Category: Podcast

Logan Christopher: 00:19 “Logan IS the Health Sovereign.” That's the title of a review from Maverick_Sister.

“I’ve known Logan for years and followed his career. He brings so much knowledge to his podcast! Educating people on the current health model in the US is so important – and Logan is determined to tear down walls and break barriers to help as many people as possible.”

Thank you Maverick_Sister. And that is true, and I'm not doing it alone. I have great people doing this along with me like our guest today. We are continuing the conversation with Ron Baker.

Last week, we talked a lot about energy and how that works, everything that's involved there in energy and healing, and now we dive deeper into inner child work. Let's get started.

Logan: 01:02 I'd like to shift gears a little bit. So, in addition to this energy work, really, I mean, they're related, but you do a lot with working with the inner child, and this is something I've just dabbled in a little bit. But I was poking around on your website and you have a fantastic free meditation for this, so I definitely recommend people go check that out. I guess same kind of story—we started with the energy. Was it a similar sort of thing? How did you get into the inner child work?

Ron: 01:30 Yeah. Just since you mentioned the meditation that I have on my website, the website is RonBaker.net. It's net, not com, so that's the unusual thing about it. And please go and feel out the free meditations that are on the site.

So, when I first started working on people, I did massage to help relieve issues that people had grips in their muscles—let's just say somebody carried a bunch of tension between their shoulder blades—and I would move the energy. It would open; they would feel better. But then they would recreate it. And I would open it again, and then they would recreate it.

And so, I was like, You know what? I need to give them more information about why we hold energy in specific areas of the body. And as I began to inform people and they would go, Oh, that makes great sense for me and my life, and the way I grew up, etc., I was like, Okay, I'm going to shift the work and go much more to source-level rather than symptom-level healing.

So, I did a whole bunch of training and worked with teachers from many different approaches, and I put together my own system. Just a quick overview of that is what I discovered is that there are three levels of self. In simplicity, it is the child, the adult and the soul.

Most people have so little education about self, it is crazy. The main reason we're here is to have the journey of self, and yet I went to school for 20 years; I got three degrees, and not one course talked about self. My parents certainly didn't know how, just like all my clients don't have parents who knew how to teach them about self.

And so, I made my school of self-mastery, my main focus in life, and let go of the performing career, because it just was too important, and all the things I was discovering were so simple and practical, and helpful and nurturing.

The deal is this—all of us in the first eight years of our lives set up certain challenges for our lifetime. For me, I already shared earlier that my parents didn't really know how to resolve a lot of the things that were going on around us, particularly emotional challenges, and so, I was trying to figure it all out. This was a great motivation for me to eventually take my curiosity into true solutions with all of these various teachers.

And so, as I put it together in a simple system, I was like, every single person, no matter what gender, what race, what culture, what country, it doesn't matter, every single person develops in the same way growing up. We have seven energy centers and those open one at a time, and the first three that opened are physical, emotional and mental.

And if our parents know how to champion us and nurture us in nine specific ways, then we would learn to receive and we would feel safe, and we would trust our value and we would claim our individuality, and we would then blossom throughout every stage of our lives.

With almost no education about self and, therefore, very little education about the nine levels of nurturing self, then instead of trusting the value of who we are as an individual, instead of continuing to grow and blossom and trust our value, we end up carrying a lot of fear, shame and judgment and that child-level development.

Instead of becoming the wonder and the trust of a child, we become the defense, the fear, the protection, a survival approach to life, and we protect and bury anything we don't know how to deal with. So, we can grow into adult bodies, but we haven't even understood that our lives are still run by whatever the setup of our lifetime was in those first eight years. I call it our “soul curriculum.”

If I'm still trapped in fear, shame and judgment, I can be 30, 40, 50, 60 years old and still run by the fear, shame and judgment. And so, the work that I do is introducing to people at an adult level how to trust these nine nurturing needs.

When they understand that it is entirely possible to feel safe and connected, and acknowledged with compassion and clear guidance and support … when they have that level of education and experiential nurturing … then the adult begins to trust that more is possible than the wounded child learned how to trust.

And so, in order to then heal the whole thing, we go back to the child part of us that is still very much programmed in the nervous system like you would program a computer. Our nervous system became programmed. I teach people how to go back in and re-parent the inner child part of self so that we can release the fear, shame and judgment, and we can fill in the gaps of those nine nurturing needs—and it is remarkable to watch what happens because we can still learn.

I don't care how old we are. We can still learn to receive and trust, and claim our value and claim our individuality, and blossom into more and more of our authentic interests, priorities, and talents, and our lives become much more intimate, meaningful, fulfilling. So, there's a little bit about the inner child.

Logan: 08:21 Yeah. One of my favorite quotes from one of the founders of NLP, Richard Bandler said, “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”

Ron: 08:31 Absolutely.

Logan: 08:32 Yeah. So, pretty much everyone, in your opinion, does every single person need this work? I mean, parents kind of screw up kids. It's kind of part of the journey here.

Ron: 08:41 The only reason parents screw up kids is because their parents did the same thing to them.

Logan: 08:47 Yeah, right.

Ron: 08:47 It's really just been passed-on limitation. So, how many times did our parents say, Oh my God, I've become my mother? If we are old enough to look back, we can see that we've become an iteration of our mother or father, because we imitate as children. We want to connect. We want to fit in. We want to feel safe, and, usually, that involves agreeing with Mommy and Daddy's comfort zones, or eventually defying Mommy and Daddy's comfort zones, but it still equals a focus on the same things, the same limitations.

Logan: 09:27 Right, it can go in [inaudible] direction.

Ron: 09:29 Yeah, it can go either way. And so, everybody does need this kind of work and to get connected to yourself, even physically. As an example, if I can do an exercise with everybody who's listening at the moment, are you connected to your physical body or not?

I'll give you a simple way to tune in at the moment. I'm going to say a word and I don't want you to change a thing. I just want you to pay attention to how this word applies to you. So, without changing a thing, focus on the word “breath.” How are you breathing? Don't change it.

I can almost guarantee from having done this with thousands of people around the world that almost everybody discovers that they're breathing really shallow, up in the high part of the chest, and not deep and full into the body. This is a great measuring stick that you carry fear, shame, and judgment, even if you bury it and you aren't even conscious of it because it's buried in your subconscious. This how I was for a long time.

And so, the bottom line is if you learn how to breathe in a truly healthy, nurturing way, the in-breath will show your nervous system you're safe to receive. And then, the out-breath, which almost nobody talks about, most people when I say, Okay, so take a deep breath, they'll take a deep breath and they'll fill up their chest, knockdown into the lower belly, and then the out-breath is so careful, it is remarkable. It barely comes out. I say breathe in the nose, breathe out of the mouth in the most proactive way possible.

So, I ask you, the listeners, to do that right now. In the nose, out the mouth. Almost everybody, if it translates through sound, almost everybody does something like (breathing) with the lips barely open, the teeth barely open. And now I'm going to do a healthy breath and hopefully, you'll be able to tell from the sound (breathing) … very different, open, proactive flow of air.

If I'm not even breathing, how can I connect and go to deep levels of nurturing or healing, or fulfillment? All of those things become possible. I'll give a quick benefit of that.

I have learned in my breathing and my nurturing of self, how to clear my fear, shame and judgment more and more and more. Health is something that has become a big topic on the planet, particularly with the volatile health insurance, and the system is not working so well and it costs so much money. I've gone for 20 plus years without getting sick at all, not even a cold, and it's because of moving energy, which starts with this breath.

So, all of that to say it is really important that we learn how to reconnect and re-parent that inner child.

Logan: 13:06 Yeah, I love your quote. Once again, I found this on the website, but your breath is a reflection of how ready you are to receive and give, and that emphasis on the out-breath because, I mean, I've written a book on breathing. I've been practicing breathing exercises a long time, but still you are giving some insight specifically around that that, on my out-breath, I was tightening up in the solar plexus there. So, yeah, it's a lifetime journey to learn this.

I have to ask, with your experience in singing and Broadway, and all of that, obviously breath is a big part of that, but I imagine even though you had that, there are so many more layers to go on the journey -

Ron: 13:43 Oh, definitely.

Logan: 13:44 - of softening the breath, I guess.

Ron: 13:46 Yeah, it's amazing. I studied with the two most famous baritone teachers in the world and neither of them taught me to breathe in the healthy way that I eventually taught myself, once I could feel and sense energy in this way. And so, yeah, there are lots of layers.

Logan: 14:05 Let me ask, with the inner child, and obviously you can kind of work with yourself at different ages, different people are going to have different results with that and kind of need to spend more time with it. Correct?

Ron: 14:19 Yeah …

Logan: 14:19 What's been your experience?

Ron: 14:21 Everybody has a lot of layers, way more than we've ever been taught because, I don't know about you, but I was never taught a single thing. So, imagine how many parts itself and how many years of squashed feelings we've moved through.

As an example, every time you grip in the solar plexus, whoever you are, and you press those feelings down and go, No, I don't want to feel that. No, I don't feel safe to feel that, the energy does not go away. It stores in the cells of our body. And so, we have to learn a healthy way to reconnect and nurture.

People go, Oh my God, it's going to feel like trauma again if I reconnect to those feelings. And I go, Nope, you are not in a traumatizing situation at all, and if you do it the way I teach, in my 25 years of teaching, not one single person has discovered a feeling that is traumatizing or threatening to them at all. You can release all of those old feelings because it's safe to feel sad. It's safe to cry and be vulnerable. It's safe to get the feelings out. It's safe as long as we are nurturing ourselves and not acting out our feelings on anybody else. And so, we can literally release the pressure cooker in a huge way just by learning these nurturing tools.

Logan: 15:48 And having done that inner child meditation that we talked about that's on your website, the other night, I had an interesting experience, recently gotten into the … back into the habit of meditating at night. I had a real strong morning routine for a long time, but wanted to do a second session.

So, as I was doing this, and I'm starting real small, just 10 minutes or so, as I was doing this. I started to get impatient, as often happens during meditation, and I kind of tuned in and recognized that it wasn't me so much, but it was actually inner child, a younger me that was impatient in the process right then and there. So, yeah, not having done a lot of inner child work, it was interesting to see that emerge during the process.

Ron: 16:31 Yeah. It's so interesting for people to discover that it's almost like having two people inside your body. People will go, Oh, that feels such and such. And I go, Huh, is that the child or the adult? And they go, I don't know. I don't know. And I go, Okay, we're right now in a very comfortable room. You're being nurtured. Is there any threat to your wellbeing whatsoever? And they're like, No, there's nothing threatening happening at all. I said, And yet your child feels impatient or frustrated, or threatened in some way. Trust me, that is the wounded history that's buried. Now show up to nurture that part of you like you wish Mommy and Daddy had known how.

And, of course, this requires certain tools that I've passed on, but the more we show up and realize that our adult is not nearly so threatened and that, in our adult lives, that wounded child keeps coming up like a nagging young person who is saying, Please see me. Please hear me. Please help me. Please give me some guidance. And we don't understand that it's the child part of our nervous system, and so, we just think we're always irritated and in a bad mood, and we don't even know why.

Logan: 17:54 I imagine it's got to be interesting, anytime something comes up, you probably have pretty good awareness of it now. It's like, Oh, this is my child or this is adult self, or you were saying earlier how you pick up on the energies of other people. So, is it like you can really feel where the different things come from with a lot of practice in doing such things?

Ron: 18:13 Yeah. As you practice, you learn. Before you go to any grade, the subject you're about to do doesn't make any sense to you at all. And then, three months in, it begins to make sense. Six months in, it makes much more sense, and by nine months in, typical school year, you have become so familiar with those things and developed certain skills that you can count on. To begin with, it didn't make any sense. Energy's the same way, learning to trust where the feeling is coming from.

Logan: 18:49 So, what would you recommend? Is there a simple way for people to start with this, or regular practice to engage and to get in contact with the inner child? Because sometimes they just don't even want to talk to you, right? They've been abandoned -

Ron: 19:01 Yeah.

Logan: 19:02 - for so long, they won't show up, yeah.

Ron: 19:05 The bottom line is if they don't show up in a meditation, it's only because they're afraid, and that's because in your childhood you learned to be afraid of certain things. And so, if Mommy and Daddy constantly negated your feelings, or made you wrong or criticized, then it takes time. It's like a puppy who's been kicked a handful of times and is hiding under a piece of furniture. Take some time for the nurturer to build trust with that part.

So, what can people do? First of all, I would encourage people to go and check out the free meditations as a place to start because it will give my voice and guidance as an example. And if you have other places you'd like to go, it doesn't have to be mine. I just happened to know that mine is clear, nurturing and helpful. So, go and get some guided meditations that focus on nurturing and feelings.

The second thing that I would encourage people to do is an exercise that we can do right now. Most people are not in touch with their physical body, which we just talked about with breath. Most people are also not connected to their emotional energy either. So, if you didn't grow up with your feelings, acknowledged, accepted, encouraged, then you might not have ever even learned how to identify feelings. You learn to bury them.

So, do a litmus test this moment. You can do it in a minute or so. Can you name five feelings right now in this moment that you are experiencing? I'm going to be silent for about 15 seconds here. Can you name feelings that are going on in you right now?

(Silence)

Most people cannot. They named one or two that are very common and habitual, and then they don't know how to name other feelings. I can give you a list of feelings, of course, but I'm going to just show you how simple it can be. Right now, in this moment. I feel open, willing, honest, generous, tender, simple, authentic, connected, grateful.

Now, all of those happen to be positive feelings because that's what I'm feeling at the moment. But if I had a frustrating situation, I could call out other feelings that don't happen to be going on for me at the moment. Those are just as safe.

Eventually, we want to be able to name feelings, moment to moment. And then, we want to learn how to nurture those feelings, how to give those feelings a voice and how to release the energy of those. So, we do need emotional education and that is a huge missing piece on the planet, and I assure you, it is a major factor to how passionate, purposeful and fulfilling you are going to be in your day-to-day life.

So, I deeply encourage people to begin to get education about itself, and how to connect and nurture yourself.

Logan: 22:48 I feel that even our language around the topic is quite limited. So, what would you say is the difference in emotions and feelings? One way I've looked at it is I kind of term feelings more to the sensory feeling in the body. For instance, if you had some kind of movement in the stomach, you could be interpreting that as anxiety or it could just be excitement, and the interpretation may be different even though the feeling is the same.

So, yeah, just anything you could point on that, because with the sensory-based feelings that’s along with energy, moving and flowing in the body, you may get a label that comes on that, but it can be different from the movement itself.

Ron: 23:34 Yeah, it's an interesting thing. It's a lot simpler than people make it, but if you just keep in mind that everything is energy—everything is energy—and everything wants to be in flow, and so, if you have a sensation in your stomach, it's usually because the energy flow is being gripped and blocked, and therefore you become aware of the friction of that movement against the grip.

That is a physical symptom, but it can come from fear of a feeling—Oh my God, I might have to experience feeling vulnerable. I might have to experience feeling not good enough. I might have to experience the feeling of deprivation and I don't want to feel any of those, so I grip—and then, you become first aware of the friction and the stomach issue.

So, the vocabulary of feeling versus emotion, it's a tricky one but it's quite simple. We have physical feeling and we have emotional feeling, so when we take in an experience through the five physical senses, it literally triggers chemicals in the body that become emotional experience. We tend to call them feelings, but it makes it tricky to what's a physical feeling. “I feel physically tired” versus “I feel sad or excited.”

I just named two emotional feelings and a physical feeling. We might as well call them all emotions. Most people don't have an emotional vocabulary. And so, all of it is feeling, thank goodness, because by having feeling, we find out where we can respond, where there is grip, where there is a pain, where there is fear. And so, the feelings give us a way to differentiate one experience from another.

Bottom line, breathe, honor your feelings, name your feelings, and get the nurturing support and guidance that you need in order to deepen your connection and healing of self.

Logan: 26:02 Yeah, I like those distinctions. Thank you for sharing on that. It seems to me that this emotional work in inner child work, I mean, it is reactive, in a sense, because we’ve all grown up with people, but this can be a really proactive way. People can be increasing their health, and, of course, not just physical health, although that will be a part of it, but across all the different layers of health that exists. It seems like a good practice worth putting in some effort into.

Ron: 26:32 Yeah. Even if you just practice healthy, proactive breathing, just one exercise, it is going to help with your physical health and your emotional health, etc. But it's really helpful to have clear tools, so that you can feel confident in how you continue to grow.

That's what I love about the work that I do more than anything—it gives people a clear approach to their lives, so they can take it as far as they want to, and they can keep growing, deepening, expanding, improving and enhancing. But it's not because they have to. It's not because they aren't lovable at the levels that they start in. It's just, oh my God, if it can keep getting better and better and better, why would I not do that? So, we need tools and a clear approach in order to make that possible.

Logan: 27:29 Yeah. I want to touch on, because we talked about the child, the adult and the soul levels, so you talked about soul purpose and I was thinking of the questions like, How many people do not really go after their soul purpose because of some health issues, in the first place? But, on the flip side, how many people, their soul's purpose gets attached to some sort of health issue, either a crisis they went through or people close to them did? I thought that was interesting.

Ron: 27:54 Yeah. I think that so often people associate the word purpose with their career and that's my purpose in the world. It's cool to have a career that invests and that touches lives. It's wonderful. But mostly our soul purpose is to learn how to love, how to love and value. How do I love myself? If I don't learn how to love and value myself, how am I going to enjoy any part of my life? I'm going to be apologizing and compensating, and worrying. It's just not fun.

So, the main purpose that we all share is learning how to get in touch with self, and how to love and value, starting with self. Then, that amazing individuality that wants to awaken and blossom, and the specific interests that we have, guide us into certain arenas. And then, we can be generous in how we give and explore, and evolve whatever those arenas happen to be.

I had some initial ones in the performing arts, and that gave me a way to express myself and it gave me a way to get a world education performing all over the world. But it wasn't fulfilling without a sense of self. And so, I used it to compensate and I had a clear purpose, and people would say, Oh, you're so lucky. You have a specific talent that gives you such a clear purpose. And I'm going, Okay, yeah, I'm really grateful that I have that talent, but I'm telling you I was miserable through the majority of my performing career because I didn't have a trusted inner sense of self.

I wish I could go back and do a lot more performing now while I have that inner sense of self to enjoy the experience that much more. And I occasionally do, but not too often. So, purpose is a big subject, and if you keep in mind that the source level itself, and then the expression of self is just how we plug ourselves into various parts of life.

Logan: 30:19 I really like that, the universal purpose we all share. So, for all those people, it's like, Oh, I don't know my purpose in life, you can at least start there and then [crosstalk] the rest will unveil.

Ron: 30:30 Believe me.

Logan: 30:31 Thank you so much, Ron. This has been a fascinating discussion. I really do encourage people to check out your website, RonBaker.net where you can find that free meditation for getting in touch with your inner child, along with a few other things there. Is there anywhere else you want to point people to you or other things on your website you want to point out?

Ron: 30:50 They can find most things on my website, such as there are 50 videos there that they can go and watch that are also on YouTube through a podcast that I do on and off called Empowered At Last. But you can find everything pretty much anchored there at RonBaker.net.

Logan: 31:12 Excellent. Thank you so much, Ron. It was an honor to have you on here, and thank you for the healing you have provided me and for the healing work you’ve provided many other people, as well as this education. Very much appreciated.

Ron: 31:24 You got it. Thank you so much, Logan.

Logan: 31:27 Forget fat. How about you base your health on sound principles that have existed for millennia? That's what my book, Powered by Nature: How Nature Improves Our Happiness, Health, and Performance, is all about.

If you want a special deal, my company, Lost Empire Herbs, will give you a $30-gift-card to buy a $20-book. Plus, every sale will support indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest, too. Find out more and pick up your copy at PoweredByNatureBook.com.

00:19 Welcome back. I'm loading CRISPR and this is the health sovereign podcast and today we are covering the final points in the health sovereign creed number 15 and 16 how do you like this creed? Are you going to live by it? Are you going to strive to, it's not as simple like yes or no type thing, but steps along the journey with these two final points today. One somewhat similar to the last one. Then definitely a big stand on the final point. Anyway, let's dive in. Point number 15 I recognize that other large industries have track records of criminal and harmful activity in releasing manmade, dangerous chemicals into the environment. I will aim to educate myself on such actions and reduce the support of such companies for the health of all. So when I'm saying other large industries, so beyond big pharma, we went into that clearly in point number 14 that they have criminal track records of harmful activity.

01:21 But so do so many other big industries doing the same sort of thing. So we all know about tobacco and how it causes lung and other forms of cancer. Right? Everyone knows about this. Everyone is aware that the CEOs of tobacco companies straight up lied under oath saying they were not aware of such effects that they purposefully muddied the scientific waters, hired PR people, did campaigns, formed AstroTurf organizations, did all kinds of stuff in order for the public not to recognize the scientific fact so that they could continue to profit. Everyone knows that. Right. Well recognized. Do you think that is the only industry that has ever occurred in, are you so naive or does it occur in pretty much every single big industry out there? Same sort of tactics sometimes called the big tobacco playbook. The truth is people were doing it before tobacco.

