Our resident neurologist and banjo afficionado Josh Turknett, MD is back on the podcast with me to talk about the premise behind his Ancestral Health Symposium 2019 talk, How to Win at Angry Birds. It’s a paradigm for how best to approach health and performance and has far-reaching implications that will help you simplify efforts to optimise your health. 

In this interview, Josh talks about his 4-quadrant model, a detector for finding a signal in the health noise. In an age where specialization and technology have become the norm and the next health trend is around the corner, it’s easy for the big picture to be obscured. Josh offers a model for prioritising interventions that will give you the greatest benefit with the least disruption. 

Here’s the outline of this interview with Josh Turknett:

[00:00:44] Josh's 2019 AHS talk: How To Win At Angry Birds: The Ancestral Therapeutic Paradigm.

[00:00:57] Few significant advances in medical therapeutics.

[00:04:05] The parable of Angry Birds: Team Game Level vs. Team Source Code.

[00:09:35] Four-quadrant model. (Here’s my version of Josh’s talk - go to minute 11:34 for a visual of the 4-quadrant model.)

[00:12:49] First quadrant: Game-level supportive interventions (e.g., sleep, diet).

[00:14:09] Second quadrant: Game-level interventions that are exploitative or disruptive (extreme heat/cold, HIIT, mindfulness).

[00:15:16] Third quadrant: Source code level interventions that are supportive in nature (e.g., taking a supplement to correct a deficiency).

[00:16:45] Fourth quadrant - Source-code level interventions that are disruptive (e.g., pharmaceuticals).

[00:25:52] Learning to play anything: feedback loop.

[00:27:19] Malcolm Kendrick podcasts: 1. Why Cholesterol Levels Have No Effect on Cardiovascular Disease (And Things to Think about Instead) 2. A Statin Nation: Damaging Millions in a Brave New Post-health World.

[00:28:43] Book: First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began, by David W. Deamer.

[00:31:40] Dale Bredesen.

[00:31:53] Book: The Four Tendencies, by Gretchen Rubin.

[00:32:36] The Intelligence Unshackled Podcast.

[00:34:44] First Do No Harm approach to education.

[00:35:34] Josh's on Patreon; elitecognition.com.

[00:36:38] The Migraine Miracle website; Josh’s previous podcast appearance: The Migraine Miracle.