Better Than Biohacking
– The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Sashen Episode 149 with Nick Urban
Nick Urban is a Biohacker, Data Scientist, Athlete, Founder of Outliyr, and the Host of the Mind Body Peak Performance Podcast. He is a Certified CHEK Practitioner, a Personal Trainer, and a Performance Health Coach. Nick is driven by curiosity which has led him to study ancient medical systems (Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Hermedic Principles, etc), and modern science.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Nick Urban about how biohacking isn’t the best way to optimize your health.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How biohacking and the wellness world rely on placebos for treatment.
– Why newborns and animals aren’t affected by placebos in the same way as adults.
– How being a bio-harmonizer is different than being a biohacker.
– How the core principle of bio-harmonization is that everything in the body serves a purpose.
– Why modern humans have lost the ability to assess what’s going on inside us.
Connect with Nick:
Guest Contact Info
Twitter
@nicholasurban_
Instagram
@mindbodypeakperformance
Facebook
facebook.com/nick.urban1
Links Mentioned:
mindbodypeak.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Jointhemovementmovement.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Steven Sashen:
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 people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body. Starting feet first, 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 yoga, or CrossFit, or… Oh my God, the millions of things people can do on their feet, and to do that enjoyably, and efficiently, and effectively. And did I say 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. So find something you enjoy and hopefully we can help you do that.
I’m Steven Sashen from xeroshoes.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. And the movement part, that first part, the way you can get involved is to go to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You don’t have to join anything, there’s no secret handshake, there’s no money. It’s just that’s the domain that I got, where you can find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us on social media, basically a link to everywhere that we are. And the gist, of course, is find the previous episodes and like and share, and give us a review, and thumbs up and hit the bell icon on YouTube, and all those things you know how to do. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So, let us get started. Nick, do 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.
Nick Urban:
Steven Sashen, 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 my beginning, 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 vitalism emerging, where it’s working with the more subtle things that are behind matter, and how when you work with those, you’re able to get longer lasting outcomes that are more effective and easier ultimately.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, cool. Thank you. That was way more than I was expecting, which is great. I want to come back to a couple things you said and address them in a couple 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?
Nick Urban:
Definitely.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, cool. You described biohacking as the art and science of fill in 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 I don’t know how it happened, but in the conversation they said, ”Yeah, 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.
Nick Urban:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
I could be wrong. We might be on the same page on this. We haven’t talked about this, but it may be that we got some placebo things going on.
Nick Urban:
Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you with that. And there is 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. I’m in agreement with you there. And I think some of the things that I notice immediate and profound effects from, on the biohacking side, would be things like certain nootropics. Like if you take caffeine, most people feel that if you’ve never taken 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, I actually have some behind me, like quantum technologies that it’s… You can use-
Steven Sashen:
That’s funny. Sorry.
Nick Urban:
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 the studies have shown, placebo and nocebo, the opposite end, where you believe something won’t work are among the strongest effects in all of medicine.
Steven Sashen:
It’s funny. I like to 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, or less clear, in my thinking let’s say. Ah, that sounds horrible. I didn’t investigate things that I was being told. I was working with some local naturopaths, or chiropractors, whatever, and they would give me various 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 I went, ”Oh, because those are placebos.” There’s nothing actually there there.
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? You could just go over there with a eyedropper and just dose the entire reservoir.” And they’d look at me and 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… Wait, let me say it 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 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, but 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, and to your credit, you said it’s quantum devices, but you said these things seemingly are doing something, but we aren’t totally sure how. There may be placebo effects there I would argue, probably, definitely. In fact, 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’m not actually from Missouri. But someone gave me a device recently. I’m not going to say what it was, and it just so happened that I had a perfect test case for this healing device. And the perfect test case was that I had jumped into Boulder Creek, I’d taken a dive in and slipped, and hit a rock with both of my knees, and it 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’ll use it for about an hour a day and what do you think should happen?” And they said, ”Oh my god, it’s going to heal in no time.” And not only did the leg that was being ”treated” not heal any faster, I think it was worse. I reported that and they said, ”Well clearly your thinking got in the way of the device working.” And I said, ”If a thought called, I don’t know if it’ll work, could interfere with a device that is pressed against my skin, then we got a problem.” And I said, ”I don’t have to believe in or not believe in for it to have an effect.” They said, ”What?” I said, ”Percocet.” I said, ”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.”.