02:27 That's just the well-known industry case where it seems so obvious now, but it wasn't necessarily obvious to people back before all of that happened. So we covered some of the stuff regarding the pharmaceutical companies in the previous episode with point number 14 but let's talk about some other people here. Let's take Monsanto for example. One of the least trusted companies out there, well they're not their own company now. They were bought out by Bayer and Bayer is a pharmaceutical company. They have these people operate in the same sort of circles, things that happen. So for a long time lots of people have brought up issues around genetically modified organisms and all the Monsanto scientists and people that they may incentivize and brow say it's completely safe and they'll run trials that show this. But once again, how you set up a study dictates the results you get for the large part, not how sound should be done, but how science is being done and with their many pesticides.

03:31 I understand drug companies and chemical companies are largely the same thing. A lot of the stuff comes from the same places. So Monsanto right now they are beginning to lose lawsuits over Roundup and the sex or Bayer who just bought them out. Cause it seems like there could be a whole lot of these, some big ones in news. Just the first couple, but yeah, there are quite a few hundred more in the pipeline. I do believe so. Losing lawsuits saying the jury is deciding, judges are deciding that their chemicals cause cancer. Now it's mostly in people that are like spraying Roundup and have lots of exposure to it, but if it's poisonous to people it's poisonous to people. Those matters. Sure. But once again, I think we addressed this before, this idea of reductionism with understanding our microbiome, the bacteria and other components of that. All of the original science was saying like, Oh this Roundup, these pesticides do not affect humans, but they affect bacteria and what are we largely made of?

04:40 Oh bacteria, the chicken meat pathway. Certain things that plants have and bacteria have that humans do not have. So they're losing lawsuits over this and I do hope that continues. I do think it will continue. That's one company. Monsanto, let's look at some others. Dupont and three M. Just recently this was on Netflix documentary. I had not really heard much about this case before, but I would recommend watching this. It's called the devil we know and is about DuPont and three M's production and cover-up of the harmful effects of Teflon. Yes, the nonstick coating on your pants. Do you still use Teflon? I sure don't because I'm aware of this and now you are about to be as well. How [inaudible] I guess it's fine if it is just being staying on there. But these pants scratch up over time. Little flakes of it getting there.

05:38 What they're seeing in the town where they produced it because they were just dumping this chemical into the water. That birth defects increased in humans and animals. Lots of farmers lost like their whole flock of animals because of it being in the water supply and they hit this up. They said it was safe. Are you seeing the pattern yet? This is what these sort of companies do. It's unfortunate, and I'm not saying every single company out there does this, but if we look around, wow, so many companies do this. Think you need to understand that this point marketing, so I'm involved in marketing, marketing for my company, legendary strength telling people about fitness stuff. I do marketing and direct response form of it. Same with lost empire herbs, send out lots of emails and information and we have ads running in different places like marketing is not necessarily a bad thing.

06:27 How are you going to get people to find you? The thing is at this higher level what companies seem to do, what industries that taught people to do. There's like a different level of marketing where is really about propaganda and controlling the worldview of the masses. This higher-order thing, I mean think about say Coca-Cola. Oh we can use them as an example to Coca-Cola, other companies and the whole industry saying that sugar is not a problem. Sugar is not causing obesity. Sugar is not causing diabetes. Really come on and they'll come out with their own science that says, so if you look at, I just saw this recently, the science saying that sugar does not cause ill effects versus science that says the sugar that does cause ill effects. If we look at the industry funding or tie-ins of these different ones, it's almost 90% or over 90% of the stuff that says trigger does not have ill health effects was tied to the industry.

07:28 All the science that was not tied to the industry, 95% of that said there were negative health effects to it. This is how science actually operates in our world, not how it should not the ideal of science, but how it actually operates in reality. This is what all these big companies, these harmful criminal companies are doing. Also, find science should be a crime and with a stiff penalty back to DuPont and 3m and Teflon, so all kinds of birth defects, all kinds of things. They denied it. They said the science was safe. They did all kinds of different things and eventually, they were, I think there are multiple cases, but in a big one they had to pay out $671 million. What was very cool was that the people, instead of just taking all that money, even though they had been harmed and deserved it, they took a large chunk of that and did a study showing real good science, showing completely that this was having some devastating effects and that it was just being spread in the environment.

08:32 That's a thing. It'd be nice. Okay. Hef lawn, like if you want to use it, that is your choice, but it's not just about you. You then wash the Teflon pan. Those flakes are going into your pipes and going into the water treatment plants or just getting dumped, who knows exactly where and how all these things get spread out. And of course, the company themselves just dumping tons of this, the byproducts of that production everywhere. Ecology, the bigger picture. We have to see this. So if it was just your choice, find, do whatever you want. Unfortunately, it's not just you. So we need to be aware of these things. So as I said, we can reduce the support of such companies for the health for all. Yeah. Instead of Teflon pans, get a cast iron pan. Yeah, you may be consuming more iron from doing so, but that's generally not a problem.

09:21 More of a problem for guys and women because women bleed monthly. Guys, you can do what is known as well. You can give blood or there's just the therapeutic phlebotomy, something like that. Forgetting the exact term right now, but just get rid of blood essentially. And we can reduce our iron supply that way. Cast iron overall much safer. Oh, imagine that. Something that has been used for hundreds of years. Sure. They cooked another thing, ceramics and, but iron has been used for a long, long time with not too bad of effects. But we come out with this [inaudible] logical intervention, Hey, things don't stick to it. So it's more convenient. And so much of our technology is about convenience and we find there are worse health effects from doing so. So here's the thing, this chemical specifically in the Teflon called C eight finally DuPont 3m, they said, okay, we're not going to do this, but DuPont, it's like, Nope, we're going to continue.

10:18 I mean, Teflon is still out there, right? We're going to just replace it with this other chemical called gen X. This other chemical probably has just as bad of the effects. We see this in the plastic industry. Everyone is looking for bottles and plastics that say BPA free now, right? This phenol a having some horrible estrogenic, you know, estrogenic effects in the body, horrible, horrible stuff and this was banned from baby bottles and stuff like that. But what is happening, unfortunately in many cases, not all, but in many, they are simply replacing it with BPS or BPF other bisphenols that likely have the exact same type of effects, maybe a little bit better, maybe a little bit worse. Even. This is what these industries do. Track records, look at history, look at many different examples and you can see the bigger picture of what is being done.

11:13 We will be going deeper on these topics. Feels like if everyone understood what is sometimes called the tobacco playbook, tobacco industry playbook, all these different ways that science is misled, that misinformation is purposely spread out there. So you have to understand this, that if people are willing to put profit over people's lives and that is ultimately what it comes down to in this are such people going to have any sort of problem with lying? No, they're not there. You're going to straight-up lie to your face lied to in media interviews and PR pieces, all kinds of places. They will lie, lie, lie because well a lot of people at the top of these industries, unfortunately, seem to be, I can't say for sure but if we look at behavior sociopath's psychopaths, we have this idea of the psychopath is the serial killer who goes and hunts people and sure that seems to be the case once in a while but think about this if you really wanted to cause a lot of harm is killing people one by one.

12:22 The best way to do it if you are in power dynamics, which these people seem to be and money is a good surrogate for that, but you can cause a lot of harm. There might be some sick people that actually enjoy the process knowing what they're doing here. Well, there are better ways to do that. Then being a serial killer or what we commonly think of as a serial killer, but you could look at these industries here. It's people making these decisions. Are they not serial killers? Far more successful than the biggest mass shooters of the mall. It seems to be the case. Once again, I look at all these different industries, see the same tactics, the same strategies being used, often the same PR companies. We can see the connections between these, the people that sit on the board of directors on one pharmaceutical company, maybe on a chemical company over here or a financial company over there.

13:13 See the bigger picture, see the pattern, and you can begin to break free and that's what it comes down to. So I'll aim to educate myself. That's the first basic. Got it. Understand any of this stuff is hard. There's so much stuff going on. Did you know that BPA is on Thermo receipts? So the receipts you get at checkout, the BPA is on there oftentimes, and it'll just come off into your skin. If you don't know that, you may think it's just paper but it's not, so you need lots of education and that's something I'm hoping to bring you here on the health sovereign podcast. I hope I'm succeeding in that, but many other places as well. Aim to educate myself on such actions and reduce the support of companies for the health of all. It's a hard thing. We can't just kind of off.

13:58 You might be able to like pharmaceuticals. I am committed to not using a single pharmaceutical drug unless it is critically important for me. Again necessarily make that decision for other people, but that can do that myself. But what about plastics? Right. There's plastic everywhere. You can't get around this world without plastic, but you can certainly reduce your plastic use in the kitchen. I tried to use as little plastics as possible and yeah, you can get BPA free. You can even find some stuff that says all the biz females free, but can you get rid of it completely? You can do things like use glass instead of plastic. Can't get rid of it completely, but aim to reduce. I buy organic food as much as possible everywhere I possibly can. I support the people making the right kind of thing, even if it's industrial organic, and certainly, we see some of these tactics and things bled into that.

14:56 So local small farmers tend to be better, but even there this better. So aim to reduce, do the best you can and keep making steps towards doing better and better for your health and for the health of all. Because if almost no one supports pesticide use, those companies are no longer making money, no longer spraying this stuff, and that's one way we can tip the system Fords, greater health, greater life. Point number 16 I recognize that we all must be able to make our own medical choices for ourselves and our families. I will stand up against all medical totalitarianism. There's a reason I end on this point. Ultimately, this is what health sovereignty is about. I control, I make choices about my own health and because my baby, my children until a certain age cannot make choices for themselves. I along with my wife, we must make choices for our family.

16:03 We are health sovereign, sovereign, right? If we are not able to make these, if the government makes them for us, well that is a slippery slope. You want the government deciding what is right for your health. When we see these kinds of behaviors going on with big companies, and this is something I didn't even touch in the creed, the revolving door, how a top CEO or a chief executive of some type or president or whatnot of a company will go and then join the regulatory agency that regulates that company. There are problems here and if this is the kind of government we have going on, cronyism, not just pure capitalism, but cronyism or which fortunately it seems capitalism always descends to do. We trust a government to make choices for us. I wish I could say, yes, our government is amazing, but let me ask, do you trust your government?

16:59 Everything going on in all these other areas. You trust your government, you think they have a right to make medical choices for us, especially here in the so-called land of the free, I mean our founding fathers still flawed people, but Holy crap. The foresight. They had the system they set up. Now that system is being systematically dismantled. People in these industries in related fields are doing a very good job of that, dismantling this system of checks and balances of separation of powers because the founding fathers saw that any power will lead towards totalitarianism and so that's a strong word, medical, totalitarianism. But for a doctor to say that you cannot make this choice regarding your health, I think that is wrong and it doesn't matter what that choice is because it is my choice to make. So examples of this cancer, a child gets cancer and they are saying you have to do conventional Western medical treatment for this cancer to not do so.

18:03 You are endangering that child. We will throw child protective custody at you. We will do all kinds of things because you are not making the right choice. Oh, that is harsh. Like this is bad. Now if your child has cancer and the government is dictating how you treat it when we can look at cancer treatment and see it's not the best thing in the world, here's the thing. It is not equal because if the people decide to do alternative medical treatment and the child has success, that's great. No one will ever hear the damn word about such things. If they do alternative medical treatment and the child dies, the parents may be sued or thrown in jail for child endangerment, but if the child does conventional treatment and survives, great. Once again, won't hear anything of it. If the child dies, well here, we also will not hear anything of it, but we know chemotherapy and radiation caused cancer themselves.

19:04 You know down the line likely to come back that it can weaken them. The immune system can cause other sorts of problems. They may be the most advanced technological medicine that we have that doesn't necessarily make it the best and I am arguing the parents have the right to decide there, but that's the difference between the two. Conventional fails won't hear anything about it. Alternative fails. Oh, that's going to get in the media. Why? Because it plays to the story that they want to tell that this stuff is wrong, that it's hogwash and you will be punished if you fail. You may think that's a conspiracy, but no, once again, we can see this play out. So here's the thing, I'm going to flip this. Parents feeding their baby a vegan or restricted diet. I do not agree with this. I do not think it is right, not scientifically, but naturally just going back in time.

20:02 Nature, the statistical significance of nature. There is no such thing as a vegan. People that have survived long term. People are experimenting with it now. Good luck to them. Vegetarians, they have done that like in India, but they used animal products. So feeding a baby vegan food and exclusively vegan food, even without mother's milk, then they're going to be lacking in certain nutrients. But and this is hard to say, should the government be able to step in and do that? But here's a thing that kind of a dichotomy here too. Oh, you can feel feed your baby food full of chemicals, but you can't try to be healthier and feed them vegan food. You can do all kinds of different crap to your baby as long as it is within the conventional worldview. But you can't do this experiment once again, don't believe babies should be vegan at all.

20:56 If you want to do that as an adult, all the more power to you and I think a lot of vegans are going to be far healthier than standard American diet or standard worldwide diet. Now fast food and all that crap. Absolutely though I think they a more ideal diet once again because of looking in the past, I think when the best works on nutrition is Western aid prices, nutrition, and physical degeneration because he looked at all these people across the world and they had all kinds of diets but some commonalities. That all-natural food, minimally processed, but they all had some sort of animal products in them. Whether this was dairy and certain European cultures, all kinds of different meats, seafood, all kinds of different things. No one was vegan, so it is a bit of an experiment. But should the government be allowed to say, you cannot do this because say maybe they don't make it illegal, but then like in Belgium there with the case of this, they, and it was like worse than vegan.

21:52 That's super restricted, but this is the media saying it. So one-sided story for sure. Yeah, they convicted the parents of child abuse or neglect or something along those lines for it. So maybe that should be on the table, but I don't think you should have your kid taken away if you don't want to do chemo. And there's another area where this medical totalitarianism is coming up becoming a much bigger thing. And here's the thing. I'm not even supposed to talk about this subject. You're going to have to read between the lines because I'm not yet ready to talk about this subject for these very reasons but the thing where it government and saying in insane, you have to do this highly technological intervention because it is completely safe and effective. What have I said before? These interventions tend not to be as safe as they say and tend to be not as effective as they say.

22:45 But I'm not allowed to talk about this because I am deemed to spread misinformation. Should I even mention stuff that's even on government websites. It's all lumped in together. This is how you control the worldview. So this is why I stand up against medical totalitarianism. This is part of the reason why I titled this podcast, the health sovereign podcast. We need the education. We need to become aware of what is going on. Not just like, Oh, you should take this B vitamin simple stuff like that. We need the bigger picture for us to truly be sovereign in our health because the worldview is closing down in on around us. We have this amazing tool of the internet, but we're seeing censorship spread across big platforms available online. So where's the world going? Well, these people, top of industries, right? There's smart people, very smart people.

23:40 They may be sociopathic, but they certainly seem to be intelligent and able to think far ahead in the future. So where is the future going? It's going towards more of the government deciding what is right for you, your body, your health, your children's health. That is where we are going in the future. Unless people wake up and begin to make these decisions themselves and stop the things that are happening that allow them to take such measures that unfortunately is the way the world is working right now, but I do have hope. I am optimistic, you know, going through some of this information. Definitely do get pessimistic from time to time and there's good reason to believe like, Oh crap, we are in for it, but at the same time can easily flip to optimism. Ultimately you do have the power of yourself if you do have the responsibility yourself and by listening to things such as this, listening to the many great guests I've just started to have on, but so many more coming, I think we can really get to a better place of understanding health, of understanding sovereignty and taking that not just in health but really everywhere because the bigger picture of health is much bigger than just having to do with your own personal health.

25:00 That is what it comes down to. Once again, that is the health and sovereign creed that's [email protected] if you want to download a copy of yourself. Here's the thing about the creed. I would love to hear your feedback. I feel this is long winded. It's been a fun exercise, especially recording these episodes, not just reading it in the first place, but I feel it can be distilled down to a smaller essence and really to get to a place where people might want to sign it or agree to it and really build a movement around this. So I always figured with this first version, just going to brain dump, put it out there, see how it goes, but I would love to hear your feedback. Are you all for it or are some of these points like too crazy for you? I want to hear your thoughts.

25:43 You can email me at Logan at Lost Empire. Herbs.Com you can leave comments on the health, sovereign.com website, all kinds of other places. And once again, iTunes reviews really helps out spreads this message to more people. And with sovereignty, we need a collective of sovereign individuals to really start transforming things for health and otherwise. I hope you've enjoyed this. Thank you so much for listening and please head on over to lost empire, herbs.com a lot more information there. Even around a lot of these topics is, I've been writing about it for a while, but a lot of information on herbs. I do think urbalism has always been the people's medicine. They took that away from us to the point where people don't even recognize herbs anymore. That's a weird word. They don't know how to use these things. They know nothing about it. They were successful in doing this.

26:34 Even though I hate the things they don't. I do give some respect for how they have controlled this system to some degree. It's kind of on inspiring to be honest, but we can take it back and I think urbalism is a great way to do so. Learn how you can work on little things yourself, improve your performance through the use of herbs. We have a good supply there, a few different great herbs available. There's much more out there, but it's a good place to get started with to check it out. That's lost empire herbs.com thank you. And I'll be back next week.

00:18 Hello and welcome back. I'm Logan Christopher and we'll be doing another solo episode going over some of the points on the health sovereign creed today. We're getting down near the wire to the end of this if you haven't already, just to remind her that you can find the full creed, all 16 points available at health sovereign dotcom point number 11 I will strive to understand the difference between what is scientific for health versus what is simply technological. That the highest tech interventions are not necessarily the healthiest as shown by science. This touches once again on that concept of intervention and in general, I'd say the higher-tech intervention, the bigger of an intervention it actually is. This is probably one of the harder points to understand and it took a while for me to really wrap my own mind around this concept. I first wrote about it on the lost empire herbs blog maybe a year or so ago.

01:22 Maybe a little bit longer than that, but it's a very important one. So we tend to confound the ideas of science and technology and there are reasons we do this, right? So what is the difference between these? Science essentially produces technology. Technology is a byproduct of science, especially around engineering and design and all of those different things. But when I'm talking about science in this sense, specifically the health sciences, what is scientifically proven or has evidence for something being healthier for ourselves, that is a different thing than what is simply done using technology. So I'll use a very ridiculous example to prove this point. Think of eating some sort of natural food. Let's say an Apple. Okay. That is something produced by nature. Human technology doesn't really touch that. It can with pesticides and all kinds of things. But in general you can find an Apple tree, you can pick it straight from nature.

02:31 We can take a piece of technology, let's say a computer and a human could eat a computer. No one does this. But just as, once again a ridiculous example, eating a computer, just because technology is involved does not make this healthy. So now let's actually go to real-life examples because I know no one is trying to eat a computer. One of the over interventions of technology that we mentioned in the last episode is that of birth. I got some stats prepared for you here. So the USA is 61st in birth results and outcome. So the number of people dying or having tragic problems, 61st out of all the countries in the world, and this is from 2015, save the children’s state of the world's mothers report 61st of all, countries everywhere. And it is the worst of every industrialized country. Why is this?

03:33 Because of the overuse of technology. So that is one example. Here's another one. This was from a 2013 report saying that it was somewhere between 210,000 people and 400,000 people deaths coming from Western medicine itself. A different report titled death by medicine calculated 783,936 deaths from medicine, and this is properly practiced medicine, so not even overdosing or leaving a tool in a person in a surgery. This is the proper use of that with that number, and obviously we're seeing quite a range here from like 200,000 up to almost 800,000 but that last number would make it the number one leading cause of death. I think that maybe overblown. It's a hard thing to actually get to the, what is the real numbers in this area, but regardless of what the actual number is, we can see that Western medicine kills a lot of people.

04:39 Of course, they're trying to save people and in some cases accidents happen and whatnot. So we would expect this to be up there to some degree, but if properly prescribed medication kills a lot of people, if properly done surgery kills a lot of people, we need to recognize this and this is where the use of technology may be overplayed in some cases. Back in 1978, the US Office of Technological Assessment stated only 10 to 20% of all procedures currently used in medical practice have been shown to be efficacious by controlled trial. 10 had 20% one out of 10 or at best one out of five are shown to be efficacious. So this is the difference. We create technology, some sort of process or engineer some sort of device or patent medicine and then put it out there. And so few of these are actually shown scientifically to be efficacious to be a good idea worth doing.

05:46 We talked about placebo surgeries, very few of those are actually researched to be shown that they work, understand that medicines, pharmaceutical medicines have to go through a process. But as we'll cover in future episodes, understanding how trials can be misrepresented, it doesn't come down to statistical manipulation because that can be found out pretty easy. But how you set up a trial or what is known as the kind of the file drawer effect, not publishing those results, that sole negative and just getting lucky in one case and using that to publish results. So just because it's technology does not mean that it is scientifically validated for being healthy. What kind of kicked this off some of this, I know was pregnancy. I was talking to my wife about her pregnancy and my wife was mentioning some things around the use of hypnosis or working with a midwife rather than the hospital.

06:44 And this person kind of shut down and said, you know, I want science. The thing is the science is showing that midwives tend to have better outcomes if you're not in a high-risk pregnancy. There are cases for use of technology and interventions as we've discussed, but using something like that or using hypnosis, you get better outcomes. Scientifically it is validated, it's just not technological. The confounding of these two ideas is where we run into trouble. So more examples. I think x-rays are a good example of this. So did you know that after they developed x-ray technology, they would then have it in all kinds of different places? So this was a technological advancement, but is it scientifically validated for health? It has it to use and we use that for like broken bones. And things, but how many people are aware of the risks?

