WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: Biohacking

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

This week we discuss the phenomenon of biohacking. Tune in to discover how technology uncovered the benefits of hydrogen water, beef tallow, sleeping enough, and drinking apple cider vinegar.

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale, 11.7 FM, where we examine the truth disparity between what's on social media and what's actually true. I'm Jeline Parks. And I'm Garrett Gulesby. And today we're talking about biohacking. Scary. It sounds like we're about to hack into people's bodies and take over them and control them. It's actually just as scary as it sounds. Okay.

To me, at least as a phenomenon, maybe not to you? Um, I don't know if it's, parts of it are a little scary. I think what scares me the most is the attitude behind it. Yes, I agree 100%. So I'm really curious to see how that played out on social media. Poorly. I can only imagine. These people are so weird.

I found this idea for the episode because I was watching TikTok as I do. And I saw an interview of Megan Trainers saying she's been biohacking her body. And I was like, that has to be a joke. And I went to the comments to find people who agreed with me, as you do. And everyone was like, that's awesome. Biohacking. It's going to take over the world. And I was like, biohacking is real, you guys?

haven't we, aren't we better than this? No, we're not. So can you give me social media's definition of biohacking? What are we working with here? Okay, so I'm going to tell you it's different for women and men. Oh, interesting. I need you to understand that the way that it's marketed and it's all marketing is really different for women and men. For women, it's like, I don't want to use the word hack because it's in the word, but the idea of like hacking your body systems in order to reverse aging.

that's always what it seems like is we're always working to reverse our bodies like what is it called like when you test your body's age like people have tested their bodies age and they're like now i'm 18 cellular age i think it's something like that you would refer to it and for men it's about the word that comes to the forefront is optimization like the optimization of your time so with women it's like it's all time related but with men it's like how much can you get done and do in a short span of time. And for women, it's like, how can you reverse time? Seems to be the different goals. Either way, it seems to be like optimizing your body's functions by engaging in high-tech practices and products. That is another big difference is there's two, there seems to be two

different types of biohacking, one that's product-based and one that's practice-based. The practice-based seems a little bit more doable. Product-based seems like it's for rich people. Like people who have literally millions of dollars to spend on in-house saunas and spas. Like that's what they can do. I'm going to name a couple of the practices that came up a lot for biohacking that aren't as money-focused.

And then I'm going to go into some of the products that people are buying. One of the big ones is putting salt in your water. Did you see that ever? I have heard of this. I actually didn't come across it in my research for this particular episode, but I've heard of people doing that. It's the big thing is like putting salt in your water, but all of the videos that say this have this special salt that you're supposed to buy. And it's linked to the video and you go to their Amazon storefront or you go to their TikTok shop page, or you go to whatever page they're linking that says you have to buy this specific kind of salt that's going to make you biohack more efficiently. Like Baja Gold Mineral Sea Salt is one of the ones that I found. And I thought that was kind of silly. Mouth taping is a big one. Have you heard about mouth taping? Mouth taping. Oh, yes. Where you like can breathe through your nose and not your mouth and it helps you sleep deeper. Yes. Some of those are, some of these are completely legitimate. We'll talk about the ones that are completely silly.

Mouth taping sounds silly to me. I didn't, I don't want to do that personally. Everybody else can do it if they want. But also mouth taping has an, it all kind of has an aesthetic edge to it. It's about health, but it's health shrouded and like you'll look better. And so it's like you'll do mouth taping because you'll sleep better, but all. also you'll get a better jaw line and you won't have cortisol face and all those stupid terms that we see. Raw milk came up a lot. Raw dairy is recommended. Beef tallow. I mean, these are all like the social media things like wool dryer balls people are using.

Grounding. People love grounding. Like cast iron pans, essential oils. Limiting your glucose levels and cutting out processed sugar. Lowering cortisol. Cortisol, we could do a whole episode on cortisol, Garrett. Not that we'll ever have time to as we knew. It would be fascinating.

But cortisol is a big thing. Cortisol face. Lowering your cortisol levels makes you more lean. And the way that you do it is by eating this tea every single day. Like, it's all product based and it all seems like silly to me. So what is what is cortisol face? I've never heard that term before. So where your face is puffy because you have high cortisol levels.

Interesting. I don't know if it's true. I will just briefly interject that cortisol is incredibly important for your body and you need it. Yes. Having high cortisol at the wrong time of day is a bad thing. But having no cortisol. at all, you would be like an inert little lump of flesh. Yeah.

I'm sure that the modern man has more cortisol than he's supposed to, though, right? Just with the stress levels of being alive. Oh, probably. I think what we see in modernity is so much of the, so most of your circadian rhythm is regulated by a cortisol clock. You get a pulse of the hormone at the beginning of the day. And then as that tapers off over the course of the day, that's what contributes, not the only thing, but one of the major contributors to you feeling tired.

And what we see in modern life is that that pulse comes at the wrong time. You pick your phone up in the middle of the night. You look at your phone. You get the cortisol pulse that tells your brain it's the beginning of the day. Or you sleep until 10 o'clock and you get that pulse at another, at a different, even weirder time. Right. And so you feel awake late into the night. Not great.

There are so many health-related issues with that. A couple other practices I found were just taking cold showers, meditating. Breathwork was a big one. People are really into breath work. Apple cider vinegar is people's favorite lemon tea. Something called hydrogen rich water. I have that funny story about hydrogen and rich water. Which you may laugh.