Anyway, that’s one thing. I just want to throw the quantum thing in there. Second one, is one that is not a poking the bear kind of thing. You mentioned that a lot of these things can have 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.
Nick Urban:
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, yes, humans are very susceptible to placebo, but animals and newborns and really things like that, they don’t consciously think the same way us skeptical adults do. They’re more immune, so I like to look and see how it affects them. 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 it yourself and see… Compare that to a control which has normal water and that’s one way.
Steven Sashen:
No, I think that’s brilliant. But even then, I’ll tell you where the human still comes into that equation. It’s whether they know how to set up the experiment correctly.
Nick Urban:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
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 watered with the magic water, you do it with 20 plants 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. It’s amazing how badly people set up simple, seemingly simple experiments.
Nick Urban:
And then to make it even more comprehensive if you have the time and resources. You would also want to blind the experimenter to not know which water is which on the plants. But that’s a whole nother level, and just for a simple at home thing, you can try with your quantum devices, or whatever they are. That’s a easy one.
Steven Sashen:
Well yeah, my favorite thing on the quantum device kind of stuff is if something lights up, just make another device that just lights up. Just do something, or if it’s something that has to… This goes back to… This is not just about biohackers or people who are susceptible to placebo things, this permeates science. I don’t know if you remember, I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember, the whole phenomenon around the idea of cold fusion. Were you around for that?
Nick Urban:
A little bit.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the gist is, some guys at a university in Arizona, maybe ASU, but I can’t remember, they had claimed that they had created fusion at room temperature. We’re still trying to create fusion at a hundred times the temperature, the sun temperature. They claimed that 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 testing a counterfactual, test something that’s the opposite and see what happens. So get rid of the heavy water and just use regular water and see if you get the same results. If you do, then it had nothing to do with the heavy water, which means 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.
This kind of mistaken causality permeates human thinking at every level, from dumb people to the smartest people you’ve ever met, who at some point circle around and become dumb 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 got to try to get you out of the equation as well. So that’s one. Last one, from your intro, we’re still in your intro. Even the concept of vitalism I find very interesting, because there are of course two camps. There’s one camp where everything is merely material, aka the materialists. 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 I got to… Boy, it just gave 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, it’s about the interaction and relationship between the patient and the physician.” I went, ”No, I think you were just pressing harder for some reason, it had nothing to do with me.” But 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… Wait, sorry, I keep doing this. Somebody had a device that was like, you lie down on 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.” ”Well how’d you feel when you fell asleep?” I went, ”I don’t know and then woke up. I don’t feel in any way different.”.
Anyway, it’s fascinating. But back to vitalism. There are… How do I 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 and other people don’t have answers for yet. I used to do, and I’m ranting on this and I’m going to get it back to you I swear to God, I used to do aikido and tai chi, and both of those, there are lots and lots of claims about vital forces in chi or qi 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 Aikido 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. 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 onto the ground. It doesn’t require any building up your chi, or your qi, 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 dojos 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… It was his dojo that I was in. And you don’t do that, that’s not showing respect. My response is, I don’t care about respect, I just proved that he’s full of shit. And I’m not trying to prove that. I just demonstrated that by accident, because I didn’t know any better.
Now at the same time, I met a Chinese qigong guy, who… This is my last story I promise, for now. 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, it looked completely fake. It turned out, he got 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 through 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.
And I’m thinking, ”Ah crap, I’m going to not feel anything and I’m just going to make him look like an idiot, because I’ve done things like this and there’s nothing, there’s no there there. Okay.” So I move 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 wall, so I didn’t do things that looked insane, but I literally felt like if I grabbed a electrical fence, or whatever that word is that I’m looking for, or put my finger in 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. Interestingly, none of his students could replicate what he was doing.
