Podcast 539: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Biohacking with Nick Urban

(Intro)

NICK: The modern lifestyle from AC to cars to beyond makes it so easy to stay in our comfort zone and to do things that just fall into routine, and when we don't use something, as you mentioned, it atrophies, and there's a lot of different corollaries for this. Some of them are  footwear.

MARTIN: Hello everyone. This is Martin Pytela for the Life Enthusiast podcast, and today I have with me, Nick Urban. I see him as my younger brother from a different mother. He's just a few decades behind me, but he's really following the passion that I have, and I feel such a deep connection. Nick, welcome.

NICK: Thank you, Martin. It's great to be here. Looking forward to chatting with you. I hosted Martin on my podcast episode number 194, and we had an excellent conversation about Metabolic Typing. So I'm looking forward to extending the conversation today.

MARTIN: Right. I would very much like to help people see the deeper things, not just the basics. Let's just dive into. Let me frame it this way, the industrial age, as I know it, has created and brought to me so many conveniences. I could just sit on my tush or in my bed and have everything delivered to me. I would never have to get up. I would never have to work out, nothing. But I would probably wither away because if I don't use something, it atrophies and atrophy is the enemy of health, right?

NICK: Absolutely. The modern lifestyle from AC to cars to beyond makes it so easy to stay in our comfort zone and to do things that just fall into routine and when we don't use something, as you mentioned, it atrophies and there's a lot of different corollaries for this, some of them being footwear. I used to have big shoes with large arch support and everything, and I thought I needed those because I had a high arch. Naturally, I didn't ever connect the dots that were actually causing some shin splints and issues with my athletic performance. And then more recently, I realized that when I sleep with a pillow behind my head, I'm doing the same thing with my neck muscles. Dr. Peter Martone taught me this. And instead of sleeping with the pillow behind my head, I shifted it and put it under my neck instead.

And so by doing that, I'm no longer atrophying the muscles in my neck, which translates to better posture and energy and to so many other things as well.

MARTIN: Yeah, this is a big one, actually. Let's dwell on this for a moment. It's called the head forward position. And it's when you are at a computer, you do this, and you roll your shoulders forward, and you roll your head in. And normally, your ear is supposed to be over your shoulder.

NICK: Okay.

MARTIN: And if you don't maintain that, you cause yourself a gigantic stack of problems. You want to dive into that a bit?

NICK: Yeah. Forward head posture is such a common issue in today's world, not only because of computers, but also because of phones, and it's earned the nickname tech neck, amongst chiropractors and other people who are aware of the importance of bodily alignment. It's a recurring issue, and when you do that, you dramatically increase the amount of pressure going through your cervical neck vertebrae, and also when you do that, you're cutting off some blood supply. Well, you're reducing it. You're reducing oxygen availability to your brain, and you're creating so many imbalances in the body. So that late afternoon coffee might not be from low energy, that is a caffeine deficiency. It might simply just be because of your posture, and by working on the forward head posture.

MARTIN: Yeah. Cut off brain circulation. Huh. I associate TMJ pains with that. That's one of the common side effects. And neck pains, migraines, back pains, midback pains. If you have pain between your shoulders, it could be from excess weight… because when you're aligned, the pressure is holding in the stack, and the further you go off of this, the angle is actually multiplying. It's a geometric increase in pressure. 

NICK: Yes, and what's interesting about this, too, is that when you have imbalances in the body, everything downstream of it is going to be affected. So if you have an issue with your cervical vertebrae in your neck, then all of a sudden, it can change your respiratory, your breathing rate, which can change your stress balance. It can put you into a fight or flight state without even you being aware of it simply because you're out of balance. And by working on these things, you can correct a lot of things downstream of the original problem.

MARTIN: Right. It reminds me that I did not actually ask you how you engage with people. Maybe we should just preface it. No, I don't understand the English word preface. It's here, and just introduce, how do people engage with you or how do you engage with people? How do you enjoy working with others? How do you,

NICK: I write and create a lot of content around looking at both the latest modern science and then also the time-proven systems of traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. And I look to marry the two, and look at these concepts through both lenses so that I can help people find what I call the highest bioharmonic technologies, the things that have the greatest potential upside with the lowest potential risk. And more recently, I started doing consultations and helping people on the individual level because there are a lot of commonalities. We all know about the importance of good sleep, of movement throughout the day, of getting your breathing patterns correct, your posture, as we just mentioned. There are a lot of different things like this, but then also a lot of times the individual anatomical and biochemical differences can play a large role. So I like to help people one-on-one figure those things out because there's a lot of cool fancy things and technologies. I'm guilty, I have a lot of them around me, and they're great and all, but if you're missing some of the often cheap or free low-hanging fruit, then you're chasing the avenue because there's so much other stuff you can do that'll have a disproportionate impact on your health and well-being.