07:39 I mean if you go in for that, you recognize that the doctors, the nurses, the technicians are hiding behind concrete walls, wearing lead shields and everything. In order to not get radiation from this and yet there you are getting zapped by x-rays. I actually had this happen recently, a little over a year ago or about a year ago. Unfortunately, I broke my daughter's leg in setting up a swing incorrectly and it seemed like there was a break. She kept on screaming, had some problems and then you know before one year of age she couldn't communicate what was going on. So took her in, we did get an X-Ray and I'm holding her while wearing this led shield but then just holding this very tiny baby getting an x-ray and then it sucks cause a little bit later I'm reading some research saying just how damaging x-rays can be and cause cancer. And here's the thing about it, it doesn't cause a problem right then and there.

08:33 We don't see the short term negative consequences of such, but cancer may be caused that develops 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the line, the devastating longer-term effects that we're not noticing from our technology, but so I'd say, you know, benefit-cost analysis or risk analysis in that. Then we got her in a cast and she healed up normally though, that's interesting to think about. Yeah, the cast is there to support, but the human body naturally does the healing process. There was nothing that could be done, no technical intervention that would actually really help things out. Sure. We supported her with good nutrition and all that, but surgery would not have helped the process become any better. That's not to say that there are not certain breaks of bones where surgery may be required because that certainly is there anyway. X-Rays, they used to be used at fairs.

09:28 You know, just as a fun, exciting thing that used to be found in shoe shops. You would get a shoe-fitting fluoroscope in order to look at your feet to get the right pair of shoes for you. This happened, all kinds of shoe shops everywhere in the USA, probably elsewhere in the world for many, many, many, many years. Then they recognized it was causing cancer and that just kind of silently disappeared. Going back in history as a good way to understand these kinds of concepts that our science, our technology, our understanding of health is ridiculous. We are wrong on 50% of things and all times it's just we do not know what 50% of things actually is, which is why I like to go back to natural principles and on that note, I have this quote from [inaudible] seem to live. The guy we talked about with antifragility also in that same book, but this is probably my favorite quote of the whole book.

10:30 Here it is. If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that as much superior to our own just as there is a dichotomy in law, innocent until proven guilty as opposed to guilty until proven innocent. Let me express my rule as follows. What mother nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise. What humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise, nothing on the planet can be as close to statistically significant as nature. Ooh, I love that. So much science is guilty until proven otherwise what humans do because we're arrogant, we have ideas, we can make the technology and let's just apply it. Once again, generally only looking at the short term things, it's really hard to look at longer-term things to do.

11:26 A study of the lifetime effects of something would take a lifetime to do and not dimension cost countless amounts of money to do so. Meanwhile, nature elevates statistically significant. I mean that's what we're looking for in all of our science and research and placebo-controlled studies that some sort of intervention is statistically significant, more so than the placebo and it is statistically significant because it has evolved in nature. It doesn't matter if you believe in the whole random mutation idea or you believe God designed us if it has come up through nature. To this point, it has been working in that sort of way. So the birthing process, yes, it has problems. There are trade-offs I guess, and developing our brain size and that skull being able to fit through the woman's pelvic area difficulties there that is causing some problems in childbirth, but we over intervene.

12:24 We disrupt that process. We don't necessarily see the effects of that for a long time to come. The rule of thumb, the principle that goes back to if it's been done in nature if it's been done for thousands of years, chances are it's pretty solid. We just may not know why as a really important thing to wrap your mind around. There's plenty of other examples. I mean I've talked about antibiotics a number of times. Technological intervention. This was a triumph of reductionist science and then we overuse them so they had a proper place of us using them, of overcoming nature in this way, but then our overuse of them having issues in doing that. So technologically it's an advancement scientifically, should you be using antibiotics at all if you are in good health for the most part, should you be using them for minor Colts? What is the proper place of antibiotics?

13:20 I was thinking about this. I don't think I discussed it. Antibiotics should be used in cases of life and death and I'd say catastrophe, so very big issues. Just having a minor cold, which has probably viral, not even bacteria in the first place, and an ear infection, probably not the best use of antibiotics, not worth it for the health consequences that come and this is being shown scientifically. The longer-term effects to your health, those ear infections are gonna come back. You're going to have other issues down the line because of the use of antibiotics. So life and death and catastrophe, that is where antibiotics should be used. They should not be used in other cases. That is my opinion and that is one that I think is best backed up by science where you can look at what some things they did around food.

14:10 So there's actually a scientific side. They aim to remove all the fats from food and replace it with trans fat. This was where the idea was getting coalesce, that fat was bad, specifically saturated fat was bad. So let's pull that out. Let's replace it with this technologically made partially hydrogenated fat and see the health outcomes of this from the point of science. This can make sense in that man. Let's see what happens with this and from the point of arrogance or like let's do something better than nature has done. But if you go back to that principle, that rule of thumb of following nature because she is statistically significant, then we wouldn't have even done this experiment in the first place because the answer is obvious. So I hope you get this point. A really important one, the difference between what is scientific for health and what is technological for health.

15:06 Countless other examples can be found and we'll probably talk about those some other time, but let's move on to the next point. This is an interesting one. Point number 12 I will come to terms with the inevitability of death for myself and my loved ones. I understand that this will help avoid the fear-induced pushing of unnecessary interventions, allowing for greater connection instead of denial. Ooh, yes, that's a fun topic. Right? So, especially in the West, we have quite an odd relationship to death in that we deny it. That's really what it comes down to. I mean like every one of us, you asked like you denied death happened, nothing like that, but we just try to push it out of our minds completely. One of the ways in which we see this is that, have you seen a dead body before? A human dead body?

16:05 The first human dead body I ever saw was my own mother and this was when I was 24 years old. For one, I don't think your own is probably the best first dead body you should see. Of course, it may happen in certain circumstances you can't get around that, but at 24 years of age, I've never seen death like this. Sure. I'd seen it in animals in some other places, seen it on TV plenty of times, but that's certainly a disassociated observer view, so we hide death. Even then, because I was not up on this stuff so quickly, the people came and took her body away, didn't recognize that you could actually like keep it low there. It's not to start stinking immediately. That's a false assumption. Many people have contrast this. A few years ago my grandfather-in-law passed away and it was nice like the whole family was there and got into like see 'him off.

17:01 Yeah. It was just much better death I would say, than what occurred with my mom and not that I was really involved in decisions there, but it's, you got just so interesting to see how we tried to not think of death at all and really from all kinds of religions to our technological religion. I mean, people are striving to become a mortal by uploading themselves to the cloud because they do not want it to die. Oh. If we go back to nature, things die. Everything dies. Every living being dies, even the earth will likely die at some point. Our solar system, the whole universe will possibly die out. Death seems to be a part of life that we can not get around. So, yeah, I'm not very optimistic about these immortality projects, although it is, we're striving for greater longevity and more importantly, the healthiness during the time of whatever years you have here, we need to recognize we're all going to die and face that there are the Latin words Momento Mori, which is basically, remember you are going to die.

18:07 That's very important and as that thing to meditate on, to reflect on your own death that you will pass. And I forget where I heard this the other day, but I thought it was so beautiful, not only to think of your own death but think of the last moment, the last time anyone will remember. You let that sink in for a little bit. I suppose if you have a huge impact on the human species, you could go on and on and on for the length of our species. That's possible. Who knows what the future holds. But if you're just an average person who will be the last person to remember you, your children, your grandchildren, friends, and family. What is the last thought about you to occur? We can memorialize ourselves in books and videos and all kinds of things. But yeah, how long will those last?

19:01 Certainly some interesting things to think about to contemplate, to meditate on. So he strives to avoid death and really the whole Western culture is so focused on youth and this has some bad effects just in, you know, hiding our elderly people away in old folks' home and retirement homes, but also just praising youth looking beauty, plastic surgery, all these things that come with that to not face death at all. And we can see there are some other negative consequences. Just looking at our healthcare system, a large amount of money, whether this insurance or other forms. A lot of the effort and energy and time are for people. In the last year of life, just poking around, I saw some different studies once I had a quarter of Medicare spending was on healthcare in the last year of life. In some other studies, more recent ones have lower estimates and that one of them says 13% which is still significant.

20:01 You think we have this entire lifespan, but 13% for that last year. And I'm not saying people should not be spending money in order to try to not die, but if we had a good culture around death, good ideas around death actually embraced it as part of life. Then as I said there we could stop this fear-induced pushing of death whether from the person you see. I think there are choices people should be making, especially at the end of life when they are not ready to die and when they are ready to die to fully embrace that and we can see things around psychedelic use that study with silicide mushrooms showing that one dose with them, I believe it was reduced end of life anxiety significantly. That's pretty cool stuff and I would say that psychedelic use, especially larger doses are some of the craziest stuff like five MEO DMT.

20:53 You will face your own death, you will feel like you are dying, your ego can be obliterated and in many cultures, this is part of the medicine, this experience of death and dying and then even being reborn after that. I think that's one of the great uses of such medicines. Once again, a warning caveat made sure you're psychologically healthy going into using these because as a powerful tool they can have some powerful negative side effects as well in certain people. But I would say that is certainly my experience. I have done some large dosages of different things. I have thought I was dying. I would recommend definitely having proper people around you because that is not a fun thing to face alone, play with fire and you will get burned. But even in hindsight, those at the time, negative experiences, I look back positively because this has helped to lessen any anxiety and fear of dying.

21:52 It's not that I want to die, it's not that I'm looking forward to that. I'm having quite a bit of fun in this life. I love sharing things such as this with you, but that doesn't mean that I have to go through life, afraid of death and looking to spend every last penny of mine in order to avoid it. So once again, this point talks about the unnecessary interventions. At what point should a person except should a person's family except family and friends, because often they are making decisions at this point. If we all have a good relationship to death, then yeah, we can possibly avoid wasteful spending. Not that someone's life is not more important than any amount of money, right? But recognizing that proper place of death that some that we in the West overall suck at. So that is why that is included in here.

22:44 And I say that this allows for greater connection, I guess personal beliefs, I think we go on, that doesn't just end and this definitely doesn't seem to be informed by my psychedelic experiences. But so much else. I mean we can talk about research around reincarnation or mediumship, how there actually is solid research around these subjects. So we can pick silence to some degree into the mysteries, right? But there are signs for anything you want to believe. So it comes down to what you want to believe in the first place, I think. But if we have this belief, then once again, that makes it a little easier. Recognizing that life here is just one phase of who knows what else goes on afterward, but I think that can all help. Wrapping our mind around this, having some experiences, some practices of dying and if we look at indigenous peoples, often initiations, whether using psychedelic drugs or not, various other forms, there is this understanding of death.

23:46 That part of this cycle and that death then leads to earth again leads to new life. So even when I die, the kind of, I would like to have a natural burial. I'd want my body just buried in the ground so that I can feed the bacteria, the insects, the fungi, and given new life, I've eaten all this life throughout my lifetime. Whether this is plant or animal origin, isn't it time that I give back to that cycle? So that is how I would personally like to be buried. I think it's an interesting idea that is actually harder to do. Then cremations and coffins and all the other stuff. We have muzzle OEMs just go back into the cycle. That's my personal viewpoint there. So we got four points left and more interviews to come. I hope you've been enjoying what we have covered so far, so much more, so many guests in the lineup. So many fun talks we'll be going into. Thank you for listening. We'll be back again next week as always, and once again, leave a review on iTunes. Super simple to do. Actually, I was surprised how easy this was. If you have the Apple podcasts app, I'm not sure about other players and whatnot, but all you have to do is click into the podcast hell and you're listening to it and click five stars. Super simple there. Then if you want to write some words, that is amazing as well. Thank you so much. We'll be back again next week.

Logan: 00:18 Welcome back. Last week we covered the root causes of health and disease with my guest, Dr. Steve Young. It's an amazing conversation that really dives into some health topics, an area, root cause, that most people are not paying enough attention to. And now we move forward with, How does this play into the future of medicine? We have some crazy technologies on the horizon. How is this going to play out for us? So, let's dive right back in.

And even with AI, right? So, let's discuss AI a little bit. It has a huge potential for helping things, even understanding root causes and helping us get to this other thing, but I'm also worried. The biggest AI players right now, Google Alphabet, they are working with a GlaxoSmithKline right now. They're looking at bioelectronics. They're looking at these things and seeing that, Oh, Google is now censoring alternative health information. If these people control the AI, then that just leads us further down the path we're already going, so not such a good way in that.

Steve: 01:19 Yeah, AI is, think of it as, an intelligence. It's like a more efficient, effective, comprehensive way to do what we tell it to do. We point it in the direction, it would do it better. So, in my mind, they're still pointing it in the direction of let's make our existing system better, more comprehensive, more efficient.

And there are all kinds of cases, like IBM. They spent, I think it was 300 million or 400 million on Watson to try to make healthcare better. It actually didn't work out so well, because they were still just making the current, I believe, I really believe, this broken system, more efficient, more effective and all that stuff.

Logan: 01:58 It’s going to be an accelerator for it, essentially.

Steve: 02:00 Yeah, it’s an accelerator. Exactly right. It's like a catalyst. It just makes it or just still pointing in a direction that, to me, is not the most serving way to enhance human health. And so, I believe that it goes back to let's apply AI towards the other side, right, which is how do we enhance healing adaptation?

Logan: 02:20 Okay, so let's go there. We've clearly said that there are problems if we continue with just ever more advanced technology moving forward in the same direction, so bypassing the system.

And it may sound like we're anti-technology here. That is not the case. I like to think of it in terms of, Is this technology in alignment with nature, with our biology, with all these different levels? If so, then it can really rapidly accelerate healing and whatnot. But if it is based on faulty assumptions, based more on profit than, let's say, health and healing, and biology, then that is where we run into troubles.

Steve: 02:55 Yes. I believe, I mean, we are one of the people that's doing this, which is building tech and leveraging tech to align humans more with themselves and with earth, versus separating and relying on technology. Yeah, I feel that's where the future's at. Yeah, science and technology isn't a bad thing.

Like we talked about, it’s just a tool and it's like a hammer. We can decide what we want to do with a hammer. We want to hit people over the head with it or build constructive things, or hold the hammer and feel the steel, and be more attuned to ourselves because of the sensation that means, why, we can do with this whatever we want to do with the tool. So, I bet there's a lot of opportunity in using AI and technology in the whole healing adaptation side versus disease treatment management side.

Logan: 03:45 Okay, so let's talk about that. And I do want to point out, AI is, for most people, a very generalized, loosely-defined term. Most of the AI we're seeing right now is just better and better machine learning, more processor speed put behind being able to compute things, and this allows a computer to master AlphaGo or chess so much faster than a human can do. But that computer cannot play checkers then. It is specifically designed for a single task and it has no inductive ability.

There are people working on it. I believe it's called artificial general intelligence or symbolic artificial intelligence where it has this ability. I'm not as up on that, but really in the past two years, we have gone far deeper down the machine learning path. So, yeah, where do you see this helping in us getting to better?

Steve: 04:35 Yeah, there are some potential applications, real-world stuff that I see happening in the future. The AI is listening to us talk and, just by our language choice, it's going to be saying things like, Oh, I noticed in the last week you said the words “need” and “should” 37 times based on my data that shows that you’re now heightened in your or you’ve just increased your risk for diabetes and heart disease by X, so let's do these actions to offset it. I could totally see this coming. Of course, it could be--

Logan: 05:09 They're already listening to us all the time anyway, right?

Steve: 05:12 Sure. We're definitely being listened to, for sure, although the application would be based on the pictures you stopped at and looked at on Facebook. And, because everyone's going to be wearing AR glasses in the next couple of years anyway, based on the things I've seen you pay attention to with your vision, this means that your this disease, blah, blah, blah, that’s happening, so let's eat these things to offset it. Right?

So, basically, in the future, what will happen is like the GPS effect. Most people don't use maps anymore. Just the phone tells us where to go. In the future, the AI will basically tell us what to eat and all that stuff to enhance our health.

Logan: 05:52 I see that as kind of a double-edged sword, because, in a sense, people are losing sovereignty if they just defer completely to the AI. And, once again, who's controlling that AI in the first place? There is a potential for this to be used in nefarious ways and it's like, Oh, you have this problem, so here's your recommended customized pharmaceutical track from us. So, yeah, there's potential for difficulty. It really depends on who is controlling and how they're pointing this technology. Right?

Steve: 06:20 Absolutely. It's all tools, right. And so, it depends on who is controlling the tool and how the person wants to use that tool. I would assume the person has sovereignty and choice over how much because people can still use maps; they just choose not to. And so, they will have, of course, a choice like, How much do I want the input to be this AI-driven logical, systematic, structured way versus how much of this do I want to develop within myself and develop my intuition and feeling naturally.

Logan: 06:50 But with feedback, it can actually accelerate that process if it's properly used. I am just curious, just thinking about even with our iPhones now and social media how people become so addicted to those and how they're built for the specific purpose with strong AI learning around them. So, yeah, people can get rid of their apps, but how often are people actually doing that? So, it's definitely an interesting thing to think about.

Steve: 07:12 It is, yeah. I mean, obviously the app builders are incentivized to keep people using it or have people use it, of course. Then, that really just goes back to how the app is designed. Ideally, it's designed with, we'll call it, sacredness, respect, and sovereignty for humans in mind, for sure.

Logan: 07:33 Yeah. Another thing, I'm curious, you mentioned that in a few years we'll all have augmented reality, and I've heard people describe it as we're already cyborgs—we have our phone and whatnot, and we're in this digital world, some people more often then outside of it—and, I mean, we're staring at a screen right now and technology is amazing how it can connect us, but that doesn't mean there's not a dark side to these things. Because we know with cellphones that research is showing EMFs, Wi-Fi, all this stuff, this electromagnetic pollution around us is one of those stressors that is having lots of effects. It is one of those causal things. It's just so subtle, the vast majority of people are not going to recognize it.

So, as we become more connected, you see a point where we can or a way we can make this technology that is more in alignment with our biology, or just as this stuff is coming like with 5G, is that going to just further rapidly deteriorate our health even though we have some cool trinkets and technologies along the way that might be able to help us in health?

Steve: 08:32 Yeah, that's a great question. From a surely technology standpoint, I definitely don't have a clear answer, but I will say in understanding the neural patterns, I have an answer from that perspective, which is the more disruption, the more chaos surely from, let's say, a physiological perspective that the tech builds.

At some point, it may not be immediate, at some point, there must be equally an amount of order. Then because it creates a big enough problem, someone will come to solve that problem because there are benefits of solving that problem. We don't know how long the problem may exist before someone comes and solves it, and how much damage it does before someone solves it. But the laws of the universe states that, at some point, if it's big enough, it gets solved. We don't know how long or when, but from a general nature pattern perspective, that will be the case.

And so, what's interesting, though, is the solving part, right? What is that solution? This could be, again, nanorobots in our bodies offsetting the EMF damage that's causing the mutation in the cells to just some people is a solution. To some people, it might be building homes or locations where there's no EMFs. You have a break from the EMFs at will, so you get to choose. I believe there'll be a mix. So, people with their own frames of reality will create what, in their mind, is the best, quote-unquote, “best” solution. I feel this will be available. It's going to be necessary because I don't think we can stop 5G and others. We're not going to be able to [inaudible], yeah.

Logan: 10:07 It is interesting, watching that where people are protesting and getting certain cities to not roll down and whatnot, whereas other ones it’s just coming. Yeah, there are fascinating things that are happening.

Kind of on that note—and you were talking about the workplace wellness and this is something I definitely think about a lot—how we set up our environment is such an important part of health because of how much we are affected by the environment.

One of the studies I like to reference, just to show how subtle these kinds of things can be, I forget the name of the people that did this, but at a movie theater, they were handing out free buckets of popcorn and this was stale bad popcorn. Some people they gave a small thing to. Other people they gave a large container to. And then, after the movie was done, they would go and measure how much people ate by how much was left.

The large one was more than a person could possibly even eat. And just by the size of the container, people liked different amounts. So it's a subtle cue. No one would say to themselves, Oh, the size of that container affected how much I ate, right? And people were, I think, asked this at the end of the time, but it definitely did. So, the environment has both major impacts, but also very subtle ones.

What are some of the things people can do right now, but also possibly some of the coming future technology that may allow us to even better, not just our workplace, but our homes, everywhere we spend time?

Steve: 11:34 Yeah. Interesting. I've been talking about this a lot in the last couple of months. Obviously, the simple one is the workstation, right? Obviously, I've been, actually, let’s just be honest. So, yeah, literally, in the last two and a half years, we've been designing something that will make the workstation actually healthy for you because it solves inactivity and posture. I believe people don't have poor posture. We have a poor workstation design that promotes this forward-leaning position.

And so, basically, you want your body to be moving. Some people think standing at the standing desk is much better than sitting, but if you're standing still at the standing desk, you still have inactivity, because you ideally want your body to be moving rhythmically here and there throughout the day. It just doesn’t lose it--

Logan: 12:19 I can see I'm wobbling on my standing desk wobble board right now.