But I’m willing to suspend disbelief and say, ”I don’t know.” I’ve experienced some things that I can’t explain, but I don’t have the opportunity to reinvestigate them now. Anyway, that was a long tangent from vitalism, where there are things that, like in acupuncture, 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. 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. 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?
Nick Urban:
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 materialist and there’s the vitalist, 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 an attack on one or the other and saying like, ”Oh, they’re totally wrong” Or, ”We’re totally right.” Whatever it is. So I love the discussions where you’re able to actually say, ”What if you do this? And think about that.” And having those-
Steven Sashen:
Well look, this is one of the reasons 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, hold on, let me take a look at that,” when given the opportunity.
Nick Urban:
Yeah, absolutely. One thing like the Qigong practice you mentioned in Tai Chi, that master, that made me think of a 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 to together, and don’t touch them but then bring them back apart, and go and do that a handful of times. And if you do it right and you tune in, you can actually start to feel, 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 at some point and see how that works.
Steven Sashen:
It’s an interesting thing, the confounds on that are vast.
Nick Urban:
Oh yeah.
Steven Sashen:
The least of which being that you know where your hands are roughly, so that’s an easy one to then imagine things. But there’s an easier thing to do with your hand that I find really fun. 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, 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 where you’re looking. It seems like they extend further out, so that’s an interesting thing. What does it mean? I don’t have an idea, but it’s an interesting phenomenon that’s easily reproducible. Or, even more interesting, are people who have a limb that’s been amputated, and have you seen the mirror experiments to get them to get rid of phantom limb pain?
Nick Urban:
No.
Steven Sashen:
Ooh, look this one up. Look up phantom limb pain mirror on YouTube someday. The guy who figured this out, it 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 in there, and it hurt. And what the experimenter did, I wish I can remember the name of the guy, it was 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. 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. It looked like he had a 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 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. 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 a pencil, while it looks like they’re doing that, the same thing, to your virtual avatar in virtual space. And after a little bit of time, 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 hit the hand of the virtual avatar, you’ll react like you got hit. It messes with your sense of where your body is. When you think about some of those things, these weird things, our brain just messes up. Basic things like where you are.
Nick Urban:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
It makes you wonder about some of those vitalistic things about, is it just a weird ass brain phenomenon? Don’t know, again, I’m open to it.
Nick Urban:
Yeah. The old practices, I’ve done a bunch of reading on Ayurveda, the ancient Indian science of longevity and life and health, according to them there’s constitutions, and that’s one of their interpretations of 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 it just doesn’t line up, doesn’t match with who you are personality wise, or tendency wise, or whatever.
Steven Sashen:
So that’s a cool thing. So you’ve got a personality typing system, or you’ve identified different personality types, 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. The thing is, you identify these types, that’s all you really need. But boy, if you want to get people to come to your Ayurveda school, or take your Ayurveda classes, then you’re going to want to sexy it up a little bit.
And I’ll give you another one just for fun, but I want to go back to unintended consequences in a sec. But I was invited to a dinner party one night, bunch of physicists on one end and a bunch of New Age people on the other side, and this was a setup by the physicists. Their goal was to prove that the New Age 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?” And they go, ”What?” I go, ”I do a thing called Kabbalistic healing.” And they were 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 looked at me like I was crazy. I said, ”But I’m going to give you a weird non-mystical answer for what I think it does.”
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, just 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 like taking two regular single ladders and putting them up against each other to form an inverted V, and we’re supporting each other in a certain way. 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 Kabbalistic healing thing is to hear how you’ve created that ladder structure.
And then I just do these internal things, and all that really means is… Oh boy. If you imagine relaxing on a floating raft in very lightly, gently moving waters, that makes a neurological change in your system. Has nothing to do with the other person, I’ve just changed something in my system. So my job, in this Kabbalistic healing thing, is to do something similar to that, do some internal change that just upsets the relationship of these two ladders, so their ladder has nothing to balance itself against, and something has to shift in that process, in that relationship. 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 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 was an animal with two eyes in the front of its 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. It could be things like that, where we just aren’t, or at least western modern people, aren’t paying attention to these sort of nonverbal, non-something, bits of information that we get that do impact us. Anyway, 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. That would be a blast, but that’s a hard row to hoe or tough bar to clear.