MARTIN: Yes, indeed. So, how do they find you?

NICK: My website. My website is outliyr.com, and there you'll find a lot of the articles that I write, the podcasts I record, the YouTube videos I shoot, but then also, since that's hard to remember the spelling, you can also find me at nickurban.me

MARTIN: Perfect. Beautiful. Actually, let's just run through some of the credentials that you have accumulated in your fairly young life.

NICK: My first and most important area to me has been my start, which was when I was really young. I was helping my high school teammates with their supplement stacks to get them to perform better on the field, and I later came across nootropics, adaptogens, and mineral balancing to help performance in the classroom as well. So I've been hands-on with people for a long time, making sure they get,

MARTIN: Junior hacker. 

NICK: And then after that, I realized there's a lot of things in modern medicine and health sciences that just didn't really fit and didn't sit well with me. Things like the cholesterol issue, the amyloid plaques and Alzheimer's.

MARTIN: Yeah. Lie number one, lie number two.

NICK: Yeah. Exactly. Even when I was in college, I was studying neuroscience, and I came across these topics, and I was like, okay, well, if high cholesterol is always an issue, and that's the underlying cause. Then if you do an intervention to lower cholesterol, you should see the outcomes of cardiovascular disease decrease meaningfully by almost 100%. And lo and behold, that wasn't the case. And then the same with Alzheimer's. You'd expect that if you untangle the amyloid plaques and you block the tau proteins, and everything, the outcomes should become almost perfect, and that doesn't happen either. So back then I realized there's a lot of issues with the way Western science has gone, and then I came across certain editors of major journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, she mentioned that a lot of that science cannot be reproduced, and if it can't be reproduced is it even science?

MARTIN: No, it's a myth.

NICK: Exactly. And so that's where some of the older systems are. I looked at those and okay, they had answers for a lot of these things. Ayurveda was talking about the importance of circadian rhythm, bioenergetics, and digestion 5,000 years ago, and they were ahead of where we are in light science.

We're talking now about the importance of early morning light to regulate sleep-wake cycles. And they knew the intricacies of that 5,000 years ago.

MARTIN: The more things change, the more they remain the same. In some ways, the basics have not changed. And my favorite pet peeve is that people are majoring in minor things, leaving the major issues behind, like the need for newness, right? New is attractive. The shiny new object is something that we want to get to. So we start talking about the newest little supplement that somebody just isolated, and we can learn everything about, I don't know, NMN, which actually is an old thing. It's just that it's newly discovered, and everybody's going to be talking about it when, in fact, what we should really be doing is focusing on the important building blocks that whole health and life stands upon. Right?

NICK: Yeah. That was one of the early articles I wrote on the NAD and NMN specifically. And I started looking into it. I did my research, and I'm like, okay, yeah, this NAD precursors out there. It's really powerful to improve your cellular energy, but there's also a lot of these really cheap and or free things you can do that have a disproportionate impact on those levels. So, you might as well start with those, and then if you have the budget left over, potentially consider taking NMN, but you don't need to. And it turns out there's additional side effects and issues with NMN, it's not the perfect molecule that it was once thought to be. Versus, if you're doing things keeping a fairly stable sleep/wake cycle, or you're moving more, these things don't have side effects. They have side benefits.

MARTIN: Yeah. Interesting. I was thinking about this issue a while back, not long ago, and I'm thinking, okay, this is the citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle, which is the energy conversion inside of the mitochondria, which is the number one thing for us, how do we convert food into energy? Are we efficient at it? And when you do the full chemistry of it, you have multiple points where you can input energy in and where energy comes out, or I should say you input food inputs and you get energy coming out, and there are the NAD, NADH, NMN, those are all the inputs that can come in. Alpha ketoglutarate is another one of those things, and you will see them in the hacking community. They will discover alpha ketoglutarate and go wild, right?

NICK: Yeah. And it's the whole concept of minoring in the majors and majoring in the minors.

MARTIN: Yeah. There we go.

NICK: But there's also times when these things make sense. For example, to me, one of the most important parts of my routine is every day I get up, and when I get up shortly thereafter, I go outside for a walk in natural sunlight, and that's around sunrise. And I'll use that time to plan my day, to reflect, and to also learn a little bit. But then if I can't get out there for whatever reason, I don't just throw my hands up. I use some of the conveniences of modernity like light panels, and I'm still able to get my circadian rhythm back on track, regulated because the actual circadian rhythm's length is a little over 24 hours. So having that daily exposure to bright light over 10,000 lux, which is a measure of light intensity, helps reset the circadian rhythm. And so by not being able to get outside, I can use these panels. I have a bunch all around me and enjoy the convenience of modernity when I can't get out.

