Episode 149: Better Than Biohacking

If you're going to try and optimize your health, you're going to want to talk to a biohacker, right? Maybe not. We're going to talk to an ex biohacker on today's episode of the movement movement, the podcast for one and up for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy strong body starting feet first, you know, those things that are your foundation at the end of your legs. We break down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the flat out lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or play or hike or do yogurt or crossfitter.

Oh my God, the millions of things people can do on their feet and do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively and less enjoyably. I know I did. It's a trick question because look, if you're not having fun, you're not going to keep it up anyway. Hopefully we can help you do that.

I'm Stephen Sashan from Zero Shoes.com, your host of the movement movement. We call it that because we're creating a movement that involves you. It's easy. I'll tell you how in a second about natural movement, letting your body do what it's made to do.

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Nick, give me a favor. Tell people who you are and what you do. And then we're going to talk about your life as an ex-biohacker. Stephen, thanks for having me.

It's great to be here. My name is Nick Urban. I am an ex-biohacker, as you mentioned. And for those who don't know, biohacking is the art and science of changing your external environment and your internal environment.

And I help curious high achievers find the little known answers and solutions to improve their health performance and quality of life. And I began back in high school when people would turn to me to try and figure out why what they were doing wasn't working and some of the alternative solutions that they couldn't find elsewhere, how to implement those into their lives. And many of them came across biohacking and I was in that group as well. I thought that there's lots of little things you can do, little hacks that make a big difference.

And indeed, that's true. But then at some point, just like a hack on a computer, eventually there's long-term repercussions. Those hacks morph and there's unintended side effects and consequences. And if you study the ancient practices of Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, hermetic principles, all of these, I noticed a concept called bivalism emerging, where it's working with the more subtle things that are behind matter.

And when you work with those, you're able to get longer lasting outcomes that are more effective and easier ultimately. Okay, cool. Thank you. That was way more than I was expecting, which is great.

So I want to come back to a couple of things you said and address them in a couple of different ways. But I'm going to start by asking this question. Do you mind if I'm obnoxious and really poke the bear, if you will? Definitely.

Okay, cool. So you just try biohacking is the art and science of film and blank. Let's add the art, science and pseudoscience of because there's a lot of that. I was at a biohacking event in the past.

I'm not going to say how long ago because I don't want to give away which one it was and I've been to a bunch of them where I met some people who actually are publishers in that world. And they, I don't know how it happened, but in the conversation, they said 95% of the things in this room are complete placebos. And so let's start there with what's your take on, and I'm curious, you said some of these hacks actually do work. I'm curious about what things you think do work and what things you think are placebos.

And again, my warning, I may suggest that things that you think do work may be placebos or may work for reasons different than what people say. I could be wrong. You might just, you know, we might be on the same page on this. We're going to talk about this, but it may be that we got some placebo things going on.

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you that with that. And there's so much in this world and really anything in the health and wellness and performance world that is placebo has a very strong element of pseudoscience. So I'm in agreement with you there.

And I think some of the things that I noticed immediate and profound effects for from on the biohacking side would be things like certain new tropics, like it's like you take caffeine, most people feel that if you're never taking caffeine before and there's other related compounds you can take that create a very immediate and noticeable effect. And there's a lot of technologies actually have some behind me, like quantum technologies that you can use. You can use surrogate endpoints and biomarkers and see how that influences physiological processes like heart rate, heart rate variability, brainwave coherence. And you can see how some of them impact that, but it's very hard to attribute it to anything more than the placebo.

And as like the studies have shown placebo and no sebo, the opposite end where you believe something won't work are among the strongest effects in all of medicine. So, you know, it's funny. So I like to have half jokingly say that I'm immune to placebos. And I say that because there were a number of things in the days when I was less rigid in my or less clear in my thinking, less, and that's all that sort of stuff.

I didn't investigate things that I was being told. And so I was working with some local naturopaths or chiropractors, whatever, and they would give me very treatments that had no impact on me. And I didn't understand why. And it wasn't until years later when I started investigating these things, but oh, because those are placebos.

There's nothing actually there. So I mean, I used to joke with a homeopath that I knew. I said, if you guys really wanted to help people, wouldn't you just take all of your various homeopathic supplements and put them in a reservoir? I mean, you could just go over there with an eye dropper and just dose the entire reservoir and they look at me and I went, oh, but then you'd be diluting it so much that it would be so powerful it would kill people, wouldn't it?

And that's when they would get mad at me. But I'm going to, in the spirit of being pleasantly obnoxious, I don't know of anything that, let me say this way, I was going to write a book with a friend of mine who's an actual quantum mechanic. He was an actual subatomic physicist. And it was going to be called something like a physicist's guide to life in a new age world.

And the big argument, the big premise that it started with was people are using the word quantum in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with quantum physics. It's a great word. Typically, the things that people are developing that use that word have nothing to do with anything having to do with quantum effects. But to your point, I think to enter your credit, you said, you know, it's quantum devices, but you said, you know, these things that seem you're doing something, but we aren't totally sure how.

And so there may be placebo effects there. I would argue probably definitely. In fact, I kind of, you know, I approach a lot of things with a very open mind, but I don't necessarily believe it. In other words, I'm from Missouri.

I'm the show me state. I mean, I'm not actually from Missouri, but someone gave me advice recently. I'm not going to say what it was. And it just don't happen that I had a perfect test case for this healing device.

And the perfect test case was that I jumped into Boulder Creek. I'd taken a dive in and slipped and hit a rock with both of my knees and scraped up both of my knees pretty much equivalently. So I said, I'm going to use the device and I'll put it on one leg and I use it for an hour day. And what do you think should happen?

I said, oh, my God, it's going to heal in like no time. And not only did the leg, it was being quote treated, not heal any faster. I think it was worse. And so I reported that and they said, well, clearly you're thinking God and the way of the device working.

And I said, if a thought called, I don't know if it'll work, could interfere with the device that is pressed against my skin, then we got a problem. And I said, you know what, what I don't have to believe in or not believe in for it to have an effect. They said, well, I said, purpose it. I said, you know, there's lots of drugs where you can take them and you don't need to believe or not believe anything.

