#229 Becoming Antifragile During Times of Chaos - Siim Land on Filip Van Houte's Podcast

Filip Van Houte (0:00)

Welcome, everyone, on the Rants About Humanity Podcast. Today, I got an ultimate biohacker on the podcast, Siim Land.

Siim Land is an author, speaker, and biohacker from Estonia. He has written many bestselling books like Metabolic Autophagy, Stronger by Stress, and the Immunity Fix, and also posting a lot of things about getting better sleep, and maybe also about waking up. Welcome on the podcast, Siim.

Siim Land (0:23)

Yeah, thanks for having me and yeah, good to be here.

Filip Van Houte (0:27)

You studied anthropology, right?

Siim Land (0:30)

Yeah, in university.

Filip Van Houte (0:33)

How do you look at the state of the world and the state of humans at the moment with everything that's going on in the crazy year 2020-2021? Well, I think it's a very interesting time to be alive.

Siim Land (0:51)

And I think it's just we like, you know, it's these kinds of things, crises and pandemics or different natural disasters that are very natural parts of existence, especially human, you know, human life as well. And they happen all the time, basically, over the course of history. It's just like we tend to maybe pay more attention to them because of, I don't know, like technology or something. But yeah, like these things aren't like, you know, unnatural, they're not deviant, they're actually quite normal.

And yeah, like I think a lot of the time we just tend to overreact ourselves to whatever maybe and we kind of hyper focus on things.

Filip Van Houte (1:30)

Yeah, I'm just curious about biohacking. It's kind of like using your own body, wisdom of the body, food is thy medicine, ancient old wisdom by boosting your immune system.

I don't see a lot of being stressed on boosting your immune system right now. So how are you looking at this as an anthropologist and someone who's into biohacking?

Siim Land (1:51)

Well, yeah, it's, you know, I think it's like a lot of these, let's say, late legislations and or like I said, the organ organizations and governments, they don't want to maybe take the responsibility for the if things go wrong. So they don't want to, they're not going to recommend something that isn't guaranteed to work. So like, you know, of course, taking care of your immune system is very important. And they do like say that you should do it to a certain extent, but they don't like emphasize it or they don't put like any assurance on it because they aren't or they're like afraid of like, you know, messing things up or something. So that's why they're kind of trying to hope for like some vaccines or something, because they think that it's going to be more effective and it's going to provide like more long term solutions. But, you know, we don't have like the vaccine for the common flu, and we don't have vaccines for most of these, you know, similar infections like influenza or something. And even like the Spanish flu, we don't have a vaccine for that either, although that's been around, you know, or has been known about for over like 100 years.

So yeah, like, they're just I think they're just afraid of taking responsibility for their mistakes.

And yeah, they don't want to they don't want the people to come out for with the pitchforks, basically.

Filip Van Houte (3:07)

Yeah. And I read about the I don't know how many people died with the Spanish flu, maybe 40 million or something in like Europe, but the population was a lot less black plague, one in three people.

No matter what you think about what's going on, it seems a bit of an overreaction when you look at how many people actually get killed by it historically, right, when you take a look at the black plague and other plague Spanish flu, even other flows. What is your opinion why the reaction now is completely different than, let's say, in the past with other viruses and big plagues?

Siim Land (3:42)

Well, you know, depends on how you look at it. Like it can be said that the world is more like interconnected now. So the kind of potential to spread much faster is greater. So that's why it did get from, you know, China to New York and Europe very fast. And even like, you know, all continents of the world basically within like weeks or months. So that is one of the issues that it is very like unpredictable, it's very rapid. And people aren't like kind of prepared to deal with it. So like the hospitals aren't ready. We don't have like a current proper equipment and we don't know how to treat it. So yeah, it is natural and it is necessary to slow down it initially as much as possible so that we could, you know, gather the right information and get the right data. But like that train has already passed.