Nick Urban:
Yeah, 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 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.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I think that’s true, and I think there’s also, just like… There’s a challenge with cross-cultural stuff, because there’s cultural metaphors that outside of the culture we can take as being, not legit, what’s the word I’m looking for, not metaphoric, real, in a way where it could just be a metaphoric thing. So the idea of some energies, for example, in some other culture’s 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, my apologies, I’ve talked more during this than any conversation I’ve had. I’m going to desperately want to stop. So please, let’s go on back to the unintended consequences part that you saw from certain biohacks.
Nick Urban:
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.” So we’ll use certain drugs, metformin is one that’s been in the news recently for its longevity purposes and it’s 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 going in and trying to hack this one little system, this 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.
Steven Sashen:
On the Metformin one, I was aware that it was the belle of the longevity ball about five years ago, but I never bothered trying to take it. But I haven’t heard what are some of the side effects that people are now seeing now that there’s been a handful of ”biohackers” who’ve been pumping metformin, and include in that what metformin was originally for, so people have a context for that.
Nick Urban:
Yes, so metformin is still a drug used 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 science, 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.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, just that?
Nick Urban:
Yeah, so a little minor inconvenience there. And there’s a bunch of others, a lot of question marks around it, 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 anabolism, catabolism, tissue building, tissue breakdown state, longer than the half-life. So it’s-
Steven Sashen:
Oh geez.
Nick Urban:
… A little unsure of 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.
Steven Sashen:
There’s some guys who invited me into a group that’s all about longevity and they say, ”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?” I said, ”No, I want to hear about it 20 minutes after the human trials are done.”
Nick Urban:
Exactly. And along those same lines, another one that’s gaining popularity is transhumanism and CRISPR-cas9, or directly modifying the genome of humans.
Steven Sashen:
What could go right?
Nick Urban:
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 microRNA, and we discovered that actually no, those have really important functions. Those have to do with your epigenetics or the expression of your genes, and you don’t want to just ignore those.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. All of this is kind of predicated on a rather comical idea, and there are certain times where you can do this, where you can have make a very small intervention that we’ll have no unforeseen consequences, and humans are horrible at misrepresenting and underestimating the potential of unforeseen consequences, in all aspects of human endeavors. 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 will only prove that to be permanently true if we all just set off nukes and crush ourselves in some way, 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 belle of the longevity ball was rapamycin.
Nick Urban:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
What do you know about that? Because I know nothing about it.
Nick Urban:
Yeah, I’m familiar with it, it’s also one of those. And it’s an immunosuppressive drug, which there’s-
Steven Sashen:
Oh geez.
Nick Urban:
Yeah. That’s how it works. That’s why it has such good 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 doesn’t make sense. It’s another one of those that I see people talking about it and taking it. And if you want to take something, there’s things that have much better safety profiles.
Steven Sashen:
Thanks, I appreciate that. And I want to ask you the things that have better safety profiles. So I’m going to inject this and then we’ll do that. I was experimenting with nicotinamide riboside, and not with nicotinamide mononucleotide, which for people who know it better as NR, or NMN. And neither of them really did anything for me. I didn’t notice anything. And the idea is that just taking niacin has a better impact on those pathways. And annoyingly I seem to not… This is a case where I don’t have an immunity to placebos. I have a hypersensitivity to niacin. If I was taking 25 gram pills, I’d get a big flush and it never changed. I did this for months and I never acclimated to it. I was really bummed, because that one looks like maybe there’s a there there. And niacin is about as not a big deal as an intervention goes as one can think of, but doesn’t work for me.
Nick Urban:
Yeah. And I hope you’re not taking it in the gram range because a huge dose is considered-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no, no, no, sorry, 25 milligrams is what I meant to say.