MARTIN: I hacked that thing not long ago. I bought myself a grow light.

NICK: Yeah.

MARTIN: I'll actually show it to you. One sec. I have it right here because I have it right by my desk. So I can plug into it anytime I want. But here is, moment, coming right up. Look at this. This is a grow light. That's about a $50 LED affair. And when you turn it on, out comes this red light.

NICK: Yeah.

MARTIN: And, it confuses my camera, and it's, anyway, 50 bucks. Instead of, I saw Joe Rogan talk about the light bed that sells for $100,000 that he's put in his house. And I'm thinking, well,

NICK: Yeah, exactly. For your average person, you don't need to spend $150,000 on a Novothor bed. You can get a cheap light. You just want to make sure it's bright enough, it's the right wavelengths, and it has what's called the right beam angle, meaning that the light is either more dispersed or it's more concentrated, and you want a 60 to 90° beam angle. Those are some of the most important things to check when you're looking at different lights.

MARTIN: Well, to a great degree. We are a lot like plants. We do want light, and we want to be out there. I really like the idea of the walking meditation that you put forward as a really good hack. You don't have to be sitting still with your eyes closed. You could be actually walking and listening to birds and admiring the insects as they go through the trees. Right.

NICK: Yeah. There's a researcher named Arthur Haynes and he proposed an idea that humans are photoheteroautotrophs, which means that we can get some of our cellular energy from the sun. And a lot of biohackers these days are increasing that by using certain substances like the dark pigments of the plant world, the shilajits, I saw you had a podcast on that, the pigments such as in blueberries, the proanthocyanins, and then Methylene Blue that's another big one, and then when you do that you're able to convert, extract more energy from sunlight or light therapy.

MARTIN: Mhm. Well, there are people out there, breatharians, who actually do, and this has been shown; they actually are able to live on light alone. It's possible. I'm not there, but it exists.

NICK: Yeah. And I've read some of those case reports, too. And these are breatharians who are in metabolic wards, meaning, they don't have access to the outside world, everything all their inputs, their food, their water, is closely regulated so that if they were actually eating, then it would be caught on camera and someone else would know about it.

MARTIN: Oh yeah. This was no cheat-proof that you can go for a very, very long time on light alone.

NICK: Yeah. Well, there's even a concept, I don't know if you've come across this, called dry fasting, where you have your typical cleanses, you have your water fasts, and there's a couple of doctors out of Russia, and there's a book called the Phoenix Protocol, and it's when you don't consume anything, not a drop of water. It's obviously very extreme and should be done only under medical supervision. Then, your body uses different pathways, and you actually continue to excrete even though you're not consuming or drinking anything, and it's supposed to be really good for stem cells and bodily repair, rejuvenation, and autophagy and all those types of processes.

MARTIN: Well, there's about a million, billion of Muslims in the world who, in the month of Ramadan do this whole thing. They consume nothing from sunrise to sunset.

NICK: Yes.

MARTIN: They turn into a bit of a night owl because then, right after the sun sets, they try to catch up to everything they missed. But still, it's documented and experimented with, and done by many.

NICK: Yeah. And that's part of my passion is to look around, what are the people doing in other parts of the world, and what kind of results are they getting from them? The Russians, for example, have been pioneers when it comes to brain supportive nutrients and substances, as well as therapeutic peptides and a subset of those peptides called bioregulators. There’s all kinds of really cool stuff and research coming out of Russia, and other countries too, but Russia seems to be one of the lesser known ones.

MARTIN: Okay, so let's dig into two trains of thoughts. One was building resilience through adversity, and the other one is targeting fixes with the peptides. The peptides are a really good thing. Which one do you want to pick first?

NICK: Let's do resilience one first. I have a lot to say on peptides.

MARTIN: Okay. So, let's say, adversity is actually a good thing. Okay. So, let's talk about temperature shocks, exercise shocks. What else can we think of? Water, no water, food, no food.

NICK: The general theme that I like to classify these all into is that humans are built to oscillate between the extremes. The polarity going from one to the other. And very rarely throughout our history would we have continuous sameness throughout the year. It's like we have the seasons. We have hot and cold. We have day and night. We have all these, running to get your kill so you can have food, and then a lot of time of relaxation, and so the body responds and adapts very well to these cues because it's a sign that things are working properly, and if you don't have that, then it sends a biological mismatch and your body starts to atrophy and decay in a way.

MARTIN: Right. So the opposite of being on a sofa in an air-conditioned restaurant, right?