It's going to knock you on your ass or do whatever it's supposed to do. And so anyway, so that's that's one thing. It's one of the quantum thing in there. Second one, one that is not a poking the bear kind of thing.

You mentioned that a lot of these things can have a long term unintended consequences. Can you say more about the kind of things that you've seen, those kind of consequences and what you notice, and I'll share one with you after you've done that. Yeah, before we do, I want to keep poking that bear a little bit more because I think that's a really interesting topic that doesn't get enough attention. And one thing is like, yes, humans are very susceptible to placebo, but animals and newborns and really like things like that.

They don't consciously think the same way us skeptical adults do. They're less immune. So I like to or they're more immune. So I like to look and see how it affects them.

So maybe you can do some experiments watering using the special water that the company makes or whatever it is and try watering plants instead of drinking yourself and see, compare that to a control which has normal water in that way. Well, you know, I think that's brilliant. But you know, even then, so I'll tell you where the human still comes into that equation. It's whether they know how to set up the experiment correctly.

So, you know, if you're going to do the plant watering thing, you don't do it with one plant that's getting watered and one plant that's getting, you know, watered with the magic water. You do it with like 20 plants that are each, you know, that you've divided or more because as someone who grows plants, I have an indoor hydroponic garden, I can tell you some of those things grow better than others under identical conditions. So it's amazing how badly people set up simple, seemingly simple experiments. Yeah.

And then to make it even more comprehensive, you have the time and resources. You'd also want to blind the experimenter to not know which waters which on the plants, but that's a whole other level and just like a simple at home thing you can try with your quantum devices or whatever they are. Yeah. That's a easy one.

Yeah. My favorite thing on the quantum device kind of stuff is if something lights up, just make another device that just lights up, you know, just do something or if it's something that that has to, I mean, this goes back to this is not just, you know, about biohackers or people who are susceptible to see what things this is pretty exciting. So I don't know if you remember, I don't know if you remember the whole phenomenon around the idea of cold fusion, were you around for that? A little bit.

Well, the gist is some guys at the University of Arizona, maybe ASU, I can't remember. They had claimed that they had created fusion at room temperature. I mean, we're still trying to create fusion at, you know, a hundred times the temperature of the sun temperature. So they claimed it was happening at room temperature.

So this one physicist said to them, so your theory is that using heavy water, which is water where it's a hydrogen isotope, that heavy water is what makes this thing work. So the way to test this is by looking for a testing a counterfactual test is something that's the opposite and see what happens. So get rid of the heavy water and see regular water and see if you get the same results. If you do, then it had nothing to do with heavy water, which is that this whole thing was fake.

So they went, well, it's definitely not. So sure, we'll go test it. And they tested it with regular water and it turned out that it was fake. So, you know, this, so this kind of mistaken causality permeates human thinking at every level from dumb people to the smartest people you ever met, who at some point kind of circle around and come down again.

So yes, that was a very good point that if you can demonstrate that something works on someone who has no idea or an animal, brilliant, but then I guess you've got to try to get you out of the equation as well. So that's one. All right. So last one from your intro.

We're still in your intro. So even the concept of violinism, I find very interesting because there are of course two camps. There's a camp where everything is merely material, aka the materialist, and there's a camp where people think there are some unseen forces that do various things that are either difficult or impossible to measure or get measured with dubious devices. So points give me a flashback.

There was a naturopath that I was seeing who had some device that was ostensibly able to tell when I needed some kind of supplement that she was going to recommend. And this worked by her pressing it on various points of my body. And I pointed out to her at one point, everything that you say that I need right before you said that you were pressing harder with that device than on the things that I don't need. And she said, oh, well, you know, it's about the interaction and relationship between the patient and the physician.

No, I think you were just pressing harder for some reason had nothing to do with me. And but you know, again, I was willing to try things. So I spent way too much money and took all those supplements and noticed zero difference whatsoever. So again, there's a, oh, wait, sorry.

I can't get to keep doing this. Somebody had a device that was like, you lie down this bed and there was these crystals of various kinds that they lit up and pointed them at parts of your body and it was supposed to be this miraculous magical thing. And after the treatment, the person said, so how was that? I said, I don't know.

I fell asleep. Why do you feel when you fell asleep? And then woke up. I mean, I don't feel in any way different.

And so it's, anyway, it's fascinating. But back to vitalism. There are, I don't want to put this, there are often, not always, often simpler explanations for some of these effects than what many people would like. And sometimes there are explanations that I, that I and other people don't have answers for it yet.

So I used to do a, I'm going to get it back to you. I swear to God, I used to do a mikido and Tai Chi. And both of those, there are lots and lots of claims about vital forces and Chi or Chi and how they work, where I was hanging out with people who just wanted to get rid of the mythology and see if this stuff really worked without any of that. And with, with like, you know, in particular, there are things that you do to someone's anatomy that work on everybody and have nothing to do with any magical energy.

That I, if you grab my wrist in a particular way and I move in a particular way, it locks up your joints in a way that I can then easily throw you on the ground. It doesn't require any building up, you know, your Chi and your, your Chi in this case. And I used to get in trouble a lot because the dojo that I went to, that's the way we practiced. I assumed it was like that everywhere.

Then I would go to other dojo's when I was traveling and some big black belt would try to move me and he couldn't move me and I could throw him around effortlessly. And it then turned out often that that was the guy, the guy, it was his dojo that I was in and people that's, you don't do that. That's not showing respect. I don't care about respect.

I just prove that he's full of shit. So, and I'm not trying to prove that. It was like, I just demonstrated that by accident because I didn't know any better. Now at the same time, I met a Chinese jigong guy who is my last story, I promise, for now.

Who I saw a documentary with him where it looked like he was electrocuting the people that touched him and more, it looked completely fake. It looked like they were just throwing themselves into the air and bouncing off the walls and looked completely fake. It turned out he brought to America, I got to meet him with about 20 other people in a room and he puts his hands about six inches apart from each other and is saying to the translator that he's just sending this electrical current back and forth between his hands and he motions for me to come up and feel it. I'm not gonna, ah, crap.

