At the end of the end of the end of a road, nestled amid the undulating hills of the Santa Monica mountains, you will find Commune Topanga.

Actually, you will get very lost before you find it. The single-lane back roads will become progressively serpentine. You will drop all cellular service. Your heart rate will quicken at the precarity of the sheer cliffs dropping off the shoulder. You’ll question your instincts and ask yourself why you agreed to travel to a remote retreat with no Internet called Commune.

Surely, you’ve seen enough documentaries about communes that don’t end well.

For a brief moment, you will decelerate, maybe even pull over, and envision yourself kidnapped by a gaggle of naked hippies on acid. When this hesitancy inevitably occurs, you know you’re very close to your destination and, despite any lingering reticence, you press on.

Upon arriving, you may be met with a home-brewed kombucha or perhaps a tranche of warm seed bread. You settle into your rustic A-frame cabin—off the grid, but nicely appointed with potted succulents. Slowly, your anxiety level drops along with your shoulders. Welcome to Commune.

Commune Topanga is our 10-acre experiment in well-being: one part production facility, one part retreat center, one part sustainability lab.

There are meditation platforms perched above magical vistas, a crystal-laden yoga shala, glamping yurts, long communal dining tables, citrus and pomegranate groves, fourteen honeybee hives, a peep of ISA Brown chickens, and an incessant trickle of fascinating people—like Scotty.

Scotty is the erstwhile head of waste management at Burning Man. Never has a man more enamored with human fecal matter walked the earth. Scotty installed an array of solar-powered compostable toilets on the property. Every few weeks, we help the decomposition process by feeding the bowl microbes. The microbes alchemize human scat into a potent compost tea. I wouldn’t recommend it with milk and sugar, but the fruit trees love it.

Little do they know, but as recurring visitors savor their apple crisp, they are unwittingly eating their own shit.

Schuyler, my long-suffering better three-quarters, and I have been manifesting this vision for decades. But lest you think it’s paradise on earth, please know that septic is prone to backing up, ground squirrels often get to the lettuce before we do, and a bevy of bee stings once sent my Commune co-founder, Jake, into anaphylaxis. Be careful what you wish for.

I set this backdrop for it is on this land that I have hosted and interviewed (and dined, hiked, cold-plunged, and sauna-bathed with) hundreds of the world’s most prolific doctors, yogis, spiritualists, mystics, and sages. Yes, I have also played interlocutor in more prosaic settings on Zoom and in fluorescent-lit, dank-carpeted conference halls, but Topanga is where I have experienced the most profound moments of satori, absorbing the wisdom of so many diverse and facile minds in an environ that matches their singularity.

Over the past five years, since the launch of the Commune podcast, I have paddled a conversational canoe with spiritual teachers like Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, and Sadhguru. I have probed the mental gladstones of functional and integrative medicine physicians like Mark Hyman, Sara Gottfried, Jeffrey Bland, Zach Bush, Casey Means, Kara Fitzgerald, David and Austin Perlmutter, Jolene Brighten, and Terry Wahls.

I’ve spoken with neuroscientists like Andrew Huberman and Adam Gazzaley, with nutritionists Elissa Goodman and Simon Hill, with environmentalists Paul Hawken, Warren Brush, Finian Makepeace, Ryland Engelhart, and Kate Nelson, and with trauma and addiction experts including Gabor Maté, Russell Brand, Hala Khouri, and David Kessler.

I’ve jawed and nattered with purveyors of every bespoke wellness modality, including Wim Hof, Byron Katie, Davidji, Tracee Stanley, Matteo Pistono, and Michael Beckwith, and with those who defy categorization, like Matthew McConaughey, Mickey Hart, Marie Forleo, Jim Kwik, Dave Asprey, and Rener and Ryron Gracie.

I could write another book about my madcap misadventures with these characters—but it would likely be my last.

In addition to interviewing living souls, I have spent hundreds of hours excavating the posthumous libraries of the British philosopher Alan Watts and the American spiritualist Ram Dass in collaboration with their estates. And, of course, I cohabitate with my Zen teacher and muse, Schuyler, whose iconoclasm serves me up daily koans over which to cogitate.

In preparation for the aforementioned interviews, I have read over 400 books, endless scientific papers, primary source data, and clinical research. If only out of vanity and risk of public embarrassment, I have committed myself to rigorous study, and, in doing so, I have become an “amateur everything,” from citizen microbiologist to part-time Buddhist.

For years, I have had the unique opportunity to absorb the insight of the world’s greatest minds. This book synthesizes and distills their wisdom into a guide for well-being—a coalescence of the ancient and the cutting edge. It is a squeezing of the sponge.