Steve: 12:24 Perfect. All right, so it’s some kind of rhythmic movement because our joints get their nutrients in circulation from movement, so if we're not moving, just purely from a joint perspective, they're basically starving to death. And so, you want some type of movement at your workstation.

And the other one would be conceptually in our environment, anything from lighting, so static light, fluorescent lighting may not be the best. There are companies now that are making LED lights that actually will stimulate the same frequency, the same color as the sun, wherever you live. It synchronizes with that. Just pretty awesome. All right, so it feels like--

Logan: 12:58 Honestly, is it lights have the power of it, because can lights even come close to mimicking that? They can do the same wavelength, but can it match the sun?

Steve: 13:07 Yeah. No, of course. It's from an intensity perspective, it will match the sun, but purely from a [curing? 13:12] our eyes in our circadian rhythms, like the rhythm of all our hormones and chemicals, essentially it will be much more in line with nature with this lighting, which is kind of cool.

Another concept is just saying we've made things more efficient and easier without fully understanding the consequences of these things easier, right? And so, part of that, because we don't have to get up to move to change a channel anymore, just think 30 years ago, you had to get up off your couch or wherever you're sitting to walk a few steps to change the channel and sit back down. Now you can just push a button, and now actually you can actually just talk to it.

Logan: 13:47 Right. This is too much, the person [unclear 13:49]. Do my movement. Get it out.

Steve: 13:52 Right. And so, I actually think, and I want to design a home and a future where it is actually, on purpose, inefficient. But, this way, I mean, just think. Imagine there's a drawer for your silverware that you need to eat with and it is almost on the floor, and you have to squat down every time you'd get a fork and a spoon.

And so, we can actually design an on-purpose efficient home that promotes movement and stretching. Right? And so, imagine, I don’t know, there's a drawer that only opens a button three feet away. You're supposed to get it, stretch with your leg to push a button. We can have fun with this, and so, you're getting stretching and mobility in, just by living.

Logan: 14:34 I just had an image of a robot child that you have to play with a certain amount of time each day.

Steve: 14:40 I mean, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that can be done with this, and the whole premise is it goes back to practicing the opposite. We've mastered, in a way, efficiency. Maybe let’s practice inefficiency because I believe God or the universe wants us to practice both, and so we actually can design a home that's also inefficient and the person would be way more healthy.

Logan: 15:00 Absolutely. Yes, you brought up the wavelength of light, and just going back to what we were talking about as far as causes, so one thing we know with our devices, too much blue light. And blue light is not bad by itself. That's another distinction that is worth knowing. It’s the dose is whether something is helpful or harmful, right?

So, too much blue light, especially at certain times of the day, nighttime, is causing these negative health effects, increasing stress levels, and whatnot. And, for the most part, a lack of red light. So, we have too much of this one wavelength, which is leading to problems, then not enough with this other one, and with red light, we see it because people are not spending much time outside; they're not getting enough of this wavelength. Using red light devices has some very beneficial effects for just the body and even the eyes. You were saying that helping.

Steve: 15:55 Yeah.

Logan: 15:55 Because the balancing factor essentially is what it is, right?

Steve: 15:58 What's fascinating is you have some of these, we'll call it, health gurus or hackers, telling people to avoid blue light because it's bad. So, they're wearing blue-light-blocking glasses all day, and there’s actually direct research showing that would cause depression and that’s what even through a seasonal effect of this sort. It's lack of light, light sort of going into your eyes.

And so, yeah, I, for sure, recommend if you're going to block light, it’s at nighttime. Once the sun goes down, put on your blue-light-blocking glasses or minimize screen time, whatever. You don't want to block it all day. It's the extreme. It's the opposite. It’s too much.

Logan: 16:32 It's going back to alignment with nature like, What did we grow up in as a species? And it's the signals from the sun and the stars, and whatnot. It's the same thing with sleeping. In most cities, absolutely, I think blackout curtains are really essential and get the devices with the various lights outside of your room, turned them off, don't sleep next to your cell phone, airplane mode, all that.

But I also wonder, are blackout curtains a good thing if you are blocking out star and moonlight? If that's the only lights that are around, what kind of effect does that have for things? And if you were to use sleep outside, then how would that be changing us as well? So, it is, yeah, often, Oh, we see this as bad, so let’s overcorrect, and, oh, now we're having problems with that. Let's overcorrect that. And then, you trust the pendulum will swing.

Steve: 17:19 Yeah. I've always thought about, I know a lot of people will do like I know one of our friends posted on social media this entire kit that he uses to block out all the light in a hotel room when he stays in travels. I'm thinking, why not just an eye mask that kind of just blocks it out on the eyes?

Logan: 17:34 Oh, it does get into your skin, too, that one of the studies is looking at, because we have photoreceptors on the skin as well, but then you're under the blankets and whatnot.

Steve: 17:43 Yeah, then we'll just the pack that eye mask. And so, yeah, and there’s actually--

Logan: 17:47 Lights are bright in those hotel rooms, so I've definitely done that. Throw pillows over the alarm clock and whatnot.

Steve: 17:53 Yeah, as you said, there's a tendency to over… We have such a subconscious input from mass media of more is better, you don't realize we're living under that subconscious [unclear 18:06] that are tendencies. So we tend to, humans tend to overdo more.

Logan: 18:11 Yeah. So yeah, technology is interesting if it can be aligned with nature in the future. Of course, there are ways that you can upgrade your environment in fully natural ways like plants indoors. They detox the air out and they're putting out oxygen into it. So there are very simple things like that. I’ve got the diffuser with essential oils going on in the background. Very simple things that can be done.

Once again, so much of health is about the subtle effects. Yeah, we can see the growth of things. You get a whole bunch of mercury in your mouth, that’s going to be an acute problem, but a little exposure to that thing, just over time, just compounds and compounds. So, we can look at the big steps we take, but also just the subtle things that are just reinforcing health, hour to hour, by both adding in those good things that are the useful, helpful nutrients, whether this is physical, mental or emotional, whatever, and also detoxing or supporting the body, and detoxing those things that need to be detoxed.

Steve: 19:09 Yeah, and like you mentioned, if there's a heightened acute input of a stressor, then in that specific situation, the response must require I heightened input or output I guess on the solution. For most people, it's more of a gradual thing, right? It's like an equal and opposite reaction phenomenon. For most people, the beneficial thing is it’s a very gentle, sustainable, long-term and very easy-to-integrate-in-your-life process, and not a super-rapid, massive thing.

Logan: 19:48 Yeah, the analogy I've used before, because Western medicine has its place and its ideal place is emergency medicine, so if your arm gets torn off, don't go see a shaman for that or a homeopathic. I'm not the proper use of that. So, yeah, over-intervening. Understanding the right time to do the right sort of intervention.

And, on that note, just I see that with detox because so much of what we're talking about here that is such a crucial part, and so people will do the 21-day cleanse and whatnot. They'll do this huge thing, and there's a time and a place for that. Perhaps, most important is how can you be supporting your detox channels on a daily basis, just keeping those open and not overburden by constant new supply, just pouring in the toxic water into the cup? How can you allow that to operate better?

Steve: 20:34 Yeah, for sure. When we work, as you know, some of the entrepreneurs that we work with, because we have the results, and so we see and we just get an idea. The test will show, for example, let's say, you have 5,000 parts per million of a chemical; you would be at the 95th percentile. That means you have more of it than 95 percent of Americans. Most people that we test, 90 percent of the people that we test, they'll have numbers in that range of 10 to 12,000. Keep in mind 5,000 is already 95.

It's funny. It's almost hilarious because the graph doesn't even have… It's outside of the bar graph. They could even make it a whole new thing because it’s outside. And so, when we see that, which 90 percent of the people that we test have that in the handful of the toxins, it’s why we actually do this actually intensive 30-day process of pulling out the toxins. We get, oh, my God, yeah, ridiculous amounts of it. And then, from there it is a multi, multi, multi-month process of how do we now gradually shift your relationship with food and add in the things that are supporting the detox process?

Logan: 21:39 Absolutely. Understanding the difference between acute toxicity and chronic toxicity is important, so we know that you get too much mercury. You need some. In an acute thing, that can kill you instantly, but just having certain high levels that, once again, may manifest as cancer, all these different things, depending on where it is in the body, all these different factors that are at play there, and how that then loads the other systems of your body that are going to disrupt the hormones and it's going to disrupt your gut, all of these different things.

Steve: 22:10 Yeah, once we get detailed into some of this stuff, it can be complex. We usually recommend it as a shotgun approach that we apply to most Americans, a general process of about 30 days to pull the toxins out with some type of general, low transition into healthier and healthier eating. And while all that's happening, of course, start to replace your personal care products with the nontoxic version, basically.

Most Americans don't realize. I was just talking to someone earlier. I was like, Hey, did you know that when they develop a new chemical, they're allowed to put it into the market and they only pull it once it kills a bunch of people?

Logan: 22:49 Yeah.

Steve: 22:50 People don’t realize that that's the law. I mean, prior to the last administration, they passed a law that said, okay, all new chemicals we’re probably been making sure it's safe before we put it out there, but they grandfathered every chemical prior to that law as being allowed, and 99 percent of those chemicals had zero testing on humans safety.

Logan: 23:11 Right. And when they do find and actually recall something, usually there's a chemical that is almost exactly the same with the same kind of effects that they replace it with. I mean, the BPA and other bisphenols. Then, DuPont with their Teflon pans that were actually called to print the name of the chemicals there. But same sort of things there. It's like, Oh, horrible effects. Let's get rid of that, but we'll replace it, essentially, with the same thing.

The world we live in, which is why it's so important to understand the root causes, understand how you can really support your body, because here's the truth—because of the world we live in, you cannot completely get rid of toxins, and even if you did, one, they're still in food to some degree. You're eating plants; there are toxins in those, which is why you can overeat things, and the whole doses of poison thing is true. Your body is also producing things itself.

So, these detoxification channels are important for, yes, the manmade chemicals that should not be here but are here for convenience and profit reasons, but also even endogenous chemicals that need to be detoxed. Very important.

Steve: 24:13 Yeah, for sure. It's impossible at this point to avoid detoxing. I mean, the hazards in rainwater in remote islands, and there are plastic particles in rainwater.

Logan: 24:21 Yeah, DDT at the top of the Himalayas. Yeah, it's crazy. Crazy world.

Steve: 24:25 You can say that. That's why I usually recommend everybody, every human can benefit from detox, especially if they live in America, just because we have pretty lax chemical laws and pesticide laws [inaudible].

Logan: 24:38 Yeah. And so, once again, that is especially if you get testing and you know it could have some big issues, do some more intensive process, but also look at what you can do in your daily, weekly routines and lives to really support that stuff.

See, we're coming up here at the end. This was a lot of fun. Where would you like to send people, people who are listening? They find you’re an amazing guy. Where do you want them to go to find some more information or learn more about what you're doing?

Steve: 25:05 Yeah, so for general health stuff, I have stuff posted on our, I guess, my personal blog, which is at DrSteveYoung.com. For people who actually want very in-depth work to figure stuff out and find root causes, they just go to Ammortal, ammortal.com. And we have a whole process that we've been doing with entrepreneurs, essentially to find, where are all the blockages that are happening, that's preventing healing, and, of course, where are the root causes?

Logan: 25:37 Yeah. And I just want to say, the stuff we talked about here, imagine all of that really kind of applied to you as far as diagnostics and different methods of looking across the different spans of levels, and then, similarly, integrating that into your life across the different levels. It's very cool stuff, what you're doing, and I know you're getting some amazing results with people doing so.

Steve: 25:59 Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it's exciting, too, because I've been looking at this for 30 years, right? So, it has kind of slowly formed into this framework. And then, applying it and seeing the impact it has had on people is pretty, pretty magical.

Logan: 26:13 Absolutely. Thank you so much, Steve. This was a very fun conversation. I hope other people enjoyed it just as much as I did.

Steve: 26:20 Awesome.

Logan: 00:18 Hello and welcome. I’m Logan Christopher. I’m here with my good friend, Steve Young. Steve Young is an amazing, amazing person. I think this is saying a lot. If I had a health problem, I would want Steve in my corner. I know a lot of health, but I would consider him as sitting on that board of advisors. And, furthermore, he surrounds himself with other incredible health-thinking people that would sit on his board of advisors as well.

We're going to be talking about some deep subjects. First thing we're going into is the root causes of health and disease.

So much of healthcare is focused on symptoms or, really, just not getting to the root. Yet, if we get to the root, we can actually solve things. So, it's a deep subject and it should get more airplay than it does across many different places. That's what we're diving into at the start of this.

So, welcome, Steve.

Steve: 01:14 Yes. Thank you. I'm excited to discuss this because I feel like there's such a need for everyone to not only understand what's really happening but a need for—and I really use the “need” word, but, in this case, I feel like it's necessary—a need for people to take individual action to really steer this ship a different direction.

Logan: 01:36 Right. So, the whole purpose with Health Sovereignty, I know this is something you've done and kind of looked at, all the big systems and what could be done with them, and really that we need a new system, a new way of looking at health, and so we're very much in alignment with that. And what I saw was, yeah, if we can get people to understand just some of the basic foundations of health, such as trying to find the root cause, then we can begin to get people to break out of the paradigm that really kind of has a stranglehold on people.

Steve: 02:06 Yes, for sure. Yeah, it's interesting. Just yesterday I had a discussion with Richard who founded TED Talks and, just really briefly, healthcare came up and, in a split second, here's a guy, the guy knows a lot. He’s a smart dude, right? And so, immediately he's like, yeah, healthcare can be fixed. Very interesting comment from him that was just very eye-opening.

Yeah, so it’d be very interesting to kind of do a dive into this topic because, like you said, I've looked at it for many years at, How do we, quote-unquote, “fix” healthcare? I shared the same idea with Richard, which is, I don't think it can be, quote-unquote, “fixed.” I feel like people can take their part in sort of shifting it a tiny bit, but I actually don't think it can be fully fixed.

Logan: 02:55 Yeah and this is a conclusion I came to myself in looking at all the different aspects, and the reason it can't be fixed for people not familiar is, basically, there are just too many way-too-strong reinforcing loops kind of institutions that are in place that have no incentive to fix things. Therefore, it can't really be fixed.

What can be done on an individual level is, I term it opting out of the system, right? And we can basically establish a new system or a new way of looking at things because, along with that system that can't be fixed—I mean, part of the problem is just the definition of health.

We don't really have healthcare. We have disease care. It's like we're only going to look at you or do anything once you already have problems, rather than building a strong foundation, so those problems don't even pop up in the first place. And how I look at health, how you look at health is very different than health that most people see as the absence of disease, but that's not a good definition of health.

Steve: 03:52 Yeah, yeah, for sure, we live in a disease management system, right? I would use those exact words carefully because it is about like managing. And, if you think about it, management, what does that mean? It means, well, let's make sure we always oversee it. And so, that's the system we're in because it is the most profitable system for the corporations. Right?

So, when people tell me, Oh, facing healthcare and all that stuff, my question to that person usually is, you own a 401(k). They’re like, Yeah. I was like, well, you're technically contributing to it, right, because you own stocks of the very corporations that now have a fiduciary responsibility that he got more profits and that’s his own and so forth. Right?

Logan: 03:34 Right.

Steve: 03:35 So, I think there are so many things. I will say, before we do a deep dive into root causes and stuff, I recently have come to the conclusion that there is a way to shift it, which is imagine if every listener of this podcast did this when they go to their traditional doctor, because it's kind of hard for most who would just immediately opt-out. Right? I mean, that'd be amazing. Probably not the case.

Logan: 04:55 You need a lot of education to be capable of doing that, and you and I have studied this area for years and years, so we can do that, but, yeah, the average person, it’s if you just opt out into nothing, you're kind of leaving a void.

Steve: 05:07 Yeah, that would not be helpful. And so, what I recommend doing is when the doctor gives you a label, also known as a diagnosis, you simply just immediately ask him or her, What's the root cause of this? And, of course, their answers are going to be, We don't know. If this happens every day for a year, it starts to pull them out of the matrix and they kind of realize, Wait a minute, this system that we operate in that I've been operating potentially for decades does not find root causes. And, therefore, they will go and read the research and figure stuff out.

For you and me, there was no special school we went to that taught us the secrets. Just, basically, the information is out there and the doctors are not seeking that information because they don't know what they don't know. They don't know that they're not finding root causes. Right? Like the way that grass roots’ huge potential to get people to just simply say to their doctor, Hey, what's the root cause?

Logan: 06:05 Yeah. I think one important distinction there is, the difference between root cause and root causes. So, part of the reason medicine is the way it is is the reductionist science, which is really trying to define like, okay, we have one cause and it causes one effect.

So, you have eaten, let's say, too much fatty food, which means your cholesterol is too high and we can manage that by giving you a statin, and that's as simple as this works, linear cause and effect. But, really, with especially lifestyle diseases, I mean, we can say root cause if you have an Ebola infection. I mean, there are probably even related things there, but we can pretty much pinpoint it on one thing there, but high cholesterol or diabetes, there's a whole bunch of different factors that play here.

So, yeah, definitely agree with that question, and I want people to understand root cause versus root causes because when we're talking biology, it's very complex systems and very complex feedback loops, so there generally is not going to be a single root cause to any issue that you have.

Steve: 07:11 Yeah, definitely. That's a great distinction or clarification. Yeah, definitely, the question will be root “causes.” I'm just thinking back to 8,000 patients later, yeah, I don't think there's ever just a root cause, for sure.

And then, it goes deep. A lot of times, when I went to, I mean, really, my doctors in physical therapy, we were under the illusion that we were treating root causes. They’d be like, Hey, yes, I'm with back pain. The root cause is the tight hamstring. Right? But that's really not the root cause because the root cause could be the fact that they behaviorally never stretch, and they sit all day and fight. And so, we were really just ending our search for root cause and causes, and, surely, the static biomechanical reality. There’s no discussion on behavior and emotion and so many other variables.

So, yeah, definitely the true root causes, one, I've found that it's never where the symptoms are—start with that—and it can be so removed and so hidden that it is a little bit more complicated.

Logan: 08:16 Yeah, absolutely. And how the environment plays a role in those behaviors and all that. So, really, is there ever an actual root cause? Because the mind likes to divide and make distinctions between things, but we could always go back more and more steps to what caused certain things.

But I think the key point is you may never get to a root cause necessarily, but if we can find something that's close there, it's at least a key leverage point. Whether this is a physical thing, or a mental or emotional thing, finding the areas where there's leverage that really is more impactful, that is somewhere at the root, not just at the symptom level.

Steve: 08:53 Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think the practice of finding root causes because that's not a thing that's taught, it becomes a not-practiced practice. Right? And so, not many people are really efficient at it and it does take a lot.

To give you an idea, I've had cases where, give you a great example, so the patient came in really for hip pain, but I asked her about her health, and she was put on high blood pressure meds and a diabetes medication, and it was around the same time. My answer was, “What happened around that time in your life?”

And so, she shared with me six months prior to that her husband died, though, as soon as you thought about it, she started crying, which tells me, of course, she has not emotionally processed this, and it’s not by accident that she had high blood pressure and diabetes, and all that stuff happened six months after this super-heightened emotional state that she went into.

So, one could say, and, obviously, the doctors didn't ask her this question, but they just put her on medications for the rest of her life. On the surface, you could say the root cause is her husband dying and that emotional stimulus, but not maybe how, when she was young—I didn't go this deep with her—it could be how, when she was young, she felt like she needed a male figure in her life to feel secure and she lost that. Who knows? It could be that deep. And so, that's really fascinating when you start digging into true root, root, root causes, It is a pretty not-practiced thing that no one has really figured a simple system.

Logan: 10:27 Yeah, absolutely. That brings up another thing. Most of medicine is all focused on the physical. There is some amount of mental emotion. I like to divide it. Everyone is going to have different models, but physical level, energetic model, mental/emotional levels and spiritual levels.

And you have a similar sort of distinction as, with physical, definitely, we can go mechanical or chemical, all these different areas, which it's helpful to kind of see these different levels. Most medicine is just focused on that physical level. So, hip pain, let's give you some drug for that or do surgery. You need a hip replacement. Very few people are looking at hip pain could be because my husband died, right?

Understanding that sometimes a physical symptom does have a physical cause we need to address, but many times there is a mental or emotional cause as well, and there could be causes on multiple levels. So, I do feel this is getting away from that reductionism, even just looking on the physical level, but a holistic model looking for root causes across the different levels, I feel that's very important, and, also, a thing not generally looked for.

Steve: 11:40 Yeah. In this subtle but powerful and important distinction, a lot of times people will say, We treat you holistically. We treat your body. We treat your mind. We treat your spirit. And that language pattern, it suggests there are three kinds or three parts of you.

Logan: 11:56 Yep.

Steve: 11:57 I clarify, you can say no. Imagine if you're standing in the middle of the room, and I'm looking at you from the north and someone is looking from south, someone is looking from east and someone is looking at you from the west, and each one of those, it could be a mind, body, spirit or chemical. If you turn, any movement you do, we can all see you. Right? And so, if you move your hand up, the mechanical self, if I'm only looking at you mechanically, I'd be like, Yeah, I can see the top of your hand, and the person from the south can say, I could see the bottom of your hand move.