I'm gonna not feel anything and I'm just gonna make him look like an idiot because I've done things like this and there's nothing, there's no there there there. Okay, so I moved my hand from above his two hands into the middle of his two hands and it felt like I was getting electrocuted. I didn't bounce off the walls. I didn't do things that looked insane, but I literally felt like if I stuck my, if I grabbed a electrical fence or whatever that word is I'm looking for or put my finger on a socket by accident, which yes, I've done.

And I was, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me try this again. And I tried it again by moving my hand into his hands from a different direction and each time now this was a good 25 years ago. If it happened now, sadly, he's dead.

Maybe I would perceive it differently, but at the time and to this day, I have no idea what happened. Maybe there's a there there there. Interestingly, none of his students could replicate what he was doing. So, but I'm willing to, you know, suspend disbelief and say, I don't know.

I mean, I've experienced some things that I can't explain, but I don't have the opportunity to reinvestigate them now. So anyway, that was a long tangent from vitalism where, you know, there are things that like an acupuncture where you don't need to, well, there are things where that story doesn't necessarily hold up, but it may be pointing to something that we just don't understand yet that may still be materialistic, but we don't understand it. So I'm just intrigued. I guess where that was a long tirade for.

I find that one interesting, but it's one of the really fun places to go. Let's see if we can really investigate this. Let's see if we can find a counterfactual. Let's see if we can find a way of controlling this.

Let's see if we can find a way to remove extraneous factors that really put it to the test. And so with that, can you tell me any of the things that you think of that involve vital force stuff that we might want to take a look at? Sure. Well, the first thing that I want to comment on is that you're right in this world.

There's the two camps. There's the materialists and there's the vitalists like Life Force, energy type, and there's a huge divide between them and very few people want to explore and challenge each other's ideas because it's more of like an attack on one or the other and saying, oh, they're totally wrong or we're totally right, whatever it is. So I love the discussions where you will actually like say, what if you do this and think about that and having those. Yeah.

The reason that I like you is that while there are certain things that you believe you are one of the few people that I've met who's willing to go, okay, wait, let me take a look at that when I'm giving the opportunity. Yeah, absolutely. One thing, like the qigong practice you mentioned in Tai Chi, that made me think of an exercise that I was given at one point where you take your hands, you rub them together for 30 seconds or something, and then you separate your hands and you close your eyes and you bring them together and don't touch them, but then bring them back apart and do that a handful of times. And if you do it right and you tune in, you can actually like start to feel like the, I don't know the exact word, the presence of your other hand, almost like a field of some sorts once you get your hands very close together, but not quite touching.

So that's when you can try some point and see. Well, it's an interesting thing. The confounds on that are vast, at least in which being that you know where your hands are roughly. And so that's an easy one to then imagine these, but there's an easier thing to do with your hand that I find really fun.

Like if you close your eyes and pay attention to the sensations in your left hand, for example, and just kind of feel where they start and stop or right, you know, with your fingers. And then you open your eyes and look at your fingers, it seems like the sensations you were feeling don't match with what where you're looking like it seems like they extend further out. And so that's an interesting thing. What does it mean?

I don't have an idea of an interesting phenomenon that's easily reproducible or even more interesting are people who have been have a limb that's been amputated. And have you seen the mirror experiments to get them to get rid of phantom limb pain? No. Look this one up.

Look up phantom limb pain mirror on YouTube someday. So I don't know if the guy who figured this out, there was someone I think he was working with someone who had either a hand or an arm amputated. And was having phantom limb pain felt like there was still something there and it hurt. And what the experimenter did, I wish I remember the name of the guy who's an Indian name, I believe, he put a mirror in front of the person, how to describe this, not facing him, but facing his good right hand.

So when he looked, when he basically just looked, he saw his right hand and he saw a reflection of his right hand in the mirror. So it looked like he had two hands, looked like he had left and right, but he only was seeing the reflection of the right. And then they would stroke or do things with the right hand and he'd see the left hand doing the same thing, this imaginary left hand and the pain went away. So there was some like neurological loop that his brain was in that was causing this phantom limb pain that getting the illusion of having a left hand made it go away.

How? But that's an interesting something. Yeah. Or they do things with virtual reality where they give you a VR avatar who's standing in front of you and they will do things where they will simultaneously stroke the back of your head with like a pencil while it looks like they're doing that to the same thing to your virtual avatar in virtual space.

And after a little bit of time, it not only does it feel like you are that virtual thing, but if they do something to the virtual thing that they don't do to you, like strike, you know, like hit the hand of the virtual avatar, you'll react like you got hit. So messes with your sense of where your body is. So when you think about some of those things, you know, these weird things like our brain just messes up basic things like where you are. Yeah.

And if you wonder about some of those kind of vitalistic things about, is it just a weird ass brain phenomenon? I don't know. Again, I'm up into it. Yeah.

I mean, the old practices I've done a bunch of reading on Ayurveda, like the ancient Indian science of longevity and life and health. According to them, there's constitutions and that's their one of their interpretations of like vitalistic life force. And you'll find that based on your constitution, you do better in certain things, you do worse with certain things and not everyone but for a lot of people it lines up very closely with their actual experience. And if you explore some of the other constitutions, you'll notice that it just doesn't line up, it doesn't match with who you are personality wise or tendency wise or whatever it is.

Well, so that's cool thing. So you've got a personality typing system or you've identified different personality types for simplifying. And if we don't necessarily know why there are these seemingly limited number of types to then apply something like a vitalistic explanation is a fine thing to say. It's kind of irrelevant.

I mean, the thing is, you know, you identify these types that's all or you really need. But boy, if you want to get people to come to your Ayurvedic school or take your Ayurvedic classes, then you're going to want to, you know, sex it up a little bit. And I'll give you another one just before I go back to unintended consequences in a second. But I was invited to a dinner party one night, a bunch of physicists on one end and a bunch of new AG people on the other side.

And this was a setup by the physicists. Their goal was to prove that the new AG people were completely full of it. And no one knew this going in. I had no idea.

And I'm not sure which I think they thought of me as on the physics side of the equation. And at one point I said, do you know one of the things that I do when they go away? I do a thing called cobblistic healing. And they're like, what?