NICK: Yeah. Or you can also be on the sofa in the air-conditioned restaurant, but beforehand expose yourself to a higher temperature and then afterward expose yourself to a lower temperature, or beforehand just do both of them. And that way your body is getting the opportunity to regulate itself because when you expose yourself to a sauna, which I'm a huge fan of, then your internal core temperature goes way up. You sweat a ton, and your body after you get out has to take the time and the energy, expend the resources to regulate itself, to bring the temperature back down to rehydrate and everything. And so that right there upregulates your antioxidant defenses and all kinds of survival pathways that make you a more resilient human. Plus, it's just nice if you live somewhere like I do in Texas in the summer, it's often above 100 degrees. If you go into the sauna, then when you are actually in the 100 degree weather walking around, it's much more manageable. My body's already gone up to well, I've been in a 200 degree sauna, so then my body can reregulate back down to my normal core temperature, so the 100 degree outside weather is nothing in comparison.

MARTIN: Right, yeah, this is training for adversity, right?

NICK: Yep

MARTIN: Indeed. I remember talking to a friend who had all kinds of arthritic problems with his aging body, got himself an infrared sauna, and within 2-3 months, it wasn't long, reporting back: “My mobility is back, my aches and pains have diminished dramatically.” So, there's definitely a great deal of benefits in sweating out the toxic things, but it's not the only thing, right? Heat shock protein is something that's been studied. You want to talk about that a bit?

NICK: Yeah, so heat shock proteins are… One of the hallmarks of aging is misfolded proteins, and heat shock proteins are a substance that courses through your body when you're exposed to really hot temperatures, and paradoxically also really cold temperatures. There are cold shock proteins also but when you're exposed to really extreme cold you're also increasing heat shock proteins paradoxically. But what happens is when you do that after your sauna session, then you come out, and your body operates more efficiently because misfolded proteins cannot be used by the body, and therefore they have to be recycled, and when you're in the sauna, and you're getting the increased heat shock proteins, you're indirectly increasing your longevity and slowing the biological aging process.

MARTIN: Yeah. I was meditating on the sauna concept and the relationship to winter flu, and I'm thinking, all right, the flu is the body just reaching a point of saturation and having to dump all kinds of toxins. So, it will put you in a fever and immobilize you and just force you to dump toxins. So, I'm thinking that the sauna is actually a smaller dose, a prevention of dumping the stuff that if you don't, you end up with a flu.

NICK: Yeah, Martin, I love that you say that. Part of what I talk about in Bioharmony is looking at the body as this system of systems as a cybernetic system and realizing that we don't have a clue about how most of it is working. Science tries to explain it, and oftentimes in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, we figure out that we were totally wrong about the way it works. And so if we have a fever, that's the body's process of increasing core temperature, obviously and then making the body less hospitable to invaders such as bacteria or viruses, fungi, whatever it is. And by suppressing that fever, obviously, we want to stay within a safe limit, but by suppressing it, we're actually impeding the body's ability to fight these pathogens off. And so a lot of times, using a sauna when sick, where appropriate, or before getting sick as preventative maintenance helps the body make sure that nothing overgrows and causes symptoms. And the worst thing during a sickness, if you're at a reasonable temperature, you're not too hot, obviously, is to suppress the temperature because then you're disabling the body's ability to defend itself the way it always has.

MARTIN: Right. Yeah. The original purpose was, let's dump the toxins out of cells and flush it out, and you say, "No, no, no. I forbid you. I want to stay toxic."

NICK: Yeah. Detox is such a controversial topic, but we know through increasing core temperature and heat shock proteins and a lot of other things that are coming from practices like sauna use that we're naturally going to be detoxifying. And some people will also add in binders, and things like that to help catch the toxins after the process, like sauna, which invigorates them and liberates them into the bloodstream. Either way, we're having to deal with extreme fat loss. Since fat can store… It does store toxins, people who lose a ton of weight will have increased levels of heavy metals and other things in their bloodstream, and they can feel really bad when they're losing weight. And so even for people like that, using something alongside a severe weight loss protocol can help prevent issues.

MARTIN: That's an interesting one. So when I exercise to the point of sweating, I'm going to lose weight, not because of the energy expenditure, but because of the detoxification that takes place.

NICK: Yeah, you're going to lose weight, obviously, the water weight from sweating as well. And probably partially through the detoxification. But also, when you have a bunch of metals in your body that changes the electrochemical balance of your body. And so there's metals and foods, supplements, from just walking down the street, we're exposed to them constantly, and the body has a really adept way of preventing those metals from damaging our body. When you've been exposed to more than an average person, and then all of a sudden you're going through extreme exercise, if you're just sweating a little bit, it's not going to be much of an issue. But if you're really dieting and trying to cut down on your weight and you feel bad, it could be because you're liberating a bunch of toxins and by binding them with something like activated charcoal, zeolite, or there's a bunch of different things you can use then that can help you get through it while still feeling better and safer.