And so, it's very helpful and necessary to look at the human from different frames. While we use language to make sure we help everyone understand, it’s just looking at you from a different frame. It's not like there are different parts of you. That’s super powerful. It could be like, I have my mind and my body as if something that can happen to the body doesn't affect the mind. Of course, it does. All of you are one system through the lens of the body, through the lens of the mind, through the lens of spiritual.

Logan: 12:58 Yeah, absolutely. That is the difficulty of language, right? I often see the mind, body, spirit. I'll hyphenate those to imply that it is a system that all levels affect all levels, but even saying there are levels is, in a sense, separating these things out, which does make this attributed thing to do so. But even to just recognize those levels in the first place when so many people think, Oh, it's my health and, therefore, it's a physical thing, it's not that simple.

Steve: 13:25 Yeah. I find that helpful to first get that frame established. They’re just different perspectives, and then everything after that, it's okay if we start to use language that suggests “It's just different perspectives.” And, from there, for sure, just literally an hour and a half ago, I was working on someone's thoracic spine. That was a not basic [inaudible], but to go I have not [inaudible] in there.

So, as I'm working on that, because I know from experience this is not just mechanical, I talked about, because her language was like, This is draining me. When I drive it kills me, and so, we had this whole talk on language and how that's doing in our lives. And when I got to talk stuff like her job, keeping in mind up my pressure. I'm not doing anything different mechanically. All of a sudden, she's like, Oh, my God, that pain is much worse. Right? As soon as we talked about her job, boom, paint heightened.

And so, it was helping to establish, yeah, it’s because how we feel, think the meaning that we're assigning to things directly dictates, controls and influences our health, all the way down to that muscle in her back. All, obviously, all related. So, yeah, that connection isn't really even being conceptualized in mainstream medicine and it’s definitely not being put into practice, for sure.

Logan: 14:43 Something just occurred to me when you brought up the thoracic spine. I'm not sure why I made this connection, but I do feel it's important. People are predominantly immobile in the thoracic spine, coming from a training background in mobility, learning how to move this mid-spine and that's right where the heart is. And people are so constricted in this area, more so, I'd say, generally, than any other area of the body. I find that very interesting.

I want to steer this a bit. We've talked about the root causes of health and opened up to me everything that could possibly go wrong, and say there's actually no one single cause and we can keep going back, so we've made it complex. Can we simplify what should people be looking for, as far as root causes? And one of the things I was looking at, I was thinking just in terms of the biochemical, so nutrients coming in and toxins going out, you have inflow and outflow, and very important.

Then, I realized, Oh, this is a reductionist thing, but, oh, it can be expanded. The same inflows and outflows work across the entire system. So, we can talk about negative emotions, like getting stressed from work coming in, is your body properly handling those? So I think there are inflows and outflows, but also a structuralization or a transformation in the body. But, really, this can be looked at on all the different levels we talked about, even though they're not separate levels, and also kind of fractally, we can look down to a cellular level or we can look at a human level.

Steve: 16:14 Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. Absolutely correct. We’ve made the frame of finding root causes very complex, which, from my understanding, it is complex. However, here's the good news—imagine if we have a cup and we want the cup to hold 10 ounces of coffee, water, whatever you want to hold. And, somehow, throughout our lives, people have been poking for ourselves, something has poked holes in the bottom of the cup and the water is dripping. To define who poked it, how they poked it, what they poked it with and how to plug those holes can be very complex. However, if we just pour enough water back in through the top, you will still get 10 ounces, and so pouring water in the cup is pretty simple.

And so, if we use that analogy and apply it to humans if we just accelerate adaptation and healing fast enough, it doesn't matter if you have certain root causes that you haven't been able to find in place. Your body will just adapt that much faster. And so, I feel finding root causes is complex, but unblocking healing is actually much more simply because we have so much data on this.

For example, we know the average American has a few to several hundred industrial chemicals in them, so if we pull that out, you're definitely going to heal faster. Ninety-three percent of the people will have RoundUp in their system. If we pull and get rid of the RoundUp in your body, which affects your gut, which affects your health, it’s much better, which affects so many things downstream, you’re going to heal faster.

We know most people in America aren't sleeping quite as well as they used to, so improving sleep, you're going to heal faster. And we know most people, through their language pattern, it shows they're under so much stress, and so, if we just give them some language and even higher level strategies of frames of reality, so they don't live in linear stress, or some tactical things just working on their breathing to get out of that constant chest breathing, fight-or-flight state, they're going to heal faster.

So, the beauty of it is to enhance adaptation and healing could be a handful of simple things, and just by doing those things, in summary, the adaptation is so well. Pour enough water and we get the 10 ounces back in the cup.

Logan: 18:24 Yeah, this goes back to the definition of health. The one I like is the ability to handle stressors and, if you're healthier, you can better handle stressors. If you're not as healthy, you can handle fewer stressors, and whether these are chemical stressors such as glyphosate or stress from your work, stressors really expand across all these different levels as well.

So, if we can enhance that ability, that is the cool and simplifying part of this. It doesn't really matter if you have X, Y or Z autoimmune condition, diabetes or whatnot. Essentially, the root causes of many of these things do come down to toxicity overload, the inability of the body to process things, and if we can clear that up, as you said, the body has this natural healing capacity that we really don't understand that we cannot mimic with our best machines or anything like that at this time. The body is able to do that. We just need to get out of the way or get things out of the way that stops that process from happening, and many of these chronic lifestyle illnesses, which is the biggest thing today will resolve themselves.

Steve: 19:30 Yeah, that's exactly right. And so, it's a whole different paradigm that we totally scratch disease and labeling people. We just go with how do we just accelerate and enhance your body's ability to adapt? It’s a much more simple model than the whole disease paradigm. You just scratch on that. For sure, if we can just triple, quadruple, even 20 percent increase people's ability to adapt, many of the symptoms go away anyway much faster and [unclear 20:02].

Logan: 20:03 So, reducing toxic load, all the different levels of whether those are big stressors, chemicals, personal care products, or, one that worst thing, water supply, all these different aspects, reducing that. And what are some of the other important elements?

Steve: 20:19 Yeah, healing the gut. For 90 percent of the people, your gut is off, right? And so, a simple thing like, How has your poop been in the last 30 days? has been same time with that--

Logan: 20:27 Poop is a good indicator.

Steve: 20:30 Solid. If it hasn't, then there's something going wrong with your gut, right? And so, you can [inaudible] that. And so, healing of the gut, eat fibrous foods, eat fermented foods. Most people, they may want to do something like chew, minimize the pathogenic bacteria that are currently overgrowing. It could be something like colloidal silver or some oregano oil, standardized carbachols and stuff. A bunch of herbs can do this, and then go into your process of healing the lining, and then go into their process of inoculating with healthy bacteria, sort of in that order ideally.

Just mindfulness practice is huge. I'm a huge fan of you can wiggle your finger a hundred times—I've said this in a lot in videos—or you can just focus on breathwork, five seconds in, five seconds out; inhale through the abdominal. It's one of my favorite things to do when I'm in conferences and meetings, just look at everyone's breathing rate. It's scary.

Most people are chest breathing at about one and a half to two seconds per breath, and there is correlational on that, causational and correlational studies between respiratory rate being inversely related to longevity. The breaths that we take in a minute, the faster you breathe, the less long you live. That’s correlational, not causational, of course. Holding our breath is huge for a few minutes.

Logan: 21:49 Yeah, and I just want to point that out to help kind of drive this home. Think about the breath you're getting in. Is that going deep or is that a shallow breath? Then, that part of that inflow that is part of that healing energy coming in, and then breathing out, what is your exchange of oxygen, carbon dioxide, a bunch of things we can look at, but it's that same frame there.

One thing I definitely want to add, too, is the importance of getting the right things in, so it's not just reducing the toxic load, but getting those right things in. And that is, a mindfulness practice is one element of that, getting into a state that is much more relaxing in the average state people go throughout their days, but the nutrients, all the different micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, which the cool thing about if you're switching towards healthier food, you're generally getting the stuff that you need nutrient-wise, but also detoxing things, so they can have both those affects. It can help with the inflows and outflows because, unfortunately, your body cannot heal if there's, let's say, no selenium around; there's going to be problems that come up from that.

Steve: 22:52 Yeah, it's interesting when it comes, if we want to go a little bit more detailed into nutrients, and one we've ever tested was SpectraCell, which is essentially like a six-month average of your vitamins and minerals.

Logan: 23:04 Right? By looking inside the cells?

Steve: 23:06 Yeah, by looking inside a cell, the T lymphocytes. So, it's just a cell, it’s your immune cell that lives for six months. Everyone we've ever tested has deficiencies, so just our food supply is just not nearly as nutritious as it once was. I mean, I'm a good example. I literally eat average of 15 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, and I still have deficiencies when I test myself. And so, yeah, it's fascinating. I feel, at this point, my usual recommendation is no matter what, and if you can't get testing, take a good daily vitamin.

Logan: 23:39 And good is the key point on that because most of the stuff out there is…

Steve: 23:43 Yeah, order the product and they don’t work, because there are so many brands. My usual recommendation, generally, is a good multivitamin is at least four pills per serving, and if you take less than that, it can't be well-formulated.

Logan: 23:55 Right. Yeah, just the mass of certain nutrients like magnesium that picks up a lot of space, because we need a lot of magnesium and most people are deficient in that. Yeah, definitely, I'm with you on that one.

Steve: 24:05 Yeah and just those simple actions that we just talked about can have and we've seen it have profound effects on people's labels, right, they're [inaudible].

Logan: 24:16 Yeah. I want to say this just for people that may not be used to this frame of thinking—for various reasons, people have certain different symptoms. Why do these toxicities and nutrient deficiencies arise as cancer in one person, and just chronic pain in another person? Diabetes over here, even though it may be the same causes, and this is for a variety of reasons like genetic differences. I'm not huge on genes, but genes certainly do play a role. All kinds of other things, and recognizing that mental or emotional trauma corresponds to certain areas of the body.

So, yeah, the problem you had as a kid could manifest that into one of these things, which is something some people are looking into, but it's not very well-understood as well. This is a key point to understand that all these root causes, just the basics of health and healing, just manifests differently based on a variety of factors.

Steve: 25:13 Yeah, we could do a whole nother podcast on that. There's all kinds of research now on, we'll call it, heightened emotional experiences as a child, turning on specific genes epigenetically that has [inaudible] affects. I just look at it as those are different holes in the bottom of the cup. We were just talking about, in the last 10 minutes, just how to pour more water in, [unclear 25:34] all the holes in the bottom.

Logan: 25:36 Yeah. All right, I want to say this is fun to think about, too. I was talking about this inflow and outflow thing, and transformation, even down to a genetic level, because we know with epigenetics, things are turned on and off, although we may not be changing the genes themselves unless you have a mutation because of radioactivity or whatnot. The epigenetics is those on/off switches, which is the same format of what we're talking about. So, I thought that was really cool to see.

Steve: 26:02 Yeah, it's very interesting. Back when I was in high school and even in college, I guess, nature versus nurture, right? Is it involving these genes? Is that dictating our health or is it nature? Now we know nature affects nurture, right? In other words, the environment in our--

Logan: 26:16 Cause a loop.

Steve: 26:18 It’s clear. It actually is now able to switch on and off the genes in any way. So, in a way, if you look at it, it's mostly nature, right, with our thoughts, emotions, foods, environment, all that stuff?

Logan: 26:30 Right. Okay, I want to switch gears right now, and we can definitely come back to this topic. But one I really dived into, what is the future of healthcare, the future of medicine? Where are we going with this stuff? Because we've established the healthcare system is broken. It's not going to be fixed. Although there may be some leverage points in different things that can be done within that, there's going to be something new, quite different coming in the future. What does that look like?

Steve: 26:59 Sure. Yeah, we definitely talk about that. So, within the system, there's all kinds of technology that is going to make the current system better. Those would be genetic editing. There were going to be, I mean, depending on how much future you want to go when you apply it, nanorobots in our body killing cancer cells for us, to a new class of drugs that actually treat aging versus a very specific label. These are all things that are being worked on.

So, I call all of those things within the system to make the system more effective. It's still essentially things that are managing disease better, right? There's a whole nother paradigm, which is something I feel I'm working on, which is, How do we bypass the system? How do we have people heal so well that most of the time unless some type of trauma is happening to the body that you never really even go into this system?

And so, this would be getting people to take on some of the behaviors and actions that we talked about. It's changing their work environment, so it's actually promoting health versus illness and disease because of the inactivity. It’s having at the workplace, instead of just a wellness program, actually having things that accelerate healing in the workplace. You are having the behavior in place. The environment is pro-health, and then, there's, we'll call it, technology to speed up healing. If those things were in place, most people would not need to ever go into the system.

Logan: 28:31 Right. Okay. A lot of things there, and I want to explore this topic. So much of health, what I recognize is our technology is kind of leading us astray in many ways, and I'm reminded of the Einstein quote—you can't solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.

I'm curious, with the first part you were talking about there, within the same system, just having better and better technologies, is that really going to solve the problems, in your opinion?

Steve: 29:00 No. Essentially, to put it very bluntly, they will be yet more profitable ways to manage the disease. They will advance science and also a more profitable way to manage disease. A great example of this is the first case when they used CRISPR genetic editing to resolve a cancer. How they justified the cost, which I believe was $470,000 for the treatment, they said the cancer, chemo and all that stuff typically would have cost 600,000, so we're charging $470,000 for this treatment. That's, again--

Logan: 29:36 Either way, it’s way too expensive.

Steve: 29:39 Right. Obviously, not the masses can go and get a $470,000-treatment. And so, I am not a fan, which is why I start off with how I feel Richard was so quick and it can't be fixed. There's a lot of truth to that. It’s because these advancements are basically breaking Einstein's rule. They're still in the same paradigm making the paradigm better.

Logan: 30:03 If you think you have a shaky foundation in the first place, just based off what we now know is some false assumptions, then it doesn't matter where you kind of go with these things, because they can't be real or truthful, or really can't get to the causes, if you’ve never even been looking at causes in the first place.

Steve: 30:20 Yeah. And I feel, whatever is the opposite of the things—actually another thing that Richard said just came to my mind. He’s a smart guy—if you're really good at black, you might want to consider practicing white. It’s that duality, right?

So, if you think about it, if we become essentially very good at disease management, the opposite of that is disease prevention, right, healing? I feel this is where the goal is. How do we get that much better at healing, focus on healing adaptation, so we never get to the other end of the spectrum, which is disease?

Logan: 30:55 Yeah. And, also, especially CRISPR, genetic engineering, we do not understand the thing, the GMO mosquitoes that they released recently that were supposed to self-terminate, and they did not do so. It's like, Oh, we got it wrong. And what are the ramifications of doing such a thing?

You can look at some of the genetic engineering where I forget the exact details, but they tweaked some sort of genes or the DNA for a pig for some sort of reason and it grew an extra vertebrae. We do not understand this stuff we're playing with and that scares me.

Steve: 31:28 Yes, there will be all kinds of those effects for a while.

Logan: 31:34 Yeah.

That's going to be a wrap for this episode. It’s me here, Logan Christopher, along with Dr. Steve Young, talking about the root causes of health and disease.

Next week, we'll be back with Steve, to discuss the future of medicine. How do you take all this crazy stuff about the cause? And where are we going in the future with our technology and how that relates to health? Very exciting episode, so stay tuned.

One other thing to keep in mind is if you really want to support your health, get those nutrients in, but also things that help support detox systems that are there in your body. Then, be sure to check out LostEmpireHerbs.com. We have some amazing stuff that can help support your health, your healing, your performance over there. So, be sure to patronize. That's what makes this podcast possible.

And if you're loving this podcast, once again, I'd love to hear those reviews from you. Send me an email at [email protected] or leave a review on iTunes. The more we do this, the more we spread this message of health sovereignty out to a whole bunch of other people, so be sure to recommend the podcast to your family and friends as well.

Thank you much. And, once again, we'll be back with the future of medicine next week.

Logan: Welcome back in this episode we continue the amazing discussion with Peter Ragner talking about time is not toxic and much more. Let's dive right in.

Logan: 00:31 Do you have any other stories or any other areas where really you are engaged in a certain health practice recognized there may not be the best thing and possibly just cause you were going too extreme with it and kind of went a different direction over the years?

Peter : 00:44 Oh, I'm not as dogmatic about diet as I have been and I think even some of the books that I've written, I come off as a believer. You know, it tends to divide people and I said, I think we all go through a process of we try this, we try that and we end up finding what works for us and basically if it works for you, great. You know, I'll keep my mouth shut. Whatever you're doing, it's living this life free of judgment free of condemnation, free of contention which basically adds your longevity and health. You know, too many people want to argue about diet. They want to argue about this and that and that contentiousness. It basically poisons the body with stress hormones and it shows. So I've seen that, I've experienced it. Come the other way around. My wife accuses me of, of creating a lot of fanatics and I said, no, no, everybody's got their own VM. But they listened to you and what you've said in the past, which is one of the problems is you said something in the past and you not doing it today and it's in print or in a format, audio format, or we're run on a video and your changed your mind. You know, people don't often understand that you do the most amount of good in the least amount of harm and let the chips fall within a,

Logan: 02:20 Yeah. And I find reading mild books, like I don't agree with myself quite often, which it sounds kind of bad, but I think it's actually a healthy thing because we should be evolving and hopefully yet getting into a less dogmatic place. I think that is probably a natural thing. You get into something you're super excited about it. You want to proselytize to everyone out there just because of how great it's helping you in whatever way and then a little bit later on you realize kind of the shades of gray of what was going on or can just kind of relax and let go of the dogma as you were saying.

Peter: 02:50 Yeah, yeah. It's pretty dangerous when you believe everything you think.

Logan: 02:56 Yeah, and I feel that's especially important in the health because yeah, people do get so radical like it's diet and politics are like right up there and just the controversy about them. But if I think pretty much everyone can agree that just eating real natural food, it's going to work pretty well for most people. Like, that's the basic foundation that everyone can agree on and then we can get into specifics on there and argue over it. But that needs to be that foundation there.

Peter: 03:27 I look around while people are contesting a dietary ideas and I think, who do I listen to? And I thought about that and I said, well, who should I listen to? Well, obviously the people who are doing it well, who's doing it? The world's oldest people. Listen to the people who live the longest, who are the healthiest, and find out what they're doing and see if that works for you. And that's the approach that I've taken. I've looked just like a [inaudible] book on the blue zones and the different areas where people lived along this on this planet and I doing what are they eating? How do they live? And I think this is a big part of it too. It's about lifestyle. What is your lifestyle? How do I live? What do I do each day? Oh, when do I go to sleep? When do I wake up? How do I eat? What's my social interaction like? You know, all of these things come to play and it's not that any one thing. There is no magic bullet, there is no magic or there's no magic. There's no special, unique elixir or somewhere. But it is when you put all the things together, put the pieces back together and we become whole.

Logan: 04:45 I think this idea also speaks to that. Both you and I are constantly experimenting with things, right? So you're in taking new information and then maybe, Oh, you know, see they're eating this food in this blue zone for example. So I'm going to add that to my diet, see what happens from doing that. And I think this is a healthy approach to life because ultimately what science says or what your friend says doesn't necessarily mean something works for you. So you have to try things. And this is diet supplements, lifestyle behaviors, all sorts of different things to really find what works. And once you find what works, you know that doesn't mean that's going to work for the whole rest of your life. Things change over time. So I think that's a useful approach to how you should look at engaging in healthy behaviors.

Peter: 05:31 Yeah, and I tell myself this all the time. I never assume that I have all these answers and because I found out so many times when I did think I had the answers that they were wrong. Yeah. Keeps you humble.

Logan: 05:47 What would you say are some of your, I mean, we've kind of talked through them, I think time is not toxic, would definitely fit as one of these, but what are some of your other foundational principles of health?

Peter: 05:57 Oh, well, one of them is something many, many decades ago I wrote with soap on my mirror in the bathroom. So I would see this every time I walked into the bathroom and what I wrote on there serve the power. What I wrote was if it's to be, it's up to me. I'm responsible. What am I going to do about it? I'm responsible. What am I going to do about it? If it's to be, it's up to me. And I looked at that every morning and that set the tone for my day. And then I realize that every morning when I woke up, I would think, what is the most difficult thing that ACEs me today? I will do that first before anything else. And usually I've found out the thing that I regretted doing the most was the most important thing that benefited my life. And by doing it first, I got it over with.

Peter: 06:51 I faced it. And so getting out of bed and basing what you need to do and do it, and you know, people ask me, how do you do this? Or how do you do that? And I said, that's a stupid question. You ask a kid, how do you jump off a diving board? You go out to the, and then you jump. That's it. You're just jump. Someone once asked me, well, well how do I stop smoking? And I saw I'd give you the foolproof, absolute way not to smoke. Don't put the thing in your mouth.

Logan: 07:21 Yeah, that's great because that applies to health, but also so much more, right? It's really a foundational principle to guide your life by and fits in with the, the name of this podcast. Health sovereignty. Sovereignty is about taking that responsibility for yourself in a day and age when so many people, especially around the topic of health, you know, do not take that responsibility. They want their doctor or the government or someone else to be responsible for the health for them.