I go, it's a non-physical, non-energetic thing that seems to create significant changes in the people that I'm working with. And they're looking at it as crazy. So I'm going to do a weird non-physical or non-mesterly answer for what I think it does. So the analogy I'm going to use is when we're interacting with another person, we have a sort of relationship that involves a number of things, including body language, which is the way we hold ourselves, the way we present ourselves, things that we don't think of that we perceive.

And I like to say that the relationship is kind of like taking two regular, you know, single learners and putting them up against each other to form an inverted V. And we're supporting each other in a certain way. You know, the fact that we relate in a certain way is a familiar thing. And we again create this relationship by putting these ladders up against each other.

My job when I'm doing this cobblissic healing thing is to hear how you've created that ladder structure. And then I just do this like these internal things. And all that really means is sort of, oh boy, if you imagine relaxing on a floating raft in a very lightly, gently moving waters, that makes a neurological change in your system. Okay?

Has nothing to do with the other person. I've just changed something in my system. So my job in this cobblissic healing thing is to do something similar to that. Do some internal change that just upsets the relationship of these two ladders.

And so their ladder has nothing to balance itself again against. And something has to shift in that process and that relationship. And these are all metaphors and analogies. But what I can tell you is it's reliably consistent that when I do this internal thing, you feel something different.

And my only explanation is in the same way that we, well, in the same way that there are a lot of things that we're aware of at a non-conscious level that we respond to in a deliberate way. But we're not aware of the fact that we just responded to this non-conscious thing. Because from an evolutionary perspective, we never needed to learn that there wasn't animal with two eyes in the front of his head right at the edge of my peripheral vision and figure out if that's food for us or if we're food for it, if there's something staring at you like that, just get the fuck out of the way. And figure it out later.

So it could be things like that where we just aren't, at least Western modern people, aren't paying attention to these sort of non-verbal, non-something bits of information that we get to do impact us. And so anyway, that's like, again, this is just an experiment of finding simple explanations for what can look like magical stuff. And look, there's no one who would want more than I to find something magical. I mean, now we have blast.

But it's a hard road of hoe or tough bar to clear. So anyway. Well, that's largely what these systems did. They didn't have the same instrumentation we have today.

So they had to look and say, notice the subtle things that are not as apparent. And because we rely so heavily on instrumentation and devices and technology these days, we look for that. And if we don't have it, we're kind of lost. But back then, they didn't have any of that.

So they were very attuned to the small things. And they tried to build their whole system around those. Yeah, I think that's true. But I think there's also just like, there's a challenge with cross cultural stuff because there's cultural metaphors that we, outside of the culture we can take as being not legit, what sort of like, not a metaphor, like real, in a way where it could just be a metaphor of things.

So the idea of some energies, for example, in some other cultures explanation of something, that may just be the best word that we could find to translate something. And what they mean is something very, very different, hard to say. All right. So my apologies, I mean, I'm talking more about that more during this conversation.

I mean, that's really going to stop. So please, let's go on back to the unintended consequences part that you saw from certain biohacks. Sure. Well, the first one is that because of the way we operate in the reductionist paradigm, we tend to say we want this outcome.

We know this pathway will help us get there. We'll use certain drugs to say, metformin is one that's been in the news recently for its longevity purposes and its potential benefits, doing all kinds of things related to autophagy and just overall life extension. And we think we understand the causal relationship between change this pathway, these biomarkers, and get this outcome. And then decades after it's been in use, all of a sudden we start uncovering a bunch of new side effects that we didn't realize were there the whole time.

And so by taking the approach of just like going in and trying to hack this one little system is one component of the system, it results in a lot of downstream effects that go on for decades in some cases and eventually get noticed. So on the metformin one, I mean, I was aware that it was sort of the bell of the longevity ball about five years ago, but I never bothered trying to take it. And but I haven't heard what's, what are some of the side effects that people are now seeing now that there's been a handful of quote biohackers who've been pumping metformin and including that what metformin was originally for. So people have a context for that.

Yeah. So metformin is still a drug use to treat diabetes and keep blood sugar under control. That's its primary use. And in the last handful of years, the off label use has been to promote life extension.

And the new site, I say new in quotes, because the side effect that came up in the studies, I think two or so three months ago was that people taking it can have offspring with birth defects. Oh, just that. Yeah. So like a little minor inconvenience there.

And there's a bunch of others, like a lot of question marks around it permanently can impair your ability to absorb and assimilate one of the B vitamins. And the half life, we know what it is for the drug, but it seems to have other impacts on the body, such as changing the enabolism, catabolism, tissue building, tissue breakdown, state longer than the half life. So it's a little unsure what's going on there. And that's just for one particular drug that's been very well studied over the decades and only now are we understanding that it can have these really drastic side effects.

There's some guys who invited me into a group that's all about longevity. And we invite the people who are doing the cutting edge research, don't you want to hear about this stuff 20 years before anyone else does it was I said, no, I want to hear about it 20 minutes after the human trials are done. Exactly. And along those same lines, another one that's gaining popularity is transhumanism and CRISPR Cas9 or directly modifying the genome of humans.

Like a go right. Yeah. Exactly. That's a better question.

What could go right? And that's more and more popular. And we don't even fully understand the genome in its entirety because until two or so decades ago, we believed that there was a bunch of junk DNA, the micro RNA and we discovered that actually know those have really important functions. Like those are epigenetics or the expression of your genes.

And you don't want to just ignore those. Yeah. I mean, all of this is kind of predicated on a rather comical idea that you can that and there are certain times where you can this where you can make a very small intervention that will have no unforeseen consequences. And humans are horrible at misrepresenting and underestimating the potential of unforeseen consequences in all aspects of human endeavors.

I mean, I sometimes drive around and I look and I go, I can't see one thing that we've done that hasn't had more harmful repercussions than beneficial ones. It's pretty wild. And of course, we've only proved that to be permanently true if we all just set off nukes and crush ourselves in something. So then that would be the proof that we were a bunch of morons.

Who thought we were smart, which is a problem. I don't know if you know anything. Another one of those drugs that was kind of the bell of the lunch every ball was Rev. Myson.

Yep. What do you know about that? Because I know nothing about it. Yeah, I'm familiar with it.