Nick Urban:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. No, 25 grams, that’s ridiculous. An ounce of niacin. That’s pretty funny. But no, it just knocked me on my butt. So that was an interesting one. Let’s go back to, and this list leads us into the section of our conversation about being, what was your term, that you’re now not a biohacker, you’re a bio-
Nick Urban:
Harmonizer.
Steven Sashen:
Harmonizer. I love you. 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.
Nick Urban:
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. It’s a cybernetic system, meaning that there’s no linear cause and effect. When you change one thing, it changes a bunch of other things. And a lot of the best practices and principles of bioharmony 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.
Steven Sashen:
Oh I like it. And even some of, boy, even some of those have become somewhat mythologized. I’m thinking about sleep. I had this conversation just the other day with someone on the podcast where the whole idea is, 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 was something, a roof, over their head, but no walls. And when there’s a full moon, the ambient light is pretty damn bright. So there’s that.
Or, I think there’s a good amount of mythology around cold plunge stuff, which by the way I do, because I just get a kick out of it. I can’t say I enjoy it, because 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 know, I don’t care, I just get a kick out of it. But that one has been seriously mythologized I think.
Nick Urban:
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’ll wear that for two weeks or so, I notice that when I take a ice bath in the morning, no matter what I do, my blood sugar will be very stable the rest of the day. That’s one that’s not often talked about.
Steven Sashen:
That’s great.
Nick Urban:
But it’s a 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 fats, and then helping with weight loss. And that cold is a stressor, so it stimulates the production release of-
Steven Sashen:
Norepinephrine.
Nick Urban:
Norepinephrine. Yeah, epinephrine, cortisol, all these things, and changes your neurochemical state as well. And I notice that I feel great when I get out of the cold bath, so that could be it. It could be something else entirely. Is it going to change your life in itself? Probably not.
Steven Sashen:
You’re talking to a guy who was a member of the Polar Bear Club, aka jumping into ice water on New Year’s Day, for 17 years until it was like, ”Eh, I’m done.” And of course the joke is that sauna can do many of the same things. 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, but they seem to. And there’s, oh who is it? Brad Pilon, or Pilon, I don’t know 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. It’s an interesting idea. I haven’t noticed any changes in my body fat or weight, from both hot tub saunas and cold plunges. I just like them.
Nick Urban:
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, so you wanna-
Steven Sashen:
So why am I still 5’5?
Nick Urban:
Guess too late on that train? That’s the one. And you alluded to the heat chalk proteins, the FOXO4, all these have beneficial longevity effects, so I think rather than taking these designer molecules, start off with the lifestyle basics, whether it’s getting outside for a walk, it’s seeing the sun, or it’s going in 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 and away, a five minute walk after my meal made a huge difference. And I just saw a New York Times article thar came out recently. It said two minutes of walking can make a difference, so it doesn’t need to be long.
Steven Sashen:
No, I think that key thing though, is it is right after a meal doing that. I’ve been trying to do that, mostly, I’ve been walking more lately because we’ve got a dog and I get up before my wife does, so I’m the 6:00 AM dog walker. We’ll go out for half an hour to an hour. Again, hasn’t changed anything about my body composition, but it is really enjoyable. And when he’s not chasing squirrels or bunnies, it’s just delightful as well. I think I’m going to have to get my shoulder reattached to 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 an 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 the walk, where it was just hanging out there for 18 hours.
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?
Nick Urban:
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 a consequence from it. One that sounds very simple and to me it was life changing when 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.
Steven Sashen:
Is it too personal to ask for an example?
Nick Urban:
Yeah, so when I get in a 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 it I’m 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 try and understand why I felt that way and give my self 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.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I refer to that as playing the movie frame by frame. You just look at it one moment at a time and see, what was I thinking? What belief did I have that led to this behavior? What was the thought? Then what was the feeling that that engendered, and what was the belief that then followed that one? I’ve done similar things. I’ll tell you my favorite one, Lena, 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. But whatever it was, 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, ”All right, 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 I realized that 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, and not 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 behavioral change was that she asked for.