Peter: 07:47 Yeah. There's another one of my little sayings, one of my cliches that I repeated over and over again. No one is coming to the rescue. No one's coming to the rescue buddy. And coming to grips with that, even though people that are people, your friends, your family. But if you take that attitude, nobody's coming to the rescue, you're out there. What are you going to do? And it's motivating.

Logan: 08:14 Absolutely. So coming back to the topic of time, one of the, I like to think of it as a myth that hormones fall with age. Now, just because this tends to happen for most people doesn't mean it's causative, right? The age, the time itself is not the factor. So much as what happens during that time. Absolutely.

Peter: 08:35 Logan, not too long ago, both my wife and I, Katrina and I both had our telomeres tested and get a number of blood tests. We found we were half our biological age. Our physical bodies were half of the chronological age. And what does that say? I mean, I see men in the gym, and complaining about erectile dysfunction, prostate problems, lack of energy. And I think, you know, it doesn't have to be that them. The readings from blood tests and things that I've done, I'm just like, I was when I was 30 and I shake my head and I said, sometimes you've said, well, you're lucky. No. Yeah, I guess you could say I'm lucky. I'm lucky that I've done the things I did, the things I did. I'm lucky I made the decisions I made. But luck is noticing. Luck is about noticing. You become very, very lucky when you notice things and if you notice something's going downhill and you don't want it to go down, you know, that's being lucky because now you do something about it. And like we were saying, you know, time isn't toxic. Time doesn't cure. You rip all the pages off for calendar and it doesn't mean a thing. You don't hurt, you throw your clock out, it won't hurt you. You're real. And it's what we do.

Logan: 09:59 Yeah. So regarding the hormones, I think of them as chemical messengers. That's what they're doing in their body. And something I've been thinking about is that the hormones sure that they, cause things are very important for our health, but they're not really the root cause of the issue because they're just messengers. They're passaging messages from one part of your body to another and in turn triggered and triggering kind of the outside environment and how we're like, you know, you lift a heavy weight that is triggering your body in certain way and it can ramp up hormones for example. So the hormones themselves aren't root cause. So trying to fix them by like getting testosterone replacement therapy. It's still really a bandaid approach and like most of Western medicine versus really kind of understanding that if you do the right things, you natural living that we've talked about a healthy diet, the right kind of exercise that largely these chemical messengers will intern take care of themselves.

Peter: 10:55 Exactly, exactly. Provide the proper terrain, the proper environment and the body knows what to do. It knows how to do it. It does it naturally. I heard of an interesting way it was illustrated just the other day and I thought it was really good. They said, you have a Lake that's become stagnant. No water is moving through it and it starts to stink it as a sludge on it and it's covered with mosquitoes and swarms and swarms of mosquitoes. Well one approaches to come in there with DDT or something. How are polite that kill all the mosquitoes and now you have no more than mosquitoes. But soon the mosquitoes appear again because the Lake is filled with their larva. Their eggs are all over the place. It's the terrain that attracted the yanks. And when we change terrain, when we change and clean the water, we don't have the other things.

Peter: 11:59 And so with the body, when we adjust the terrain to it's natural, organic state, all these other things, the tumors, the cysts, the infections, the inflammation, all of these things are absent because they require a different type of terrain. They'd inquire of polluted water and if the water is not polluted, it doesn't happen. The water flows smoothly and none of that stuff is out. And I thought that was beautifully described because like you said, so often we look to the magic bullet and say, well if I have an inflammation, let me take this shot to get rid of victims, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Take this medicine, take this particular thing and it'll all be well, I'll be well. But it's all with changing the condition of the body. Actual state.

Logan: 12:51 I don't know if you heard about this, but the metaphor there of the mosquitoes and brought it to mind how in Brazil they released genetically modified mosquitoes that were supposed to kind of self terminate. The next generation was just supposed to die out and surprise, surprise, it did not work out. Like they plan, they are not dying off and they're now more robust. Everything's like, yeah, I didn't think that was a good idea going in.

Peter: 13:16 Yeah. Yeah. That is interesting. I know what you're saying.

Logan: 13:21 Yeah. So speaking to ecology or the terrain, which yeah, I feel if this is one of the things that it's in any sort of holistic system of medicine, of health, they're looking at the body more as an ecology as that terrain rather than like the body as a machine. And the metaphors we use to think about things really impact so much we're doing, if you think of the body is a machine though, let's just replace a part or let's just add in this thing that's missing. Whereas at ecology is like, okay, what can we do to tweak things so that then the ecology kind of takes care of it itself. So we've talked about many different things here on this call. Is there any other aspects? What really helps a person to take care of that terrain? Well?

Peter: 14:07 Well, what belief helps the fact that we are more powerful than we ever believed we could be. That we realize that there's an intelligence in the body and the way it functions that is hard to mentally grasp the functions of the body operate lawlessly under their own laws. And as long as we don't start to try to manipulate or as you said a moment ago, we replaced the parts. The body knows how to heal itself, it knows how to come back to center. I don't have to do anything for my body to heal itself, to come back to center. All I have to do is find that middle space, that balance point and not too much this way, not too little that way. Just finding center and mentally coming back to center. I never have to worry about I have a cut healing itself.

Peter: 15:01 Why would I worry about anything else? It's a natural process. All I have to do is get out of the way and let it happen and that's a conviction that I hold and I've held for a long, long time. I'm amazed by it. I'm amazed by it. They're just coming back down to mentally settling, finding a sweet spot. And I think we can do that when we learn to deal with our thoughts, settle our thoughts, spend more quiet time. Find that time every day just to sit, to walk, to be in the woods, be in nature, walk along the shore line. You know, watch the waves on the ocean, go out at night, look at the story sky and just stand there. awestruck do that.

Logan: 15:50 Yeah. That brings up a very interesting point. So the body has a natural healing process and you don't have to do anything. So to actually stop this process requires you doing something. It's interesting thing about people that have chronic pain for 20 years or so, you know, every single cell in their body gets turned over, gets changed out in less of a timeframe from that. Even super dense cells like bones get changed out every seven or nine years, something like that. So there must be a belief or something that is blocking that healing process from going on in the first place. Like you said, a cut will just naturally heal. So I think that's fascinating answer, do Nothing come back to center and allow the healing to take place.

Peter: 16:34 Yeah, and it's the same way of dealing with pain. Someone was asking me about pain the other day cause a, how do you handle pain? And I says, I don't, I welcome that. I said, show me what you've got and guess what? Pain gets scared. You away from the, this guy is nuts and said, no, you know I don't resist pain. This is nothing to resist. Pain is simply the fear of the pain. The thought about pain, the thought about suffering. I don't have that. It's a sensation. I have a pain if I stub my toe or break a bone or whatever. Right? I said, okay, it's a sensation my body knows how to. I'm not going to interfere by getting emotional about it. It's just a pain that heaven sakes, that's all. It's just the pain. Let it be. is just not the pain and it will go away

Logan: 17:28 And it goes back to the the noticing, right? I mean pain is a signal and hopefully you can learn from that signal, especially if it's something you did to yourself, then you can avoid doing it in the future.

Peter: 17:41 I talked to myself, I said, Peter, don't do that.

Logan: 17:46 All right. If people have liked what they heard today when the check out more information about you, do you have certain places you'd like them to go?

Peter: 17:54 Well, I've got a huge following on Facebook. Facebook is a nice place to start. And also I do have a, a website. It's a longevitysage.com or simply Peterragner.com and YouTube, by the way. Yah, I have, there must be, I don't know, 75 or 80 a videos on herbs and health on YouTube and you know, so many of the different herbs that you offer Logan. I get to talk about them on YouTube and it's a pretty exciting place to be. Also you can go, go on Amazon and look up Peter Ragnar or see what some of my books are on there. Most of my books are out of print though. A recent one that is on Kindle. It's free on Kindle and it's called finding heart. I live with courage in a confusing world. That's a lot of stuff out there. I don't even know what, what's out there.

Logan: 18:57 Well, that's okay if it's out of print because you disagree with yourself from back then. Right.

Logan: 19:04 Okay. Peter, thank you so much for joining me once again today,

Peter: 19:08 Logan, if the, it's always a pleasure, my friends and I really appreciate you. I appreciate all that you that you do and this is always good. It's always good.

Logan: 19:18 All right, thank you. And everyone listening, you can find the links on the show notes over at www.healthsovereign.com. This was the first interview rather for the health sovereign podcast, but the first of many, and I hope you've enjoyed this, we'd love to hear your feedback on it and as always, reviews on iTunes or wherever else helps to spread this message out to other people. Thanks so much for listening.

Logan : 00:19 Peter Ragnar has been a huge influence on me. Yes, I've learned many tactical things, but that's not the main point for years. Now, I've looked to him as a model of what health can be an inspiration to contrast against that culturally enforced image of the frail elderly that shuffles around, forgets things too often while being propped up on pharmaceuticals, and it's not just physical health, but all over holistic lifestyle. He's an author of over 30 books martial artists, amazingly strong and not just for his age, teacher of cheekbone, extremely lucky and much more. Thank you so much for joining me and being the first guest on the health sovereign podcast. Peter, it's good to talk to you again.

Peter: 00:57 Wow. It's always good to be with you Logan, and I greatly appreciate all that you've been doing and we appreciate this opportunity to be with you.

Logan: 01:05 Excellent. So in line with what I just said, I'm kind of curious, who were some of the models for health for you? Who did you look to that kind of led you down this path?

Peter: 01:16 Oh goodness. That goes back a long way. You know, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, especially in my late teens, I had volunteered to help out in the, some of the communities found in the Appalachian and the Southern mountain areas. And when I went down there, I got a room with a room in a house that and they'll do a woman had. And she was about 80 years old at the time when I met her and she started talking to me about health and proper eating. She had an organic garden behind your house and she said creepier. And this was the first day I was there. I had, I've put my belongings in the bedroom there and she's going outside. She had an Apple tree out there and she went out there and she said, so Peter, can you do this?

Peter: 02:11 She jumped up into the Apple crate. She's hanging there. And swinging upside and swings herself upside down. And I'm saying, Holy cow. And then she showed me how she did the head stance. She says that's what queen ribbon does. And I said, okay, I'm all ears. So she knows one of my early models for health and fitness. And about that time I started to read a lot of the work of Bernard McFadden who I gather inspired Jack Lane and many, many other people. And so that pretty much started me off. So you know, looking at diet, exercise, looking at it as a, as a coastal package. And it was a pretty exciting time in my life. All of this stuff was brand new and I was just hungry to learn.

Logan: 03:03 [Inaudible] And Bernarr Macfadden, definitely a very interesting character. And one of his nicknames was the father of physical culture because he was like one of the first guy that really got into publishing and putting out health information out there. And one of my favorite quotes from him is a weakness is a crime. Don't be a criminal.

Peter: 03:24 That was one of mine also actually still is.

Logan: 03:28 Yup. So that's a very good point. I feel like, I mean what I said in the intro there, there's just, most people think that, Oh, you know, once you're 80 years old, you know, life kind of sucks and this is I guess just kind of like a reinforced thing over time because so many people believe that they end up living that or not even getting to that age in the first place. Whereas people tend to not look to people like you and like this woman was for you in turn to actually see that you can be any age and still be thriving.

Peter: 03:58 Yeah. In our society right now, when you start looking at some of the statistics about health and aging, one of the big challenges for older people, the sarcopenia, which may sickly means muscle wasting. It's a Sarco referring to cell and Penia referring to poverty, the poverty of the cells or the poverty of the muscle. And what happens by the age of 70 and seventies not old. Most people lose 50% of their motor units and 75% of their fiber numbers and basically the end up shrinking the muscle strength. But what people don't realize is that when they're not fit, when they don't have that muscle mass, something else starts taking place and that starts taking place in the brain. The way the body handles glucose, weight feeds, energy trigger brain, even bone structure without stressing the body, the bones get thinner and this thing is just a really a vicious cycle.

Peter: 05:06 I mean the brain loses its glucose, it doesn't handle it well. The neurotransmitters don't fire as they ought to and this excess calcium building up in the brain, which basically now is suspected that fall contributing to Alzeimer’s disease and just general dementia. Yeah, that's a pretty grim outlook. But the good news is, and this is what I've found in my personal life, is that you turn it around at any age and the body begins to respond unless you are wait til you just on that storeway when you hear people who are, are they, you know, this is just like the 80 year old woman that I knew. Did you take Bernarr Macfadden or other examples? I get inspired by them. You know what? We get inspired by them and start to do something, we get up out of our sedentary lifestyle and get motivated.

Logan: 05:58 Absolutely. And there's so much wisdom behind the phrase, use it or lose it. And one way I like to think of that even more so is use it and expand it. So what you're saying with the muscles in osteoporosis as an especially big thing for women, but same sort of thing, the bones and the muscles are not being challenged and therefore the body sees no need to kind of keep those around. So they begin to just kind of deteriorate. But if you use them through strength training and even just simple things like walking, then just how much this affects the body and keeps you not only able to maintain, but you can get better as you were saying at any age.

Peter: 06:37 Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting because if we don't do anything, if we ignore it, we don't realize how this creeps up on us. Muscle loss, actually according to what I've read in a lot of the studies begins around 30 years of age. And I think that's why a lot of times athletes, people who are competitive athletes feel that they have a short window to really Excel it, which is really not true. So you can Excel at older ages too and many, many athletic examples you can find to that. But when we start losing muscle mass at about 1% a year at the age of 30 and then when we get to the hour around 50 then it becomes 2% or 3% and then during that same period people experience bone loss and all of this affects the immune system. That's why there's so many of noon deficiency diseases. The insulin is out of whack, blood sugars out of whack and the increases in type two diabetes. All of these things are all coming back to what you just said a moment ago, Logan, you use it or you lose it, you lose it if you don't use it.

Logan: 07:55 Yeah. One of the phrases I got from you, and I'd definitely think about this fairly frequently because I think it is super important to grasp around health, but it's outside of the conventional worldview, is that time is not toxic. It really is a great phrase because the time is not the problem so much. But here's the thing, what you were just talking about. We're at 30 years old, plus you're losing 1% muscle mass, 50 years plus these things. Yeah. They're occurring in most people. Right? But it's not the time itself that's doing it. So could you go and explain a bit more of this phrase, what it means and also even how did you come to this wisdom?

Peter: 08:35 Yeah. When we think of time in most of the ways that aging is presented, it's presented as a disease and something that accumulates from year to year. Well, if something is falling apart, if you have a car and you never service it, you take care of that. You never watch fight. Just the laws of nature, it's going to fall apart when it has nothing actually to do with time. It has everything to do with neglect and it's not time. It's not noticing. And time is irrelevant. This physical body, it's self healing, self generating, self restoring at any age. You take a cut. If you're nine years old and you have a cute, you're 90 years old and you have the same bodily function takes place. The body doesn't need any new information as to how to heal itself. But if we interfere with that process, and this is what happens in our society, if we interfere with it, poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of rest, all these things come together and they basically destroy the machine.

Peter: 09:46 And one of the things I came across a just recently, it was a study actually presented by the USDA and they said that the turn of the last century 1900, the average annual sugar consumption per person or a year was five pounds. In 2017 it was 190 pounds per person of sugar. And now we know that sugar is basically, it's a deadly poison to the body. We have a epidemic of Alzeimer’s disease and other diseases. And diabetes you can go down the list and so much of all of this is that would become insulin resistant. That and I, we're down a whole litany of woes associated with this and this is just one thing. This is just one thing. So bringing awareness to this, bringing awareness back to health, bringing awareness back to natural living, just like what you've been doing. Oh, Logan, with the herbs, with your write your personal examples of awesome strength that you display. All these things are exciting. They excite me. You inspire me. And this is I think one of the doorways where we can get beyond this concept, this self fulfilling prophecy, that time is toxic, not toxic at all. It's thinking that's toxic,

Logan: 11:19 Right? Yeah. And it's dumping 190 pounds of sugar into your body per year. That results in the symptoms related to that toxicity. That's

Peter: 11:30 One of the interesting things is that exercise, when we feel good, when we've been eating right, we feel like exercising. When we exercise, it affects even how the proteins are made in the brain. And it allows new cell growth in the hippocampus, the learning and memory center of the brain. It keeps us mentally sharp. And when we're mentally sharp, we want to do things. We get excited every day we get up out of bed, I'm ready to go. You know, it's like this morning I got up, I couldn't wait to get to the gym. And I'm just really, really excited about my workout. And after that I went and stood under a cold shower and laughing to myself. I don't, they make the shower even cold though. I said it came out of their euphoric and the endorphins you know, that feel good energy that you had. You're alive. And it's one of the things I love to say. I'm alive. I'm awake, and I feel great.

Logan: 12:41 And one of the ways I like to think about health is all these behaviors, diet, exercise, even your mindset, your beliefs and everything. They're all interacting with each other and this is where that time component comes in, but it's if you're doing the right things then you're kind of increasing your health as you go along. And I think of this as kind of a spiral because you're going through routines and everything, but if you are doing things that are not so good for your health, like over consumption of sugar, like being sedentary, then you're on the downward spiral of health and these things just come to reinforce each other to where it becomes harder and harder to get out of that sort of slump. What you mentioned with the exercise there, I found that interesting when I was doing some research around habits. They said that people that exercise tend to have an easier time eating healthier, but it wasn't the same vice versa. Like the exercise led more to the eating better compared to people that just tried to eat well. They didn't necessarily have the motivation to exercise necessarily. So I think that's also important to recognize how, what they called their, the Keystone habits, how these things all interact with each other in different ways.

Peter: 13:52 Yeah, that's a very, very good point. Logan, if you're eating poorly you don't feel like doing anything inside and especially you're overeating, people get sluggish, sleepy, and everything starts basically shutting down. That's why I love stuff that you present and even though the information you put in your recent book, you know, it's a call back to nature, all back to natural living. And no, I think we've gotten so far away from that. That's why we're generation the or society that is played by illness. It's exciting to see what you're doing. I love all of the, the different herbs that you're taking. By the way, I was just thinking about this this morning I was taking some core Copa and I was holding it under my tongue as I usually do. And I was thinking, you know, some of the ancient yogis would take Bacopa and they would do the same thing and their ability, their mental abilities to remember verbatim pages and pages of ancient texts. And we site them. They could be to, to impart to that in part working with the mind, working with your consciousness. But we have so many tools now and you bring so much to light of, so many opportunities to really delve into studying about this and saying, what do I need in my life? What do I want in my life to make it better? So I really appreciate you for that.

Logan: 15:25 Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I feel it's certainly more natural life or recognizing that we are natural beings and the further we try to move ourselves away, and I understand the reasoning of how we got down this path in the first place, but recognizing that anything we do, there tends to be downsides too. And especially kind of longer term chronic things that aren't as noticeable right away. So I feel by bringing us more in alignment to nature that people will be better served in their health. And performance. And I mean you exemplify this, you are spending time in nature every single day. It's really built into your routine, right?

Peter: 16:00 Yeah. I really love it. I was thinking about to Logan, we just got back from Finland and we had gone up to the Arctic and up there, there are so many different wild berries that it's so abundant. And I was thinking about the Arctic, [inaudible] or just Schisandra, Rhodiola, you know, all of these things readily available and you come back into a society that doesn't know very much about these things and you see tooth decay, senility, joint pains and the very things that these berries are good for. And I said, Holy cow, I do want to lay down in the Tundra of Rove around.

Logan: 16:46 Yeah, we do really have such abundance around us. And it's lack of knowledge and awareness that just makes people oblivious to, and it's, it's somewhat of a difficult thing to get into if you don't have a mentor or certain assets especially cause different things grow in different places. So you may hear about these great, wonderful herbs like Rhodiola and sea buckthorn. And if you don't live where those grow, then you think, Oh, all the magic is stuff is away from me. But truthfully, every single place in the world has their own herbs that can work for so many different things. It's just you gotta learn that local landscape.

Peter: 17:22 Yeah, you know, many, many years ago, it was a, after I met that 80 year old woman I came onto someone else. This guy's name was catfish, man of woods, and there's a guy he's lived in way out and unbelievable brutal place on a sort of trail at little shack. And in his shack, the walls were covered with letters from people around the world. And the reason they wrote to him is that he was picked herbs and he came across a recipe from a Cherokee medicine man. And he started putting those herbs together and giving them to people and people getting well. And so he then started collecting more of them, packaging them up. Just funny because I would spend time with them, I would go out there and he'd show me the herbs that he was picked and it was interesting how this guy never ever suspect he had anything going for him, but he had this marvelous secret of nature's bounty and nature's medicine and he ended up become actually quite famous and it said that the queen of England actually went to visit him at one point and that was in the newspapers many, many years ago, but it was just interesting, he was another one of my mentors, he's the one that got me excited about herbology and subsequently years later when I wrote the book alive and well with wild foods, a lot of that inspiration came to him.