It's also one of those and it's an immunosuppressive drug which there's. Yeah, I mean, that's how it works. That's why it has such a life extension properties. For me, it seems way too risky for most people.

I don't know why you'd want to take that when there's a lot of other things lower hanging fruit that are safer and don't have side effects. In fact, they have side benefits. So to me, it just doesn't make sense to know one of those that I see people talking about and taking in if you want to take something, there's things that have much better safety profiles. Thanks.

I appreciate that. And I want to ask you the things that have better safety profiles. So I'm going to put inject this and then we'll do that. I was experimenting with nicotine in my riboside and not with nicotine in my mononucleotide, which for people who know better as NR or NM and, and, and neither really didn't think for me.

I didn't notice anything. And the idea is that just taking Nias and has a better impact on those pathways and annoyingly I seem to not this is the case where I don't have an immunodentine of both seabos, I have a hypersensitivity to Nias and like if I was taking 25 gram pills, I'd get a big flush and it never changed. I mean, I did this for months and I never acclimated to it. It's really kind of bummed because that one looks like maybe there's a there and Nias and is about as not a big deal as an intervention goes as one can think of, but then work for me.

Yeah. And I hope you're not taking it in the gram range because a huge dose is considered. Oh, no, no, sorry, 25 milligrams. What I meant to say.

Okay. Yeah. No, 25 grams. That's ridiculous and ounce of Nias.

But no, yeah, it just knocked me on my butt and so I was initially one. But let's go back to and this leads us into the section of our conversation about being on what was your term that you're not now a biohatter, you're a bio harmonizer harmonizer. I love you. So let's talk about one of those things that you alluded to that's a milder intervention than an off-label drug that is seemingly doing something.

Sure. So the first reason I like to harmonize rather than hack is because as you alluded to earlier, the body is a system of systems, cybernetic system, meaning that there's no linear cause and effect when you change one thing, it changes a bunch of other things. And so a lot of the best practices and principles of bio harmony that I've come across seem ridiculous when you call them hacks, such as getting enough sleep, such as going on a walk, such as learning to build your personal resilience via something such as exposure to extreme temperatures, the sauna, the ice bath, these types of things, they just do not fit into the bucket of a biohack, but they are in harmony and they're helping the body do its own processes better and more efficient. I like it.

So, you know, and even some of those have become somewhat mythologized. So like I'm thinking about sleep, I had this conversation together. I was on the podcast where the whole idea is, you know, you need to have a pitch black room because that's what our ancestors did, except for the fact that's not what they did because many of our ancestors lived in places where maybe there's something on roof over their head but no walls. And when there's a full moon, the ambient light is pretty damn bright.

So you know, there's that or there's, I think there's a good amount of mythology around cold plunge stuff, which by the way, I do, cause I get a kick out of it. I can't say I enjoy it cause when I get it right now, my cold plunge, now that it's getting cold at night here is at about 40 degrees. And when I jump in, I yell every expletive that I've ever thought of for the first two seconds and then I kind of get with the groove and I just like it literally does feel refreshing when I get out. I really enjoy it.

And maybe there's other benefits. I don't care. But that one has been seriously mythologized, I think. There's also some very cool properties that are unique to cold and to heat.

One that I've noticed personally is when I wear a continuous glucose monitor so I can see how my blood glucose changes throughout the day and I wear that for two weeks or so. I noticed that when I take an ice bath in the morning, no matter what I do, my blood sugar will be very stable the rest of the day. So that's one that's not often talked about, but it's one of the powerful effect that I've noticed. And there's a lot of claims about its effect on the conversion of let me think, white fat to brown fat and then helping with weight loss and that cold is a stressor.

So it stimulates the release and production and production release of Northern Ephrin, Ephrin, cortisol, all these things and changes your neurochemical state as well. And I noticed that I feel great when I get out of the cold bath. So that could be something else entirely. Is it going to change your life in itself?

Probably not. You're talking to a guy who was a member of the polar bear club, AKA jumping into ice water under your day for 17 years until it's like, and done. But well, and of course the joke is that sauna can do many of the same things. It's like they're both affecting heat shock proteins, which is a weird thing to say that both high temperatures and low temperatures affect the same proteins.

And I, and there's a, who's Brad Pilon or Pylon, how he says his last name has a whole book about how heat exposure can be beneficial, including for weight loss. Because it's basically telling your body, you don't need to store fat. So that's an interesting idea. I haven't noticed any changes in my body fat or weight from both hot tubs on us and cold plunges.

I just like them. Yeah. Well, there's also some cool benefits that I like of the heat, such as the ability to increase growth hormone, second to none from a nice long session in the sauna. Why am I still five five?

I guess too late in my train. That's the one. And like you alluded to the heat shock proteins, the Fox O four, all these have beneficial longevity effects. So I think rather than taking these designer molecules, start off with a lifestyle basics, whether it's getting outside for a walk, it's seeing the sun or it's going into the sauna.

These all can have disproportionate effects and ultimately going for a walk. Isn't that hard to do? Doesn't need to take that long. And in my blood sugar tracking experiment, I noticed that that had the biggest impact of anything on my blood sugar, better than any supplement I've taken, better than the cold plunge, better than the sauna by far away, a five minute walk after my meal made a huge difference.

I think the work times article came out recently. It's a two minutes of walking can make a difference. So doesn't you belong? No, I think that key thing though, it is right after meal doing that.

I've been trying to do that. Mostly I've been walking more lately because I've got a dog and I get up before my wife does. So I'm the six a.m. dog walker.

So we'll go out for half an hour to an hour. Again, it hasn't changed anything about my body composition, but it is really enjoyable. And when he's not chasing squirrels or bunnies, you know, it's just delightful as well. I think I'm going to have to get my shoulder reattached my body after this morning's bunny event because it caught me totally off guard.

But I remember reading this years ago that they had done experiment just after people had eaten a high fat meal. And one group went and took a walk right after the meal and the other group didn't. And then they just drew blood and you could just see the difference between fat mobilization from the people who had taken a walk where it cleared the bloodstream very quickly versus those who hadn't taken a walk where it was just hanging out there for like 18 hours. So I love that you got the 24 hour glucose monitor.