And then I immediately went and apologized and said, ”Look, I can’t promise that I’m going to do it, but I will do the best I can. Feel free to remind me, but also, 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’m okay with that. If it extends past there, that’s going to be a problem.” So to your point, we didn’t need a therapist, we didn’t need to process our feelings. I just took care of, by recognizing the pattern that I had and why I had it. That’s a great one. I appreciate you pointing that one out.
Any other harmonizing things that you’ve done, other than emotional?
Nick Urban:
Yeah, I can run through some of my principles of bioharmony.
Steven Sashen:
Please.
Nick Urban:
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 xero, that could be your arches.
Steven Sashen:
I like it.
Nick Urban:
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 a intervention, there will be consequences and you have to accept that there could be consequences whenever you undergo one of those types of things.
Steven Sashen:
People love to ignore the potential negative side effects, because they have the fantasy they’re going to get only the positive ones.
Nick Urban:
Yeah, unfortunately, doesn’t usually work that way.
Steven Sashen:
It’s what we do. 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 workshop rooms every weekend in hotel rooms and get tens of thousands of dollars per person based on that.
Nick Urban:
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, 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.
Steven Sashen:
Here’s where I’ll poke at it 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 into hysterics and I said, ”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 see in the mirror, you won’t find anybody who says yes honestly. One of the functions of being human is looking in the mirror and going ew, or some variation thereof.
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, suddenly had two warts, one right on thee inside of its lip and one on the outside of his lip. And it’s a papillomavirus and he just didn’t have the antibodies for that. And it just plays its course in the course of three weeks or so. 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 impact, some emotional thing you’re doing, whatever it is, stress and however we define 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 can 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… 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. That’s a whole other aspect of it, given all the right circumstances, it will do the best it can. I’m going to say it that way, see if you disagree with that one. But sometimes you’re going to die.
Nick Urban:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s precisely it. And there’s a lot of things the body is capable of doing that seem… They are miracles when they happen, and we can’t explain them yet exactly how they’re working, in terms of regenerative abilities. But yes, for the most part, you have to support the body or you should support the body, and recognize that it’s a biological organism and it’s doing its best, but it’s not perfect in that way.
Steven Sashen:
It’s definitely 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, for some of us. Or continuing to be able to perform that way up until, in whatever way perform means for you, I was not going the way that some people just took it by my qualifying it, into your whatevers. Again, we’re going to die at some point. Skin gets saggier, muscles get smaller, unless you’re juicing or variations thereof. And I guess perhaps the hardest intervention, or the hardest thing to do with that, maybe, for some people, is being okay with that.
Nick Urban:
Yeah, absolutely. 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’ll drastically speed up your arrival at that destination, and also ways to slow it down a bit.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. And some of these, they could not be more simple, like you were saying. Get some sleep, get outside, see the sun, eat things that you enjoy. And even the eating thing, I have a friend who had breast cancer and she was living with somebody who was a vegan something chef, and was just feeding her all this green stuff and every healthy thing to try and cure her. And every two weeks she would call me and I would 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 much or as little of any of these that you want.” Basically, here’s the buffet, enjoy. And I’d say, ”Which do you think is better for you? How much fun this couple of hours is, eating however many donuts you want. Or thinking that 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.”
Nick Urban:
Oh, absolutely. And that’s also one of the ancient principles of rhythm and pulsation. 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 the experience of being a modern human, but you’re also doing your body favors, even if it’s subpar nutrition in that example.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. 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 that’s it. I don’t have very many donuts per year any longer, and I used to eat a lot of donuts, because donuts, awesome, they should be one of the four basic food groups.
Nick Urban:
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 junk like that.
Steven Sashen:
Chocolate cake. Chocolate cake.
Nick Urban:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
I’ll eat that chocolate cake.
Nick Urban:
Yeah, chocolate cake. There’s all kinds of things that fall into that category that are non-negotiables. They should be in everyone’s diet for the sheer enjoyment if nothing else. But that leads into the fourth principle of bioharmony and that is biofeedback amnesia. The fact of how modern humans have lost the 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 a very different equation in terms of the overall want.
Steven Sashen:
My favorite
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