MARTIN: Right. Yeah. Well, and then there's the cold, right? The cold plunge has gotten very popular.

NICK: Yes. 

MARTIN: And I see guys buying these fancy cold plunges. I guess it's a good thing. I don't know. My own method is just turn on the cold shower and suffer for a while.

NICK: Yeah. I got my first exposure to cold plunges from rugby because between matches, we'd have back-to-back matches and we had to recover in less than 24 hours, often in 14 hours. So, it was a non-negotiable that our coaches made us do them. We'd be in hotels, and they'd put ice in the bathtubs. And that was where I first learned about it. First started doing it. And they are a double-edged sword. For a lot of people, they obviously feel good when you get out, and you have the adrenaline, the norepinephrine, the dopamine coursing through your brain and body, but it often comes at a cost because it is a biological stressor. And if you have everything else in your life in check already, that's great. It can be therapeutic, and it can give you resilience and mental fortitude, that is the reason a lot of athletes use it. But if you already are concerned about your family life, about your deadlines at work, about other things going on, your fasting, then all of a sudden what's known as your allostatic load or your stress bucket can start to overflow, and the benefits of cold exposure can actually turn to detriments. And so for a lot of people, doing it at a little warmer temperature, it seems to be one of those areas where colder and longer is better for bragging rights and everything, but that can be detrimental. And if you're going to do a cold shower, you're not going to run into that issue as much. But if you're doing a commercial cold plunge at a gym or something, oftentimes the 10 minutes at 32 degrees or 34 degrees is doing more detriment than it is good.

MARTIN: Too much stress, right?

NICK: Yes.

MARTIN: That's too much of a good thing, right? I can enjoy one scoop of ice cream and call it an oral pleasure without much of a metabolic penalty. And if I eat the whole pint, that's a whole different level of damage.

NICK: Yeah.

MARTIN: So, here's the opposite. You're doing a goodness, but you're overdoing it to the point of overstressing the body, right?

NICK: Yes. Exactly.

MARTIN: Right. Well, so I think I'm going to stick with my 50° shower.

NICK: I think that's perfect for a lot of people. I think that makes sense. And perhaps later, I think, there's some devices you can use to put your shower water through a filter of some sorts and it cools it down, and you put ice cubes in it or something. And I'm not sure how necessary that is. You could also try turning your bathtub into your own cold plunge at some point if you really wanted to get out of the ordinary. But it's also one of those things, to me it's you don't need to use super cold thermogenesis every day. It seems to work best when it's only used a couple of times a week, and if you're going to use it more often to do it for shorter bouts and try varying the temperature according to your existing stress load.

MARTIN: Or go to the local park and find a cold running creek and jump in.

NICK: There you go. If you're up in Canada or somewhere where it gets cold enough to do that, that's definitely an option.

MARTIN: I keep forgetting that you are where the surface water is probably 75, right?

NICK: Yeah.

MARTIN: You have to suffer so much in that mild climate. 

NICK: Yeah. Well, when you're getting out into the natural bodies of water, you're getting a lot of other exposures, beneficial exposures, too. You're getting the natural light. You're getting the earthing or grounding by contacting the bare earth, but also water is a better conductor. So, you're getting more of that. And there's some interesting research on the ability of that to help modulate pain and inflammation beyond just the cold, but the cold also does that. So, it's like a synergistic additive effect. You're also getting the terpenes and the bioactive substances that occur in the air, assuming that there's some kind of plants or trees around you. You're getting the stress-relieving fractals of the geometric patterns that naturally occur in the environment. So, there's a lot of other benefits. I'm actually a bigger fan if you have the ability, you have a stream near you, or something to make that the practice.

MARTIN: Yeah. You're putting the sciency words to fill the Japanese concept of forest bathing.

NICK: Yes. Exactly.

MARTIN: Just simple, right? Go for a walk and make sure it's in nature rather than in a radiant heat of the heated pavement, which is currently off-gassing a whole bunch of hydrocarbons that you should not be inhaling anyway.

NICK: When it comes to health, that's also one of the areas I like to start because there's so many different places and a lot of it takes willpower and dedicated effort each and every time. Say you want to go to the gym, you want to make that your routine, you have to get your stuff together. You have to decide you're going to do it every single time you want to go and hit the gym. But for something like your home, your environment where you spend so much time, a couple tweaks here and there, like upgrading your quality of air, whether that's changing your HVAC filters a little more often or it's getting a dedicated air filter, maybe that's improving your water, getting a dedicated water filter. These things you do once, and there's occasional ongoing cost of the filter maintenance and that kind of stuff. But then instead of exposing yourself to these things that can be degrading your health day in and day out, you're able to put that part on autopilot and to improve your health in the background without doing any extra work.

