was to model what a sane, constructive, respectful hard conversation looks like.
This is, as most Tangle readers know, anomalous in our current media environment. What passes for “discourse” on social media is mostly people screaming over each other from their respective echo chambers. Content is engineered — and algorithmically rewarded — to tickle our negativity bias: to keep us scared, outraged, anchored in our preconceptions and addicted to a firehose of sensationalism. Outrage works famously for engagement, by providing perverse incentives for content creators — especially in the health space where, ironically, we talk about amygdala hijack and the importance of emotional regulation. We’ve built a virtual machine that rewards hyperbole and punishes nuance.
But it’s really hard to spew vitriol up close.
When you put people together in actual, four-dimensional spacetime — sharing oxygen and making eye contact — tempers are, well, tempered. There’s more room for curiosity, less appetite for humiliation. And that’s the space I wanted to create: not a food fight, but an honest, “spicy but substantive” conversation (about food).
This work is not new to me. Last year, I hosted a Palestinian–Israeli summit at Commune Topanga. At Eudemonia 2024, I facilitated a conversation between a Trump supporter and a Harris supporter. While no ballots were reconsidered, it, somewhat astoundingly, ended with a hug.
As a means of facilitating these conversations, I lean into the tools of nonviolent communication:
- listening to understand, not to reload
- seeking connection, not immediate solution
- looking for islands of common ground instead of obsessing over the fault lines
- steelmanning: a technique in which you reiterate the best parts of an opposing argument
So that was goal one: model the kind of conversation I hope people can replicate around their own contentious dinner tables.
The second goal was to untangle the public health debate around the MAHA movement. Because whatever you think about Bobby Kennedy and HHS, the Health secretary has undeniably helped drag the conversation about the epidemic of chronic disease into the foreground of American life. And that’s undeniably a good thing.
