Community Influence and Anti-fragility in Health

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.