MARTIN: Yeah, those are really good thoughts. So, okay, exercise, roll around naked in nature, expose yourself to sunlight, especially in the morning. Don't be afraid to look at the sunrise. There's such a thing as photosensitivity that's induced by pH imbalance. So, if you are light sensitive, you're probably too acidic. Contemplate that.

NICK: Yeah.

MARTIN: All right. Well, let's hit the other side. The biohacks from Russia.

NICK: The big one for me is peptides. These are really small chains of amino acids. very short compared to the proteins which are longer and they're interesting because a lot of them are naturally produced in the body. A lot of them have long names and codes and everything. The most famous one is probably the most famous newer one is BPC-157, and that's a peptide produced in the gastric juice in the stomach. And it's been making the waves in the health optimization realm because it's such a broad benefit for peptide, especially for gut issues, for wound healing, since the gut is linked to the brain through the vagus nerve. And the BPC-157 can help with wound healing and recovery from injuries from tendons, ligaments, joints, even bone issues. So that's a common one you'll see in a lot of peptide protocols. It's also one that you can get that works and is bioactive not only through injection but also through capsules, and I don't think creams, but multiple different forms of administration.

MARTIN: Mhm. Yeah. I guess the FDA has started sticking its nose into this, right?

NICK: Yes. Yeah. It's a gray area right now, and there's some clinics that work with people to integrate them because peptides, some of them have a really good benefit to safety profile. And as compared to a lot of drugs which bluntly just force changes in the body, peptides act more like signaling molecules where they suggest changes to the body.

MARTIN: Right on. Well, the GLP1 has been getting a lot of press, right?

NICK: GLP1 has. I'm not as big a fan of it because when I look at it through the lens of bioharmony, the potential upside to downside. The issue with that is your body naturally produces GLP-1 after you eat.

MARTIN: Exactly.

NICK: But the molecule that is being used as peptides lasts about 6,000 times longer than natural GLP-1.

MARTIN: So you have eaten, and you're satiated for a long time. Yeah?

NICK: Yeah. And the issue with that is that when you sleep, you would never have that state in your body naturally because of the way it impacts insulin and other hormones. So to me, if you were going to use that, the ideal molecule would be one that has a much shorter life.

MARTIN: Right.

NICK: It's not as convenient, but I think that's also the way people are going now. It's microdosing GLP-1 peptides.

MARTIN: That seems to be very anti-inflammatory for most people, right?

NICK: Yes, it's anti-inflammatory. It can also help with addictions because of the way it works on the brain as well.

MARTIN: Okay. Anyway, speaking of GLP-1, in a commercial setting, that's called Ozempic, and it's dosed at a very high dose, like one and a half, two milligrams, as opposed to the micro-dosing, which would be a 20th of that.

NICK: Yeah. There's also other companies, I have one right here in front of me, and these are just capsules, and they activate GLP-1.

MARTIN: Go ahead, show it clearly.

NICK: Let's see. Can you see that?

MARTIN: Yeah.

NICK: This one's called,

MARTIN: GLP-1 in a microdose just straight up, yeah? 

NICK: Well, what it is, it's called CaloCurb, and it's a special plant extract called amarasate. And the team behind it, they were commissioned by the New Zealand government to study a bunch of botanicals and find any that can help with obesity and appetite control and everything. And they found this, and it's the only one out of a thousand plants they studied that has a meaningful impact on GLP-1. And it brings it up by sixfold. So you consume one of these capsules an hour before a meal, and it just dramatically reduces appetite and cravings and everything. And this, unlike the GLP-1 peptides, it doesn't have such a long half-life. So levels come back down much faster, and it's closer to the way the GLP-1 naturally works in the body.

MARTIN: Right. Yet again, leave it to pharmacology to mimic nature, but not in a very good way.

NICK: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. It sounds great on paper to have something that lasts 6,000 times longer because you only have to administer it once a week, max twice a week for the GLP-1 peptides, but there's usually a downside when you do something like that.

MARTIN: Yeah. The acquisition of these, how do you get your hands on it? Do you have it available for people, or do you sell these things or no?

NICK: No, I don't. That is definitely a gray area. I don't even necessarily. I advocate they check with their healthcare team to make sure it's appropriate for them because it's a regulatory gray zone, currently. There's some products that contain them that are sold commonly, one of my favorite peptides is called GHK-Cu. It's a copper peptide.

MARTIN: Yeah, we actually have that one available on our website too.