I've never felt the urge to do that one, but it is entertaining. What are the other things you've done that are that kind of experimentation? And of course, what are the other harmonizing things that you found that are for real from your experience? Yeah.

So first of all, another core principle of harmonization is that everything in the body serves a purpose. We might not understand that purpose yet, but if you get things removed, you choose to ignore things that comes at your own peril and you may or may not suffer consequence from it. One that sounds very simple. And to me, it was like life changing what I discovered was recognizing that emotion plays a vital role in understanding the circumstance I'm in and what kind of response I should give instead of just suppressing the way I feel, exploring it and trying to trace back where it comes from and why I feel a certain way.

Is it too personal to ask for an example? Yeah. So when I get in the conflict with my partner and something really bothers me and I just decide to storm off because it seems like the only logical thing to do. And then when I dissect them, like, why did I storm off?

I didn't have to storm off. I should have been more present. I should have told her that this really upsets me and it seemed inaccessible at the time. And then I was able to trace that back to previous life experiences and find the root of that and find understand why I felt that way and give myself permission to feel that and to understand it and to accept it.

And once I accepted it as strange as it sounds, I feel less intensely when things come up now. Yeah. I refer that as I'm playing the movie frame by frame. I just look at it one moment at a time and see what was I thinking, what belief that I have that led to this behavior, what was the thought, then what was the feeling of that engendered and what was the belief that then followed that one.

I've done similar things. I'll tell you my favorite one. Lane and my wife had asked me to make some sort of behavioral change. I don't know what it was.

Let's call it putting the toilet seat down, which is not my thing because I like to sit down when I pee. It's the only chance I get to sit down sometimes. So but whatever it was, and I'm not, I don't tend to ask for behavioral changes. It's just not my thing to ask people to do something different that way.

And so I was really angry for whatever reason that she'd asked me to do this thing when I would never do anything like that. And I thought, okay, so she's asking me to do this thing. I don't do it. But what do I do instead?

And it hit me like a ton of bricks that Lena likes to keep things really neat and our house is pretty neat. But like her desk at the end of the day, clean, my desk at the end of the day, where's the desk? So, so I realized that, you know, there are a couple of places in the house where I have piles of stuff and she endures my piles of stuff. And there's no doubt that her having to see those multiple times a day is and not, you know, ask me to leave is a much more amazing thing and takes much more something than whatever it would take for me to figure out whatever that paper change was that she asked for.

And I immediately went and apologized and said, you know, look, I can't promise I'm going to do it, but I will do the best I can feel free to remind me. But yeah, but also, you know, I can't thank you enough for putting up with my sloppiness where I know that must be unbearable for you. And she was very sweet. She said, I know that you have limited places where you do it.

And as long as it's in those limited places, I can, I'm okay with that. If it extends past there, that's going to be problem. So to your point, yeah, it was not there was no, we didn't need a therapist. We didn't need to process our feelings.

I mean, I just took care of by recognizing the pattern that I had and why had it. So that's a great one. I appreciate you pointing that one out. Yeah.

Any other any other harmonizing things that you've done other than. Yeah, I can run through some of my principles of bio harmony. Please. So the first is self sovereignty.

And that is the idea that you don't want to outsource anything that you want to keep long term, or at least let it decay and atrophy that can be your memory or in the case of zero that could be your arches. I like it. Yeah, the next one is oppositional consequences. When you fight the body and you suppress things, however, that is, whether it's a natural practice or it's intervention, there will be consequences.

And you have to accept that. There could be consequences whenever you undergo one of those types of things. People love to ignore the potential negative side effects because they have the fantasy they're going to get to only the positive ones. Yeah, unfortunately.

It doesn't usually work. It's what we do. I mean, you know, we imagine this future happy state. And then if we think that there's a way of getting there, we're going to lock onto that and ignore all the contradictory information.

That's why there are certain people who fill up workshops rooms every weekend in hotel rooms and get tens of thousands of dollars per person for based on that. Yeah. The third principle is the principle of innate intelligence that the body really knows how to self-regulate, return to homeostasis, to rebuild, to regenerate. And on the opposite end, that by taking certain interventions, we're assuming that we know better than the body and that that will lead to a better outcome.

And there's instances when you want to go out and make sure you do the right thing and the body gets stuck in a loop or something, and then you need some outside intervention. But for a lot of time, like a lot of things, such as a broken arm, the cast is not repairing the arm. It's your body that's repairing it and we're just supporting it. Here's where I'll poke out again.

The flip side is there are certain things where like I was taking a walk with a friend of mine and she said, I'm just trying to listen to my body so I can eat the right things and I just burst in hysterics. And so I know what your body wants to eat, french fries, ice cream, chocolate cake. You just have the idea that if you listen to your body, you'll end up eating some things that right now you don't enjoy that will then change your body into something that when you look in the mirror, you're going to like it. And that's pretty funny because if you ask everyone on the planet, do they like what they say in the mirror, you won't find anybody who says yes, honestly.

So one of the functions of being human is looking in the mirror and going, ew, or even a separation thereof. So that was an interesting one because I think what you're saying, please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, is that there are times where something does get out of whack and your body will show that in some way. I'm thinking of this one's an easy one, our dog. He's definitely had two warts, one inside of its lip and one on the outside of his lip and it's a papillongovirus.

And he just didn't have the antibodies for that. And it just, you know, plays its course in the course of three weeks or so. But so here's this thing that in this case, you don't need to do anything about it. The body will take care of itself.

But there are things that can pop up for whatever reason, some environmental impacts, emotional thing you're doing, whatever it is, stress and however we find stress that could cause your body to get out of whack and stay out of whack until you do make some intervention. So what you're implying is that if given the opportunity, that's what I'm saying, given the opportunity, more often than not, many things will take care of themselves. Now there are many things that just get out of whack and they're out of whack. So if you get glioblastoma, you got a brain tumor that's most likely incurable.

If you get, you know, there's a handful of things that that's just the way it is because these things don't work perfectly. They're not designed to keep us alive forever. And so, you know, that's, that's a whole other, whole other aspect of it is so given all the right circumstances, it will do the best it can. Let me just say that way, see if you disagree with that one, but sometimes, you know, you're going to die.