Peter: 18:58 Yeah, I'd say that's probably one of the, the main things for me that helps me to get out into nature more like it's fun to just go for a walk. Certainly do that plenty, but I like going to new places and saying, Oh, what new herbs do I spot here? And going out and harvesting some or even foraging for food. I feel these are, it's kind of like a, you accomplish something out of going into nature beyond just going out in nature. So I think that's a helpful practice that I feel probably more and more people are going to be getting into just because it does rebuild that connection to nature. It rebuilds that knowledge base of useful things that are just growing up all around us.

Peter: 19:37 Yeah, and it's interesting just like you said, you can go to one locale and find an entirely different group of edible plants and herbs. You go 50 miles away and it's almost like you'd have to be reeducated again. When I was living in the Smokies, there was so much there that I never ever got to learn it all. And it's interesting when I, after I moved from there, I'm still out in the country. I have to re-educate myself all over again because all of a sudden that found under so miles away a whole new assortment of herbs and wild edibles. And that's a, it's fascinating. So no matter where we are, whether we go to the jungles of the Amazon or go to the Arctic, it's a whole book of nature ready to be read.

Logan: 20:27 Absolutely. One thing I'd like to discuss with you, you having been around quite some time and witnessed health fads come and go, possibly even got wrapped up in certain things yourself. I'm curious when we're looking at health, how have you kind of evolved in how you're looking at health? For instance, just in fitness, right? If I'm remembering you were engaged in marathons at one point, then you got heavily into the strongman stuff then and steel and everything. Last time I talked to you have very focused on the power lifting, so obviously you've tried lots of different things, but yeah, just interested on your perspective of how everything evolves or how your mind may even change around some things around health.

Peter: 21:08 Oh definitely. And you know, if you think you know her at all, it's always something new, a new way, a new approach and dietary wise, even my ya exercise approach, so many things have changed. Well, let's put it this way. If manmade, the food in a plant don't need it. But if you find it in a plant and that whole food approach don't eat anything that I don't know what it is or where it came from. And generally most of the food that my wife Katrina and I, we know who grew it, we know where it came from and that's been very, very helpful. So it's a very holistic approach. And as far as exercise at one time I was a very avid runner and there was a period of time where I was running a hundred miles a week. I was 20 miles a day, five days a week.

Peter: 22:12 Well, it's interesting just prior to that I had been very much into heavy lifting and I had hoped up and you know, still pretty good. And then during the time over a period of time as I ran, I got thinner and thinner and thinner. And one day I bumped into someone I knew I hadn't seen for about a year or so. And he said, Holy shit, Peter, what happened to you? Have you been in the hospital or something? He said, you were ripped and muscular and muscular and he said, what happened? And as well I had been running and he said he just shook his head, basically said disgusting.

Peter: 22:58 Then you know, I said, Whoa, you know it's good for you. Well, I remember being in one race and in this race I ran alongside a Dr. George Shehan, he was very famous. He wrote a lot of books about running. After the race was over, I met up with him and we were talking and he says, you want to know what you're going to look like in 20 years? I said, okay, George. Yeah. He said, look at your face and the mirror after you've run a marathon. And I thought to myself, Holy cow. Then I started to know this, that the people that I would regularly compete with in these road races, they just looked like they were getting old and I said, Holy cow, they're aging growing rapidly now. This is my impression, and I know people will just agree with with that. Cause I, and I don't mean to be a derogatory toward the sport, but for me I think it's too much. I'm burning myself out and I'm a person who tends to go overboard. If I love something, I do it all the way. If I don't, I don't do it at all. And because of that attitude, because of the intensity, I started having knee problems, my back started hurting and I said, Oh, I gotta do something different. I went back to the weights. I did body weight exercises too and I just started building my body back up again and haven't stopped.

Logan: 24:28 Yeah, I think it's important to understand that distinction is since marathon runners are still largely seen as the epitome of health. I know this was true back a couple of decades ago and it's probably losing its focus a little bit, but it's still, many people believe that and certainly better to be a marathon runner over just sedentary completely, but also recognizing the distinction between doing it for fun or because you're actively engaged in the sport and versus what is actually healthy is to do. I think any sport where we take to the extremes like extreme power lifters or CrossFit athletes, like at that level, fitness, maybe slightly divorced from health in what people are going to. So I think that's an important thing to recognize.

Peter: 25:09 Yeah, man, you made a good point there Logan. When you're competing at a high level on the sport, your cortisol levels or Jack gum, you're dealing with a lot of extra stressors that ordinarily you wouldn't be. And all those types of stressors negate the benefits of the activity. You know, where it may be beneficial on a moderate level. At an extreme level, it stops being that way. And that was my experience because I was extreme in it and I was a very competitive, and, I liked the competitiveness, I liked pushing myself to the limits. But you can only do that so much. And so the lesson for me was to back off, take another approach because I really didn't want to look that skinny.

Peter: 26:01 I didn't want to lose my strength. And so I went and worked on regaining it. I said, okay, what are the things that I need to do to regain it? Well, I need to have plenty of rest. My body needs to recuperate from the stress that I put on it. I need clean air, right? Oh, clean water, good organic food, need to be sensible about it and being sensible about it gives you the longevity. Athletically. Today I'm still performing at a very high caliber level and I feel good about that because I've been able to maintain it and it's that moderation. No, we're more of a balance.

Peter: 26:44 Hope my wife's doesn’t hear me. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely.

Logan: And this concludes part one of my interview with Peter Ragnar. About time is not toxic. Next week we will be back with part two, the final part and conclude this conversation. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, be sure to share this podcast with your friends or head on over to iTunes and leave a review. It would greatly help me out and also be sure to check out lost empire herbs. Peter is a big fan. I, of course, being an owner, I'm a big fan, but we started the company to really help people in the first place, as well as from their own supply. So we have some great stuff over there, great information, all in alignment with what we're sharing here today. I'll see you next week.

00:18 Welcome back my health sovereign. Since starting this podcast up and hopefully you've been listening in old time, what steps have you taken to claim your sovereignty in your health? Today we'll be diving into a few more points in the health sovereign creed, the first one around culture, how it affects you and how you affect it and not just culture at large but different frames of size we can look at with this. Then we'll also be talking about the very important concept of anti fragility. Very Fun concept too. Let's get started. Point number seven of the health sovereign creed. I understand that my views on health are shaped by my culture and community regardless of their truthfulness. So I keep an open mind about different possibilities and I recognize that I intern come to shape my community and culture at large. Therefore having a moral responsibility to lead and inspire others and being healthy got a few important elements to that.

01:28 So when I'm talking about culture and community, yeah, we can look at the whole worldwide culture. Well there's this idea that there are all these different cultures and different cultures have different ways of viewing the world and this postmodern idea that you know, every culture is unique and has something to give. And while there's truth to that, we can also recognize that certain cultures in certain contexts absolutely are better than others for lack of a better word. Not Saying one culture by itself, but we can look at different things. So how a culture looks at health is going to determine health of that people to some degree. So the thing that we're talking about a lot here is this western medical worldview, this model that is the culture of America here in which I live, but really is exported to the rest of the world to a large degree and the great parts of this emergency medicine, the use of the proper use of antibiotics.

02:28 I already talked about that a little bit. These were very great advancements of it and were also then kind of seeing like the success of this system reinforce itself. It became a success to the successful loop, but then it is playing in fields where it's not great and still though, because it is the cultural worldview, that dominant worldview that most people do not perceive these flaws or if they perceive these flaws, they don't necessarily recognize other methods of looking at the same thing. So when I'm talking about culture and community, yeah, we can talk about this worldwide and in that sense, what power do you have over that? Not much. You and I do not have much power over the community. Even someone with a great amount of power still changing the worldview that's out there is a big thing. But with community, we can look at some smaller frame sizes where you do have input.

03:24 So let's say your family, especially if you're raising kids, what you project onto them, what you teach them, what they learn from you just from observing and mimicking is your worldview to a large part. And now they may rebel against this. Kids can either fall in line or rebel against it, right? That's kind of the only two paths you can go, but they're going to be picking up stuff from you. So you are influencing kids as you're raising them, but you're influencing your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, boyfriend, any of the people you interact with, your family to some degree, the other parts of your family, your friends, your social circle. Even the people that follow you on social media or any other channels on what you may post something or do something, put it out in the world. You are influencing people to some degree.

04:12 Yes, some people don't have much influence and some people have greater influence, but it's recognizing that this influences there. And even if you're not teaching health, not talking about it like I am here, you're still doing things that affect your health and merely doing those things. Others will pick up on it. And this can be completely unconsciously, right? So what you do with your health is influencing people one way or another. Now, if you're just picking up the dominant worldview, absorbing that through culture. So this is taught in our education, not really explicitly. It's so much of it is implicit, right? It's not directly taught, but it's absorbed through media channels and whatnot. So if he just getting that, then you are become, you absorb that and then you're reflected out. If you are not consciously learning something, not critically thinking through it, then this is just what happens.

05:03 This is how we humans operate. So it takes sovereignty once again to recognize this and then begin to change it. If you recognize that you are a sovereign individual around your health and that then what you're doing is once again, what we go back to in the previous episode where we talked about symbiosis, not just affecting you, but then affecting these other human symbionts that are walking around. And there's studies showing that we share bacteria with the people we interact with, which makes sense, right? They colonize us, we colonize them, colonies spread from one area to another. And that can happen without necessarily having intimate body contact, just breathing right? Bacteria will move on the winds essentially. So this is important to recognize and of course with all of our ideas around health, not all of them are true and I recognize that even myself, I'm not 100% truth speaker here.

06:03 Although I am trying to be, my ideas change over time. I've got wrapped up in things that I no longer believe about health and come tomorrow. I maybe believe something different, but by getting to these foundational levels, these principles that we're talking about here, I do believe getting to this level helps to get less wrapped up in misinformation that is out there but still not foolproof, right? So these ideas get spread and memes get spread around a meme being one of the useful ideas that came from Richard Dawkins of kind of a mimetic gene, a mental gene that could be an idea essentially that spread around. So these can be spread around whether they're true or whether they're false and ultimately experiences going to be the thing that dictates the reality of that. And experience changes from one person to another, one context to another or one time to another, which makes it all tricky stuff.

07:01 Getting to the truth of the matter is very hard. So recognizing this, you can then begin to understand that you are influencing people whether you want to or not to some degree, and that's why it comes down to being a moral responsibility. Think about that, especially if you are a person of influence, which if you're a parent and you absolutely are, even if only to one person, but we do influence the people around us to some degrees, so it does come down to morality. The way I've looked at this, if you know what it takes to be healthy and yeah, we all have hangups and our crap that we need to work through in order to become healthy because there's so much shame and guilt in misinformation and whatnot. We definitely have some work to do in this area. We're all people that need to heal, so I'm not laying this on you as more of a judgement from on high.

07:53 I have, I've definitely gone through a bunch of crap around here myself, but to say that aim towards an ideal and do it in a way that it is not just for you, that should make it easier because a lot of people are more other person oriented. They, we'll be able to do things for other people better than they do for themselves. So aim for taking care of yourself in the way that it will naturally spread to other people. That's why I say it's more responsibility to lead and inspire others and if you are healthy, this is kind of a natural byproduct that comes of that for the most part. Like people aren't going to care what you do. I mean that is definitely true but especially when you're older, let's say you're 50, 60, 70 years old, if you are vibrantly healthy, people are going to notice and hopefully they end up asking you a little bit about it and don't verbally vomit everything you know about health.

08:47 You got to stretch it out, give a bit of information at a time, see if people are really interested, take some action on it. Then you give them a bit more. But I do think there is definitely in health there has to be this idea of leading by example because the opposite is to go into a doctor that is vastly overweight on a bunch of drugs himself. Is that the model of health you want to look at? And if someone is in the health field, they need to be healthy. Once again, we all have challenges. Not Saying a person needs to be perfect, but overall health should be something that they're doing. It is moral responsibility because of this, and this is that thing. I believe I talked about this in the very first episode, the interdependency. So health is about self responsibility and recognizing that it can't just be about self because we exist with other people.

09:36 We are influenced and influence them. So as you become healthier, you can have greater influence just by leading through example alone. I mean that's so much of what I do. I'm doing this stuff for myself first and by noon. So I'm able to help other people out there. And one other line in here so I keep an open mind about different possibilities, recognizing that for the most part we're not coming up with new ideas about health. It is, you know you're listening to a podcast here. Listen to me expound on these ideas and you're going to be absorbing some of the ideas if you agree with them and it might just kind of slink right in. You've never thought about a subject but you know me like me, trust me. So you take my idea on and hopefully it's a good idea and it works out for you.

10:23 But understand this process is going on all the time. So you mean to the truth as I said, is really difficult to do. So even if you believe something, do your best because this is kind of contrary to the human condition. Keeping an open mind about such a thing. Open to new information, open to changing your idea. Cause I'll tell you one thing that does not seem to be healthy is dogma. No matter where you cut it, just getting locked into an idea. Even if it is right, it tends to become very rigid. You can hold on to ideas while still being open to possible new information. I think that's a healthier way to go. Try not to believe your beliefs too much. Recognizing also that things change. So even if something does work really great for you, recognize that it may not always work for you.

11:14 Some event could shift the way that something works. So let's move on to point number eight. I recognize the antifragility of the human body that its livingness conserve to help come back from stressors stronger than before. I will aim to support expanding my antifragility to further increase my health. When we're talking about health, I believe this term antifragility is absolutely crucial to understand, and it's not a term most people know. It's popularized a few years ago by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book. Antifragility forget the subtitle, but something along the lines of things that gain from disorder. So what is antifragility basically coined a new word because we didn't have something that described this in our lexicon. The opposite of fragile is not robust. Something that is fragile. We can just think of like a wineglass, right? Falls off a table easily likely to break. You put it in a box, you're going to put bubble wrap around it.

12:16 You're going to tape it up. You're going to stamp fragile on the outside of the box in order to prevent this thing from breaking. Now, if we have something that is robust, let's say this is just like a block of wood, this falls off the some height it's going to, nothing's really gonna happen too. Maybe it gets a little dinged up, but if you're packing and moving, you don't need to wrap this up in bubble tape. It is robust. It can survive things, but the key difference with antifragile, right? You dropped this block of wood off the thing. While it may not break, there may be no marks or nothing on it. It doesn't get better from that process. And I guess this analogy falls apart right here, but let's move on to the human body and just take working out in any fashion, yoga, crossfit, lifting weights, running, whatever you're placing a stressor on the human body and the body responds, all the wonderful mechanisms, the livingness of it responds in such a way that it rebuilds from the stressor and it comes back stronger or faster and more enduring, more flexible.

13:23 Whatever sort of workout you're doing, that is antifragility. That is you place a stressor on the body and it responds becoming better. So although we kind of all know this, most people don't think about it because we don't have this term until recently. Antifragility so the working out, that's a really simple example, but we can think about this in certain other ways and many practices that are done that are good for your health tend to be along the lines of going into being uncomfortable in some sort of way. So the working out is one example. What about cold exposure like ice baths? Wim Hoff has made these quite popular in the last couple of years along with debriefing exercise, which is great because these are both areas that are not something the average person knows much about. So cold exposure, you are intentionally exposing your body to temperatures that make it uncomfortable.

14:18 I mean, you can even go so far build up to this smartly of course, but to temperatures that have some dangerous element to it and where if you stayed in too long you could get hypothermia. What's the point of this? Well, the body's going to respond to that stressor in a positive way. That's very important. Another stressor, fasting, not eating food, it's uncomfortable for people. Some people, I've never really fast it besides like the overnight fast when you're sleeping, but fasting can treat your body certain adaptations, your body adapts to having food coming in, all kinds of stuff that the body does during fasting. So I think it can be a very, very, very useful practice. And till Ed writes about this in his book as well, so you come back better from things such as this. I'll read a couple of quotes from his book just to give you some more idea just about antifragility itself.

15:14 Quote, some things benefit from shocks. They thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorders and stressors and love, adventure, risk and uncertainty. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. Oh, here's another quote. Typically the natural, the biological is both anti-fragile and fragile. Depending on the source and the range of variation. A human body can benefit from stressors to get stronger, but only to a point. So the human body is both fragile and anti-fragile. And this is a fun thing to, for me to think about. You know, it's amazing the adaptability of the body and what it can come back from. Right? So you can have an arm torn off, you can lose a kidney, you can lose an eye, you can lose both eyes. Like there's so much that can happen and you can still survive from there is not just robustness but antifragility I mean to a certain point, right?

16:11 With these, I guess better would be term robustness cause you're not getting better if you lose an eye generally, although your other senses would pick up the slack, your hearing would become sharper, your touch would become better, your smell would become more useful. So in a way that is an antifragile response because you still need to survive and get by in the world. So these other sensors would pick up the slack. If you lose both arms, you learn how to use your feet per pickup and move objects. So yeah, even in these, there's a case for it being anti-fragile at, at patients though, not saying those to happen, not to me, not to you. At the same time, we're also really fragile. Like to kill a human does not take much. You know, all kinds of accidents happen. It's actually quite easy to do it.

16:59 So it's interesting to think about this adaptability we have, but also you can push too far on the limits. Right? So I was saying with the ice bats, right, we take the temperature down much lower, way, way, way down low or we extend the timeframe. And what was good at some point, and this could be a blurry line, can become bad at some point, even with a workout right there is overdoing it where you can injure yourself or just overdoing it to the point where your body is not able to bounce back. You're actually driving up stress hormones, cortisol and all that, where your body becomes less healthy from doing so. So this line between antifragile and fragile is an important thing to recognize with fasting, right? You're having a good response. Your body is cleaning house and everything, but you go too far and you're starving and eventually you would die from such a thing.

17:52 So there's this line or this gray area between the two and that is important to recognize as well. There are lots of other things like this and we want to look at this in different ways and there are some things that really don't fit. So not all stressors can be good stressors that trigger this kind of anti-fragile adaptation. I would argue that any sort of mercury exposure is not a helpful thing to get. Your body can handle some to some degree. Let's say you eat some tuna or other fish, right? Mercury in the water, your body can hopefully process that out where it makes no impact, but does that actually make you better at all to any degree? Maybe in a sense we could say the body upregulates its detoxification systems in order to handle such a thing, but overall just mercury exposure, no amount fits good.

18:45 Whereas some amount of working out where fasting or cold exposure is, so we've not, all this stuff is super clear. Another quote, this is probably one of the favorite quotes in the whole book. I read all of his books. I really do like his work and I would recommend it to other people. Definitely gives a different worldview, right? So some different cultural ideas if you will, but another quote from him, if there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that as much superior to our own, just as there's a dichotomy in law, innocent until proven guilty as opposed to guilty until proven innocent. Let me express my rule as follows. What Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise, but humans and science do is flood until proven otherwise, nothing on the planet can be as close as they stickly significant as nature.

19:44 This quote isn't, this is what my book powered by nature is all about elementary. That again, if you haven't picked that up and you have a special deal available at powered by nature, book.com what is natural has been happening for a long time. So I really liked this idea because on the flip side, right? Science, you look at I Oneidas, I think that's how you pronounce his name, saying that 50 plus percent of research results are wrong for a variety of reasons, from sample sizes that are too small, wrong ways of doing the research, like all these different things where the funding comes from a lot of stuff. So science should not be our ultimate arbiter of truth, which sounds very contrary to the standard worldview because that is exactly what science is for essentially. But what the lab is saying here and which I fully agree with, let's start with just nature.

20:38 As a rule of thumb. I mean, mercury is a natural thing, right? So we can't say that. Oh, just because it's natural, it is automatically good. But as a general of thumb, we can say that generally what is natural is good and useful, and what has been done for a long time. So fasting was practiced, all kinds of different ways, really built into a lot of religions. But as we began as a human species to throw it, the religions, we'd lost fasting. Along with that, as we began to increase our food supply and always had it available, we didn't think, oh, why would I fast? Why would I starve myself when I didn't need to? But now we're finding sciences beginning to back this up. Oh, lots of cool stuff happens when you fast. And science was really only scratched the surface of what is available there.

21:26 So we want to look at these longterm practices, the use of natural medicines, just moving around all the basics. Getting Sun is something natural that we have only avoided in the last hundred years or so. Is that really what is causing cancer all around? I'm reminded of the huge Swedish or Finnish study where the more people got sunburned, the longer they lived. They may have had more skin cancer, but they had less of all other cancers and they were less deadly, so more sun exposure was far, far better for you. There's another anti fragile example, right? Sun Exposure. There is a certain window. What is good for us. We produce vitamin D and much else. There's other compounds going on and our body actually adapts to that. It will build up a tan so that we're able to combat the sun so we don't get too much. If we're out into it, there is a point where it goes fragile.

22:22 You can burn yourself and not have fun with that. You can get extremely bad sunburns. Not advocating that, and now I would say try to avoid getting sunburns in general, but that doesn't mean we should avoid the sun completely or we should slather on toxic chemicals that are found in most sunscreens. Onto our body. These are some of the ideas as far as understanding antifragility and if you do the things that support, what did I say here? I will aim to support expanding my antifragility to further increase my health. So what I mean by this is we have this antifragile too fragile window that's available, have us do too much and we break, do the right amount and our body adapts in a healthful way as we do more and more of some sort of health activity that works in the antifragile window, it expands our window.