NICK: Yes. So, that can be used in a bunch of different ways also, including as a topical. And I actually used it as a topical cream earlier today. And that one's awesome for rejuvenation, regeneration, and beauty purposes. It's used in a lot of skin care products, but it also has nice anti-aging longevity benefits.

MARTIN: We're in a bit of trouble with the regulators wanting to limit our ability to control our own destiny. By the way, bunch of these peptides are injectables. You would need to be using the same kind of syringe that people who inject insulin would be using. It's a tiny needle, and it's not a big deal, but you need to get over getting used to stabbing yourself in the belly.

NICK: Yeah, that was definitely a hurdle for me because before this, I'd never used any kind of needles, and the first couple times it's a big shock. It's like what am I doing? This is pretty extreme and then very quickly you're like, okay got the hang of it now.

MARTIN: I guess every diabetic who gets to be shooting insulin, they pretty much have to figure out how to do that, right?

NICK: Yeah. And that's the best known peptide of all. It definitely has a very narrow therapeutic window. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a professional bodybuilder and you really know what you're doing. But that's the most established peptide.

MARTIN: Right. There's another little piece of biohacking which I think is awesome, and it's hitting the mainstream, really, which is a continuous glucose monitor. If you can try that and watch it on your phone, just seeing what it's doing, that would to me, be very useful for anyone who suffers with all kinds of glucose dysregulation issues, obesity, diabetes, mental states, lack of brain power, any one of those things that are related directly to glucose dysregulation.

NICK: Yeah. Martin, I don't know if I told you this, but I actually used to use continuous glucose monitors once every single year, just for a short two-week period to make sure that my blood glucose levels are on a healthy level in a narrow window. And to make sure that my current diet is working for me, because those can help you find out that seemingly healthy foods that are having a disproportionate impact on your blood sugar and really spiking your blood sugar. And so I found out very quickly that things like green beans, I would never suspect green beans, but those would spike my blood sugar even when I just steamed them. And then I later realized that it was because of gut imbalances I had, and I addressed those. And I also realized from using it for a long time, back when I was following the ketogenic diet. You wouldn't think I'd have any blood sugar issues because it's supposed to keep your insulin steady, your blood sugar steady. But over the long term, it didn't have that impact. And my fasting blood sugar actually increased. So I realized that by adding back some carbohydrates into my diet, I was able to bring my fasting blood sugar right back down into the normal healthy range.

MARTIN: Now, isn't that an interesting, unexpected finding, right? And that's where metabolic typing comes in, right? We have some people on whose choice list green beans are way down at the bottom of the list. I'm one of them myself. I already know from my results that green beans are not my friend. Whereas my wife is a completely different type. She's totally fine with it. I'm not.

NICK: One of the other strange insights for me, perhaps this has a corollary in metabolic typing, is that ice cream, you'd think that I would do terribly with that, and it would really just make my blood sugar soar, had very little impact on my blood sugar,

MARTIN: Right. Go figure. Well, creamy things, we speak of pituitary dominance, and you probably have plenty of it. And creamy things are the food that feeds our brain. So people who do a lot of brain processing, intellectual activity, will do well with creamy things and are designed to consume that sort of thing.

NICK: Yeah. I'm not using that exactly as justification to eat ice cream all the time, but it was interesting to find if I'm going to have something that I think is not very healthy for me, should it be this over here, the cake or the ice cream? The ice cream seems to do better for me.

MARTIN: Oh yeah, makes sense. Yeah. Whipping cream in quantity, if you want. Well, what else should we hit on trying to help people? I somehow would like to tie in the understandings of your generation, most of my clients are in my age group, and you would be our children's group by understanding. How do you see the world? What are the big things that you're facing that you're dealing with.

NICK: One of the things I think is important to cover with you today is the impact of AI on all this. I'm not sure if you've discussed this much, but it's a really powerful tool of taking any of our health data really. We can maybe want to anonymize it so it's not going to be used to train the models, but we can just take our name off of it, and we can share our blood glucose levels or our blood panels and be like, "Hey, this is what I got in my recent test. Help me understand how this compares to the healthy population, not just the population that is in the normal reference range here. Or you can look at it and be like, "Oh, okay. I have really high iron levels," which I did from my previous blood work. I looked at it, and I thought to myself, I know a couple of things I can do to address this. I wonder if AI has any good ideas. And so I fed it my blood labs, and I showed it several different markers and asked them how they can relate and what I can do to optimize them as a whole. And it gave me a bunch of different ideas. And that's just one way that you can use it. You can also, with your doctor's permission, record conversations that you have at the doctor's office, and you can ask it for the information that you just heard, I'd like a second opinion on what you think is useful here.

MARTIN: So transcribe it and feed it into what do you use? Do you use ChatGPT or some other one?