Yeah, yeah, that's precisely it. And there's a lot of things the body is capable of doing that are miracles when they happen and we don't can't explain them yet exactly how they're working in terms of like regenerative abilities. That's for the most part, you have to support the body or you should support the body and recognize that it's just a biological organism and it's doing its best, but it's not. It's not it's not designed to do the thing that you want.

It's definitely not designed to keep you looking like you did when you were in your teens or twenties or or for some of us. Or you know, continuing to be able to perform that way up until in whatever way performing for you. I was not going away to some people just took it by my qualifying it, you know, into your whatever's. I mean, again, we're going to die at some point.

Things get skincare, muscle get smaller unless you're in less you're juicing or variations they're off. And I guess perhaps the hardest intervention or the hardest thing to do with that maybe for some people is being okay with that. Yeah, absolutely. That's the whole longevity sector is fighting that idea.

And while it's true that we will die at some point, there's things you can do that will drastically speed up your arrival of that destination and also raise a slow it down a bit. Yeah, yeah. And some of these, you know, they could not be more more simple like you were saying, get some sleep, get outside, see this on, you know, eat things that you enjoy. And even the eating thing, I have a friend who had a breast cancer and she was living with somebody who was a vegan, something chef and was just feeding her all this green stuff and like every healthy thing to try and cure.

And every two weeks she would call me and I'd say, Oh, is it time? And she would say, yes. And we would go out to the local donut shop and I would buy one of everything they made and say, just take as measures, little of any of these that you want. Basically, here's the buffet enjoy.

And I said, which do you think is better for you? How much fun this couple of hours is eating and however many donuts you want or, you know, thinking that you if you don't have a green drink tomorrow, you're going to die. And she said, yeah, the stress of that is probably worse than the fun of this. Absolutely.

And that's also one of the ancient principles of rhythm and pulsation. Like the thing is, if you do one thing long term, your body will compensate. It will down regulate enzymes. It'll change neurotransmitter baseline levels, all that kind of stuff so that you adapt to be more efficient in your current state.

So if you every once in a while change things, you go out and you enjoy yourself. Not only are you getting that connection and you're getting like the experience of like being a modern human, but you're also doing your body favors, even if it's a subpar nutrition for that example. Yeah, I go. My thing with donuts is I find myself craving them every now and then and when it gets to a point that it's like, okay, I can't drive by this donut shop without getting one, then I will go do that.

But but that's it. And I don't have very many donuts per year any longer. And I used to eat a lot of donuts because they're awesome. They are pretty great.

And you were mentioning your friend earlier who was trying to listen to her body and her body was telling her to eat ice cream and maybe donuts and jump like that. Yeah. Chocolate cake. Yeah.

Chocolate cake. I mean, just all kinds of things that follow that category that are non-negotiable. So they should be in everyone's diet for the sheer enjoyment of nothing else. But that leads into the fourth principle of bio harmony and that is biofeedback amnesia.

So the fact that how modern humans have lost ability to access what's actually going on inside of us. And if you're listening to your body, it might tell you sure, grab that donut. That'll taste great. And then you might eat that donut.

And an hour later, you will notice that, oh, okay, my blood sugar spiked and then crashed. And now I just need a nap. I need a nap for at least a half an hour. And then instead of weighing whether or not you want that, you're weighing the want versus the total cost.

And that can lead to like a very different equation in terms of like overall want. My favorite version of that is you eat something typically something like scrambled eggs. And then for completely unrelated reasons, you end up with a stomach bug. So you get the, you know, get some sort of stomach flu.

And if there's happened in close enough proximity temporarily, you won't be able to eat scrambled eggs again for years. Yeah. Because your brain will have put two and two together and said, ooh, it must be because of the scrambled eggs because it's always looking for something. And probably, and it had nothing to do with the scrambled eggs.

And I find that one kind of funny. So it's in many ways the opposite of what you described. But the one you just described, that's a really good one because we, you're right. I mean, we aren't good at, we're always looking for patterns, but we're not good at identifying certain patterns, especially if there's enough of a time gap between the cause and the effect.

Yeah. And there's a lot of things, especially with nutrition. There's usually a short term, a medium term and a long term. Like for example, when I'm assessing someone's core, I can assess it one day and then I can tell them try not eating gluten for a week.

And even if they're not gluten sensitive, you can actually feel a difference in their ability to activate their core after they take a big diet. And you won't necessarily know that you don't feel it because you most of us eat gluten all the time. But like their body notices a difference and is able to like exert more force when they made that change. That's really interesting.

Or let's use this example. How much individual variability do you see? Oh, tremendous. There's a really fantastic book I like called Biochemical Individuality by Roger Williams, I believe it is.

And he goes through the body systematically and goes through every organ, every enzyme as much as you possibly can that he knew it back then when it was written a couple decades ago. And he shows that there's like tremendous differences between people like up to 54 differences in enzyme activity, stomachs that are on either end, like one is tiny and others three times bigger. And so there's a lot of variation. And that's part of like what all of this is about is the bio-individuality of everything that works great for me.

It might not work at all for you. Yeah. This is something that is so problematic for humans who want a simple solution. Like give me the ABC, give me the plan and let me just stick to it because we like things simple.

But man, just is not like that. The first paleo FX conference that I went to, I was saying, you know, you all think that everyone should be eating a shit ton of meat. And I actually have a genetic disorder and I don't taste the savory flavors in meat. So it just tastes like Metallica mush.

So that ain't gonna happen. And of course the joke is while every panel discussion with like 10 people who are the paleo experts at the time, and each one of them was basically trying to convince people that their version of paleo was the way you had to eat. And no one acknowledged that each one of them had a different version of paleo. I mean, they acknowledged that, but they weren't acknowledging that it was that there wasn't going to be a resolution to the fact that, you know, not, no one was going to suddenly have, uh, present something where the other nine people were going to go, yep, you're right.

I was mistaken. So each one was everything. And it was so much of it was based on their own personal experience, more than any sort of research or data collection, um, which is problematic. Well, that's one of the biggest issues in the health and wellness world is that people are on this journey themselves.