23:11 So the training we can do in the gym, the cold exposure, we can handle the sun exposure, we can handle the fasting, we can handle. The more you do these, the better your body gets that Numb, the healthier the body is from them in general. And that means you can handle much more. And although these are specific examples, we do a whole bunch of things like this, we become more anti fragile in general. Our overall window of antifragility is bigger and what is fragile to us is pushed off in the distance. So take this concept spread out to your community, spread it out to culture. I think it is an idea worth understanding and worth using, worth talking about, and if you're enjoying this podcast, please spread it around. Tell other people about it. Let's get these health sovereign ideas out to more and more people, of course, sharing it with people's great, leaving a review on iTunes or elsewhere. Also, very useful. That's going to wrap it up for this episode. I hope you've enjoyed this.

00:18 Hello, hello, hello. We are back with the health sovereign podcast and today I'll be going over points number five and six of the health sovereign creed. This should be a fun one because these two points are about symbiosis. Number five, pointing it down toward the micro scale and number six looking at a bigger macro scale. Point number five, I recognize that I am not just human, but a symbiont with my microbiome that includes bacteria, fungi, viruses, and even the animal kingdom. I will act as a shepherd to my body's ecology to the best of my ability and with this point I want to read a couple of quotes that I put in my book powered by nature. This is actually one of my favorite chapters in the book because it is such an important concept and although everyone these days that's even just a little bit into health, has heard about the microbiome is probably even taking probiotics or something along these lines because they know about the importance of, well, just the bacteria.

01:32 A few people are recognizing these other organisms that are involved. So this is a very fascinating field and important to understand, one that we know next to nothing about AI, and some of these quotes will clear that up. So I'm going to start with a quote from James Shapiro, who is one of the leading researchers on bacteria out there. He says, 40 years experience as a bacterial geneticist has taught me that bacteria possess many cognitive computational and evolutionary capabilities unimaginable in the first six decades of the 20th century analysis of cellular processes such as metabolism, regulation of protein synthesis and DNA repair. Establish that bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus. Studies of genetic recombination, [inaudible] antibiotic resistance, and my own work on transposable elements revealed multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules.

02:43 Examination of colony development and organization led me to appreciate how extensive multicellular collaboration is among the majority of bacterial species, contemporary research and many laboratories on cells, cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilize sophisticated mechanisms for intracellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of higher plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observation requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings. He used some big words, some scientific words in there, but the gist of it is pretty amazing to recognize what he is saying. I'll try to distill this or just phrase it some different ways is bacteria are intelligent creatures. Let's start with that, and this is such a message of my book powered by nature. By the way, I'll just plug it right now.

03:51 Special deals still available over at powered by nature. book.com if you haven't picked up a copy, I spent a couple of years sinking into this. I would highly recommend you read it. It's really going to give you a foundation that goes along with everything we're talking about here in the health sovereign podcast, but on powered by nature. book.com you can pay for the book and you get $25 credit available at lost empire herbs, so it's actually like a better than free deal or the $30 credit plus we send some money to the Amazon rainforest. They'll protect that, so it's a all around winning deal, so definitely check that out if you have not already. Back to what James Shapiro is saying here, so the bacteria are intelligent creatures. They communicate, he talks about the colonies in there. They're building essentially cities or groups of bacteria and communicating with different ways and they're able to engineer their own DNA.

04:46 They're able to transfigure it, to change it. This is why antibiotic resistance is such a thing because when coming up against some sort of antibiotic, some bacteria will mutate, be able to change their DNA in a way to fight that off and then they can take this DNA and pass it on to their friends. This is why and how biotic resistance is a troubling thing and why some people are saying that we may be going into the post antibiotic era, which for all of western medicine's flaws and they're many, which we have talked about and we'll continue to. The creation of antibiotics is one of the best things that Western medicine has done. The problem is we have overused it. It's so great that we just continued to use it even in, well now we can say very stupid ways like feeding it to animals, livestock, animals, in order to fatten them up, not because they actually had some sort of disease, some sort of bacterial disease we needed to get rid of, but literally by feeding them this because it changes their microbiome, they would gain weight faster.

05:51 By the way. This seems to be true in humans too. So obesity epidemic. Anyone here's one of the reasons, of course, not the only one, but one of the reasons there, because we are getting some amount of these antibiotics in from animal products, meat, dairy, all that is gonna transfer through to some degree. And then of course we have it sprayed on all of our fruits and vegetables too. Glyphosate is a antibiotic, right? Lots of other pesticides are peculiar off things. So yeah, how this interacts with their microbiome. That's a thing. When we started doing this whole pesticide, everything, we did not understand any of this. So we looked at, it's like, oh, these don't affect human cells, but what about everything else that makes up us? Yeah, we didn't think to look there, but guess what it does. They changed their DNA. That's really important to recognize.

06:45 So this idea of DNA just being random mutation. Well, that has been proven wrong. Most people don't realize that the whole neo Darwinism is actually a falsity. Lots of other things happen. They're able to switch around DNA, not just epigenetics. There's the transposons different ways of tinkering with DNA that these small bacteria do in viruses do and various other things do that. Maybe yes, we humans can't, but we are symbions with them. So they are changing things, which means because they're part of us, we're being changed. And there's a whole theory that has a good amount of evidence that the mitochondria within every single one of ourselves, these are often called the the powerhouses of the cells. They produce the DP, they produce energy. These are a ancient bacteria that joined cells and became cells. Basically it was a symbiosis that happened or two different things actually joined together.

07:45 And this is what allowed multicellular life to come to pass. Same sort of thing happened with plants. With the chloroplast your analogy, I believe we're involved in that. So it's very important to look at this. So if we are doing something that if we take an antibiotic, it's killing bacteria in the beginning of bacteria, we did not even realize there was such a thing as non pathological bacteria. That's how far off the truth we missed. This did not recognize it. Add are, I forget where I saw this, but I was reading like a 1930s book talking about bacteria. Everything was pathological in there. So you'd take an antibiotic, wipes things out except the ones that are going to be resistant to that. That means all your friendly bacteria. That means this part of you, if you are napalming the area essentially, but how much does that affect your mitochondria?

08:38 Does it get inside your cells recognizing that those are bacteria in there? I am not aware of any research that has looked at that specifically and it would be interesting to find out. Let me read another quote. So that's the bacteria, right? And this is an area that most people have heard something about but recognize, okay, so these are Centene creatures and they can, Ooh, what was that one part of that quote? I want to reread that cause that is really important. Sophisticated mechanisms for intracellular communication even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of higher plants and animals to meet their own needs. Understand that your gut is sending more information to the brain than vice versa. Or is that the heart getting those two mixed up anyway, information is passing through these different channels in a big way. Bacteria being a huge, huge part of your gut, more of your gut.

09:35 Then you yourself have human cells. Even so they are sending this information which then affects your thinking. You ever have a craving for anything, right? What are cravings coming from? It's not so much you. It is much more the bacteria, which is why if you change how you actually eat, you begin to crave different foods. I think most people think that cravings are, yeah, we do have thought patterns like get stuck in everything but change the bacteria, change the thinking. This is an important thing to realize and bacteria are not the only ones. Let me read another passage here. This is from a review about the microbiome, so everyone's heard of the micro biome, but the mycobiome, MYCO, that is specifically the Mycological, the fungi involved in us like the microbiome as a whole individual members of the microbiome may also play a beneficial or commensal role in the host.

10:36 Beneficial fungi have been found to be preventative and therapeutic agents. The limitation of today's immune therapies is that most target only a single fungal species. Ignoring the overall microbiome composition. Today, our knowledge of the microbiomes suggests that interactions among fung guy within an environment and between microbiomes found in different body sites may play an important role in pathogenesis. One thing I talk about in this book, and it is important to realize is so just like I was saying about the bacteria, we used to think they're all pathological. Can you tell me right now, just think about it, any of the microbiome that's beneficial or if you think of fungus in the body, what do you think of Candida athletes foot, a yeast infection. Can you think of anything else? Do we have any terms to talk about like beneficial mycology in the body? We don't.

11:33 It's something we've completely missed and something that even now like there's next to no research on, but what this is saying is that fungi live with us. Many of the, the word Commensal, you may have not heard that word before means it's basically kind of a neutral interaction. They just live here. It's not a problem to us and it's just not an issue. But then there's beneficial, which obviously means there's some sort of beneficial relationship between one or both of the organisms. So maybe we're providing something for the fun guy or they're providing something for us or both ways. So this is another area that is vastly underexplored. Besides those few cases of like specific acute infections, we really don't know much about the yeast and fungi in us yet. Think about this. I mean just based off of not knowing many things, how much could these be affecting different things?

12:32 I mean, one thing I like to take is the different medicinal mushrooms. Now these are not going to grow on you. You're not going to have Reishi growing inside your body. But the way I like to think of these is that they are helping to educate them immune system. And one of the reasons for this is that that's what they do in nature. There's a symbiotic relationship between the mycelium, their networks of mycelium that are often underground and that are working along with trees and plants, their root systems and they're providing things for them immune system of the plants. I think they can do much the same for us. All right. One more quote and this time about viruses. Herbert Virgin says virome interactions with the host cannot be encompassed by a monotheistic view of viruses as pathogens. Instead, the genetic and transcriptional identity of mammals is defined in part by our code evolved at virome concept with profound implications for understanding health and disease.

13:35 Same thing. They're thought of bacteria just as pathogens, not about fun gag just as pathogens, viruses before I said this right here, do you think of them as just as pathogens but they're not the virome being another word like microbiome or mycobiome virus meaning this network of viruses that lives in us. You think? We have a lot of bacteria in us. Viruses. There are, I forget if it's 10 or a hundred times or a thousand times as many. There's vastly more of them and they're not all bad. This is part of us and viruses swap DNA. Like what's a good analogy? Like kids swap baseball cards. It's something that just happens easily for them and this is actually how our DNA can get changed. This was one of the functions of it that's not just random that viruses which may happen with something like say a mosquito or other ways of passing genetic material can occur that this may be why there's what they used to call junk DNA.

14:38 Why so much of this DNA can transfer from even across species and how that may affect evolution. We really know next to nothing about this, so these are just a few quotes in. There's so much more in powered by nature. Once again, highly recommend you check out that book. I wanted to do this because I hope you feel its mind expanding. Like when I dove into this area I found it truly mind expanding. For me, an important part of this is also the hygiene hypothesis. So one of the reasons that's theorize that auto immunity allergy is all this kind of stuff is on the rise is because our immune system is not being challenged by the environment like it used to. Sanitation and hygiene is a very good thing and that's a large reason why disease went down disease and infection and death from all of that very good reason to be sanitary.

15:34 But we seem to have over done it to the point where with an overcorrection right, we went too far that there's a downside to that as often happens with nature. So we did that with antibiotics. The overuse of them has not only made it so there's antibiotic resistant strains out there, but it's caused lots of health issues and people not recognizing the beneficial bacteria in us. So same kind of thing. If we look at being overly sanitary, our body, our immune system is not challenged how it normally would be in nature. And this may cause the autoimmunity. Cause if that means just [inaudible] not getting that education, this is where things may go awry. This is why it's good to introduce wildness into yourself in different ways. So when I go out to nature, I'll just forge out, eat a little of this herb here or a this fruit over there.

16:29 I was just this past weekend walking around and there's plenty of man's Anita around and they have the Manzanita Berry, which is high vitamin C containing tastes pretty good. You gotta chew it up cause it's like powdery inside the flesh. Very small. But then rock hard seeds, they spit the seeds out. It takes some work to do it. But in addition to getting what's in the fruit, there's just wild yeast, wild bacteria, all kinds of things here. I'm not washing them before I consume them. And if you're able to get something in the wild or something, you grow yourself, this bacteria, this what's on here may be completely different than what you find inside a probiotic. One of the things with this, the viruses especially but also true with bacteria that we may not be able to even say that it's this genus and species because they're swapping DNA so much that how we look at in understand this world, this reduction is framed, doesn't necessarily work because it doesn't reduce in quite the way we see it happen with animals, plants our size.

17:33 So this is some of the important stuff to realize for our symbiotic relationship. And I think I say it here, I will act as a shepherd to my body's ecology to the best of my ability. Another word I like a lot is steward. So when you that you are not just you, then it may change how you think, how you feel, how you behave a bit, recognize that you are this symbiotic creature. Yeah, sure. Mostly human or partly human. Depends on if we're just counting size of different things or cells and number of cells and all that. I mean if we count just by like number of individual cells, then we're mostly viral. But recognize this and think of it. So when you are feeding yourself well, one, you're not just feeding yourself, are you eating the right foods in order to support the right microbiome in you, which then in turn supports you?

18:30 It's a system. It's a reinforcing feedback loop. You eat right foods and what right is. That's a whole other discussion, but let's take foods with the insoluble fibers, right, which is food for bacteria and they get eat these foods. Then those certain populations are going to expand. They're likely going to make it so you crave or desire those foods more. They'll change your taste buds. Even part of the reason taste change is likely that microbiome changes. I don't know if that's been studied, but I'm just going to come out and say that's partly at least how it works, so then it's going to reinforce itself, right? You have that craving because the bacteria wants food for itself. Once to expand. It's calling me. All this being said, of course there are times when there is pathogenic bacteria, pathogenic fungi, pathogenic viruses. We've got to recognize that.

19:23 I think we have a pretty good grasp on that. What we do not have a good grasp on our human species is this beneficial site and how it really all works. And here's the other thing about a lot of people look at genetics as the end all be all. Okay? And so we've mapped out all of human DNA, which ultimately hasn't led us to much of curing disease or anything like that. What about all bacteria, all viral DNA, and they're swapping around all the time. So to map it out, what does that even mean? How much would that help us? There's likely some insights there, but something else to think about, this stewardship component is important to think about because it does change once if you really grasp and that not just like a cognitive thought, but can believe this. It does begin to change your behavior to some degree.

20:13 So now I want to move on to point number six. I recognize that I am like a bacteria or insect in size to the greater ecology of Gaia planet earth, that I cannot exist without plant life nor many other species and kingdoms in the web of life. I will do my best to align what is good for me to what is good for the greater ecology. So on the previous point, kind of taking a microscope into the body and seeing that, oh, here's some bacteria, here's some virus, here's some fun guy. Oh, and we didn't even talk about parasites. Right? Are All parasites, parasites in the common use of the word? Are they all bad? Might we have some animal components within us that are commensal or beneficial? Again, an area that has not been discussed much. The truth is most people probably do have parasites.

21:07 Yeah, most I'd say that's likely true. And they can be in certain areas that are not just the gut. Interesting to look at isn't necessarily all bad. Not enough information on there to say adequately, I think to just think of that as gross and disgusting, which many people may be recoiling. Now thinking about how much of that is a cultural response versus recognizing these are and have been parts of us for a long time that aren't necessarily bad. So with this ecological thinking also goes the other way. We can look out to the bigger one. I'm saying you are like an insect or bacteria in size. I don't know the exact ratios, but think of the planet as a whole. So if you think of the planet as a body or living being, which is what the guy hypothesis is about though there are different forms of that.

21:56 Some people think it's, it's like a living being versus other ones will say is a living being useful to look at either way. I suppose. So we're just some bacteria or an insect on there. So what we do by ourselves, not necessarily so important, but a whole colony of us can change some effects, change the environment itself. Are we being parasitical commensal, beneficial. Just an interesting way of thinking you guys. Here's the thing. What is to differentiate between you and not you. So he saw that you are made up of viruses. Bacteria is whole microbiome. So you're not just you, but between you and the outside world. Most people just commonly think of at the end of your skin is the end of you. Right? But think about just your lungs breathing in air right now. As you listen to this, you're taking air into your body and expelling it.

22:50 Now we don't think about air much because we don't see it, but I mean at what point is this air in you versus out? Are you saying once you take the breath into your body or is it once it makes the transfer through the lungs into the blood that it becomes part of you and is it the same way on the way out? Once you exhale mostly carbon dioxide. It's out of you, not a part of you. Well, what about your skin that is picking up electromagnetic signal from the sun, which is converting, creating vitamin D, cholesterol sulfate, other compounds. Yeah, a lot more in vitamin D. That's not all there is about getting that sun contact. This is a body that is many, many millions of miles away. Yet the light from that is transforming us. Does that make that part of our environment? Well, let's just put this out there.

23:43 One of the sun disappeared. How long would you exist if you rid of all plant life on earth, how long would you exist? I guess if you had bottles of oxygen stored up, you could go for a little while, but then what else? And there's that whole thing about when the honeybees disappear, they're dying off and alarming rate. Sometimes see something say like, oh, and they're coming back or not. But if they do die off, how that affects this whole web of ecology. Will we survive? Well, humans survive. If honeybees go away, it's hard to say for sure because we don't quite see all the web of impact that would happen. Pollination for large part stops happening. Some other insects, even mosquitoes pollinate some flowers. There's an interesting thing about mosquitoes, so let's let Bill Gates kill them out all off with GMO mosquitoes, right? Yeah, I understand that is the biggest killer out there.

24:38 But fixes that fail. We don't look at the longterm consequences many times. Just the short term thinking. So where do you, and this is the one that points with like the endocrine disrupting chemicals. How I like to look at this on a couple of different levels. So you have plastic BPA in it. Let's say it's BPA free, but do you know if it's BPF bps, the other females, they often just replaced them in many things. Hard to find the details on whether they have that. Unfortunately these chemicals are just as bad, give or take of endocrine disrupting as BPA itself. So you have this plastic, he drank water out of it, you heat it up, eat off it, whatever. You're getting these chemicals and BPA, maybe just one of them into your body and it can have these endocrine disrupting effects. Not really good for anyone.

25:29 And then you throw away the bottle or you tried to recycle it, but it doesn't make it out there and it goes in the landfill or let's say you're a litter bug, he just cast it out your car and the plastic is breaking down in the environment. Photo degradation, the sun reflecting on it, that sun signal, once again starting to break it down and BPA is going into and the environment, it's getting into the trees, into the plants. A plant absorbs it maybe puts out this chemical in the fruit and then some animal comes along, eat that fruit. This is the web of ecology. This is understanding the stewardship, the shepherding of the ecology from yourself, all the organisms that make up you and all the organisms that make up you on the larger scale that are part and parcel of this. So this is one of the things that is useful to look at and why I talk about the idea of alignment.

26:22 Your health is aligned not just with your human cells, but your entire microbiome. Your health is aligned with not just the symbio that is you, but the larger environment. Because that plastic was just one example. We could find other ones. He popped some pharmaceutical drugs. These are made to be persistent chemicals so they can have action in your body. They do that and then what your body detox is, the process of mouth through the liver. And or kidneys. They go into the toilet and then what happens to you? You may think they just disappear off, but now they're going to a wastewater treatment plant. They're getting, well, hopefully filtered out of the water though. I think you may recognize that that does not happen 100% Oh, and then they're actually concentrated. The waste is concentrated and sold as fertilizer in some places. They're that smart, but let's just say it's run off and dumped in the ocean or dumped in some groundwater's seeps out.

27:21 Does nature does a tree of Redwood and oak, a Bush Manzanita? Do they want your Prozac? Do they want your chemotherapy drugs? No one thinks about this. Without this ecological frame of thinking, we are very shortsighted and thinking about our health and these things do have larger effects, and of course, you know one person does not matter, but it's a call. Any of us that does matter. If we have this alignment between our health and the health of Gaia, our health and the health of our symbionts, then we think ecologically. We think symbiotically we make very different decisions. So I'm going to close with a story about, well, I've talked about on a few things, my psychedelic use, it seems to work for me. Don't recommend it for everyone, but it has been one of my, I guess a path I've used that has helped me to grow in many different ways.

28:19 So one day a mountain, the forest on a combination of psilocybin mushrooms and Syrian room. So some fucking guy in some plant and fairly strong trip is thinking back on it. At one point during this I felt like I glimpsed into the mind of Gaia into the plant night. So here I delivered this idea of us being this size of a cell or bacteria insect to Gaia. I felt this during this journey. I felt what it was like see guy's perspective of me, how insignificant I was, and also that I could not truly grasp the mind of Gaia. That human mind is not meant to grasp that, but it was a hell of an experience. Even glimpsing it a little bit. Part of that was what helped me to come up with these ideas really because you know, coming from that experience of it, not just a cognitive idea, so I'm not saying you should necessarily strive for the same thing, but this is something even without the use of psychedelics, you can use meditation, whatnot.

29:23 Just reflect on these ideas. There's some deep ideas and I feel despite that experience, despite having looked at this for awhile, then I'm still just beginning to grasp them, but it's very important things. If we want a sustainable future, we have to think ecologically. We have to in alignment of different levels from the small to the sizeable, both below and above us. Very important to do. That's going to wrap it up for this episode. Once again, I would recommend powered by nature if you like this stuff. I do have a lot more inside powered by nature. The chapter on symbiosis is one of my favorites for these very reasons. I think you could tell I have fun talking about this and I think it is some important ideas, so check that out. Of course it's on Amazon, but you want that special deal that's at powered by nature. book.com I think paid 20 bucks for the book. You get $30 gift card to lost empire herbs. So even with the shipping and handling charge there, it is better than free. Yeah. Hard to beat that kind of deal. And we're saving some of the rainforest at the same time, looking at that bigger ecology poweredbynaturebook.com. Thank you for listening. Think ecologically. Think alignment, I'll talk to next week.