NICK: Yeah. So, what's cool, there's a bunch of different options. Gemini, Google's product. You can chat with it over voice for free.

MARTIN: Okay.

NICK: And I like ChatGPT because they tend to innovate the fastest. You can also chat with it over voice, but I think that costs money. There’s a lot of different options out there, and it's one of those technologies and skills that’s only going to become more and more prevalent, so it makes sense to start learning about it now. And the applications are endless.

MARTIN: So, I haven't thought of it, but you can actually take the test, the medical lab test that you just received the results of, they send it to you online, and you just feed that document right into the input and say, "Help me understand what this is all about. How can I improve the numbers? I'm concerned about blah blah." And,

NICK: You could even say I have been feeling low energy the last couple of weeks or months, and this was my most recent blood labs. Help me determine if there's any patterns or correlations here that I should be aware of that might explain it. Because sometimes it's not one biomarker that's out of normal range, but it's a constellation of them. And when you piece them together, you can see, oh, okay, it's because I have low thyroid. And then you can say, okay, because you think it's this, how do I address this as a whole rather than just focusing on the individual biomarkers? Because I'm not a fan of just chasing individual biomarkers to begin with either. The body's much more complex than that. So if you see this over here, you can take a natural alternative to bring your cholesterol down, but it's more important to figure out why is your cholesterol high in the first place?

MARTIN: Yeah, this is really cool. I have not thought of it. I've been always interrogating Gemini or whatever, just asking it questions, tell me about this, tell me about that, but I have not been actually individually customizing this, feed it, and say okay, what do you think of this or what do I have here? That's really creative.

NICK: Yeah, there's a lot of ways to use it, and there'll be more and more that come up over the years too. But it's one of the first things to think about when you have a health question, maybe if you don't even rely on it, is how can I use this as a second opinion? On whatever it is that I'm coming across, say I have high cholesterol. Back to that same example, help me understand how, what can be causing this in my body. What's the root cause of this? Because it's pretty good at root cause analysis. And also, if you're looking at things such as peptides, the GLP-1s, any new intervention, you can ask it, "Hey, what are the proponents saying about this? What are the opponents saying of this? Help me understand both the potential upsides and the downsides.”

MARTIN: Right. Using your brain in a creative way to expand and extend your reach. I mean, you really have an assistant at PhD level. As long as you ask it an intelligent question, it will come back with an answer.

NICK: Yeah. Well, there were certain things that I have complex biochemistry questions about and I'd search Google for answers. I'd peruse the first three pages results, not find anything satisfactory. I'd go to YouTube. I'd watch a couple videos, bummed that they didn't answer my question. And it seemed like it should be simple but I just couldn't get an answer and now I can just open up the chat and I can have a conversation with AI and you can give it tweaks tell it to do this and not do that and really customize it the way you want and you can get answers to your question pretty fast and I don't trust everything it says I always double check there's certain AI tools, one's called Perplexity that tends to cite its sources so that's really helpful for a lot of things. If you don't need the sources cited, then ChatGPT or Gemini can work pretty well, too.

MARTIN: Yeah. Awesome. That sounds like a really neat hack. I guess it can replace me. People call me and say, "Martin, what do you think?" I guess.

NICK: Well, the quality of your input determines the quality of your output. So, if you can direct its thinking and you can tell it who it is, ironically, you have to actually tell ChatGPT or any AI platforms who they are. You are a researcher, or you are whatever kind of professional. Now, answer this: the quality of your prompt, as it's called, determines the quality of your results.

MARTIN: All right. Yeah. This is something that we're going to have to be teaching at school now. Of course. It’ll take 20 years before they get it into schools, but.

NICK: Yeah. Well, I think it's already making its way into schools. Even if I am going out and I didn't know anything about health and wellness. I would go to the grocery store. You can snap pictures of things such as the label of the food and ask it to decode what some of these words mean. What are these other ingredients? Do I need to care about magnesium stearate? Do I need to care about silicon dioxide? Do I need to care about all these things? What are these chemical names translated in English?

MARTIN: Well, Nick, this has been a very interesting hour we spent together. I think we could keep going, but I think maybe we should call it chapter two when we get together next time.

NICK: I like it.

MARTIN: Right. So, Nick Urban, that's N I C K U R B A N.me or Outliyr spelled funny. O U T L I Y R.com.

NICK: Yep, that's it.

MARTIN: All right. It's been most fascinating. Thank you, Nick.

NICK: Yeah, thank you. It was great to host you as well. If you guys want to check that out, mindbodypeak.com/194 was my podcast with Martin on all things metabolic typing from a biohacker's perspective. But Martin, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for hosting me today.