They explore, they try different things and it works great for them. So then they start researching it. They fall victim to the confirmation bias and then they realize this is the only way humans should operate. And then they tell everyone else that and they create like highly successful books and media libraries and that spreads.

And you don't understand like with only saying that, you don't understand the whole backstory and we were just talking about the individuality of everything. So are there any other principles that we have left out? Well, the last one we've talked about a bit and that is critical application. And critical application is doing the research yourself, not just relying on any one source, including everything we say today and every conversation.

And then going in and trying things where safe, don't take our word for it, but go actually try it yourself, where it's safe and notice what you get or don't get. And to take notes, log it down and practice all the principles of harm reduction, just to make sure that just because it's worked for a bunch of other people, doesn't mean it will or will not work for you. So you learn, implement and reflect. Dude, which part of just tell me what to do?

Did you not hear? The new diet book is coming right now. I'm on the, I don't know when I'm going to get hit by a bus diet. So you know, when the donut calls me, the donut calls.

And you know, what's actually really funny, the hardest thing for me in situations like that is I'll have the donut and I know after like, I only want like two bites, but I hate throwing food away. I'm the opposite way. Once I get started with anything, I finish it and look for all the scraps and eat those too. So my best bet is just to avoid bringing all that stuff in the house to begin with.

Yeah, see, I'm not a bingy kind of guy. We've had a pint of Ben and Jerry's in our fridge for I think nine years. And we each had, you know, a few bites and then I don't know why it's still sitting there frankly, but I can do just the parts that I like, but it is very hard for me. Like I went out with some new friends for dim sum on this past weekend.

And it was really hard for me to like leave something on a plate that I liked. And so I didn't, I ate it. And it was not Gaster and Testinally satisfying in a few hours later, but I had such a good time when I was doing it that it made up for it. Yeah.

So which is part of the principle we've talked about. You know, that's an interesting thing is that some of what we talked about really is a little hedonic. It's the value of enjoyment is I think greatly overlooked, like genuine enjoyment, not just you know, sort of temporary getting a buzz off something, but something that really is even if it's not necessarily great for you, the pleasure part is well outweigh the, you know, temporary negative consequences. Absolutely.

When I'm going out and spending time with friends, I have no problem eating things I won't usually or stretching the window in which I'm consuming calories a little longer than usual because ultimately that social connection and then enjoyment, all of that is going to outweigh any temporary lapse of my usual routine. Yeah. I think that's a good one. So is there anything we first of all, this has been a blast and thank you for diving into my long winded sort of examination of some of these ideas because frankly, you know, again, one of the things I appreciate about you is that you can look at this stuff from different angles and land somewhere that is, I don't want to put it maybe more accessible to human beings.

And the fact that you just continue to experiment of course is a really fun one. So of course, I'm always curious what you discover either that's working or just some idea that is worth investigating. So anything that we left out. One thing that I recommend is if you're trying to understand learn about a subject, go around and pick out a handful of books about that subject from all different perspectives and then you can see what they agree on, what they disagree on and you can explore each of those avenues yourself.

But if you're just relying on one interview, one book, one YouTube video, you're never going to get the full picture and you're going to be prey to all kinds of biases. Yeah, well, what you're prey to is your wallet getting empty. I mean, that's the biggest one. It really does amaze me the number of people who spend inordinate amounts of money going to workshops or doing various things year after year after year despite the lack of demonstrable benefits they've received.

And because the sunk cost is so high, if they realize that what they've been doing is wasting their money, it's almost more humiliating and upsetting than just continuing to do something that doesn't work. Yeah. Oh, humans in their minds, they're so silly. Oh, and the one last thing is with a lot of these lifestyle practices, these healthy bio-harmonization habits, instead of having unintended side effects, a lot of them have unintended benefits.

So if you improve your sleep, that's going to translate to a better performance. You're going to show up better, less emotionally reactive in your relationships. And you don't need to do all of these things and spend 18 hours a day optimizing your life to start feeling and seeing and noticing a difference. You can start small with a few minute walk after a meal or trying maybe blackout curtains and realize that yes, some nights in the natural world, the moon will be brighter.

And if you can't get that, it's not the end of the world. Like you'll sleep just fine, maybe a little worse than normal, but then you can bounce right back from that and adapt a lot. So again, I'm trying to where I want to go. I said, I can't think of anywhere we can wrap it up.

So Nick, if people want to find out more about bio harmony and what you're doing, et cetera, how would they do that with you? Yeah. So they can go ahead and reach out to me on my website, nickurban.me. And that'll bring you to a link tree like page where you can see the website, the podcast that I host and my social channels, all that stuff.

And if they want to reach out to me directly, the socials are great or they can fill out the contact form on my website. And I personally read and respond to every email I get. So if it takes a couple of weeks, don't take it personally, but I love hearing from everyone. And I look forward to ongoing conversations.

Awesome. Well, I hope people do take you up on that invitation because again, you know, we are all any of us who are health and fitness minded are always looking for something that will make a difference in our life and to find someone that you can reach out to and at least lean on to put you in a good direction if they don't have an answer is a very valuable thing and you're doing a great service by being someone who's able to look at these things logically and critically and still be really one of those people who likes to investigate and do more than the average bear in that process. So much, much appreciated. And for everyone else, thank you for being here.

It's the simplest thing I can say. And as always, a reminder, go to www.jointhemovement.com to find all the previous episodes, like and share and thumbs up and bell icon on YouTube, et cetera, you know, the drill and that. But more, if you have any requests, if there's anybody you think should be on the podcast, let me know if you want to tell me you thought something was great or you think I have a case of cranial rectory orientation syndrome, I'm open to that as well. In fact, I'm open to find someone who jumps on the podcast who thinks I'm completely full of it.

That would be a blast. I'm not going to do that, but they seem to be resistant. And I always want to send one email back to them after they tell me they don't want to be on the podcast with one word, which is scared, but I haven't done that yet. So anyway, you can drop an email to me at move, m-o-v-e-and-jointhemovementmovementmovement.com.

But speaking of moving and maybe you'll do this after a meal, go out, have some fun and live life-feet first.