And then as we get into the products, we starting to get into more celebrity culture people like Megan Trainor. Paris Hilton has a garage in her house that she turned into an in-home spa with all these extremely like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollar products that she's using. There's like across the board I found things called like biocharger frequency machine. Oh, that sounds fun. ozone sauna and the that sounds dangerous actually lymphatic drainage therapy and nasal ozone therapy and big on ozone interesting and lymphatic massages are big people love I don't know that sort of thing functional blood tests people are always like you have to get your genetic testing done you have to figure out like what what you're working with genetically before you start trying to hack your

body which I guess that makes sense to me um and cryotherapy oh my gosh people are so into the cryotherapy when you go into like negative 270 degrees Fahrenheit for three minutes and it's like your whole body is going to be different red light people are freaking out and crazy about red light can you figure out does it is it obvious on social media what they're using it for the red light that is no no no they're just saying it's so good for you and then they go into this list of I they do tell you it's just a list of non things like you'll be this and they're listing everything you could ever want to be and they're associating it with biohacking so it's it's not particularly convincing because it's like you'll be everything you want this can do and it's I just don't believe it um like I said men and women have a very different it's marketed to very differently for men there's a lot of famous men right now who are coming forward and talking about like biohacking um there's a man named Dave Asprey who wrote a book about biohacking there's Mark Hyman who went on the Barry Weiss honestly podcast and talked about how he's going to live forever Brian Johnson's similar guy

He founded a company called Blueprint He thinks he's going to live forever It's this idea that we can cheat death By hacking into our body systems And helping us live forever Everybody wants to live forever Men want to live forever Women want to age in reverse

That seems to be the thing there It's all kind of pointing to the same thing But just marketed and framed in very different ways For women it's more aesthetically And product oriented For men it's more like you can be more productive And more manly and get as much done As you could ever possibly want

generally I think people think it's silly from what I can tell in the comments it's like this seems this seems ridiculous it's super expensive it's I saw a video that I thought was really good that was just basically talking about how biohacking is a part of productivity culture it's just something to keep you busy every every second of your day they talk about blocking out your time in 90 minute chunks and filling up all 90 minute chunks and waking up at six and going to bed at nine and then intermittent fasting for like all these things that are good in theory I think probably, but just become busy when you do them the way that they're doing them. So it's all, I don't know, I don't think it's pretty, I don't think it sounds appealing to me.

You can disagree with me if you maybe have a different view. It doesn't seem like the way that I would want to live. I don't desire to live forever. I don't think I need to cheat death or my body. I think there are ways to, there are practices in here that I'm like, oh, that actually sounds like it could be effective for doing good things. But generally, I don't think social media is enamored with this. It's a small group of people that have really dove into this rabbit hole and decided to adopt all of it.

And it's those people with the time and money to do so. So I don't think it's rampant. I just do think it's a sect of the internet that people find really fascinating, but probably isn't going to become widespread. So for those of you who are just tuning in, we're talking about biohacking on the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale, 1.1.7 FM. Garrett, do you want to take us away? Sure. So biohacking, when I started reading about it, I was like, is this just another way to refer to general healthy habits that people should have? And in many ways, the answer is yes. Now, we'll talk about where biohacking departs from those things in a second. But it really is just a shorthand way to refer to things you can do to optimize your physical and mental health, right, to help you be more focused and have more energy and all those things. And so many, of the practices that I came across that were referred to as these biohacking practices, oh, this wonderful new thing.

People have been doing that for 3,000 years, you know, like getting a lot of sleep. Hey, people used to go to bed when this thing called the sun went down. Yeah. And it was dark and they went to bed. And then they slept till it got up. And you know what? That was good for them. Yeah.

Fancy that. So a lot of it is just like rediscovering this old wisdom that we've had around forever. Circadian rhythms and drinking water with hydrogen and it. Okay, the hydrogen water thing. I wanted to talk about this because I have a funny story about this. Okay, so the idea behind hydrogen water is that the water has actually been infused with molecular hydrogen, right? Two hydrogen molecules, hydrogen atoms spotted together, right? So oxygen molecules, right? So oxygen atoms spotted together. Okay. So oxygen molecules, right? And then you can drink this and this is somehow good for you in some way. Well, any of you that have spent any time learning in chemistry, what you'll know is that hydrogen gas is extremely flammable. Oxygen is too, but I had a chemistry professor who heard about this hydrogen-infused water. And of course, like any good chemists, they were like, well, if there's molecular hydrogen in here and we boil it, the paper should ignite and it should

explode. So they tried it. It didn't work, which means there's not molecular hydrogen in this. So anyway, It's just a marketing. I just thought that was funny that they actually tried to light it on fire. You debunked hydrogen water. Yeah, sorry. Literally, there's no evidence that it does any difference to your body whatsoever than just regular water. I think people just want to buy stuff. I think people are looking for shortcuts.

I think that's why hacking is the word that they're using here. I think people want to do as little work and get as many results as possible so they can stand in a sauna or a red light therapy session for 10 minutes instead of going for run. I think they'd rather do that. And it seems like, of course, you'd rather buy the hydrogen water instead of just drinking more water. You know what I mean? Yeah. And you're exactly right. Most, if not all of the biohacking practices I came across are actually not comparatively any more beneficial than doing things like sleeping a reasonable number of hours a night, eating, you know, just not even an amazing diet, but just a reasonably balanced diet and getting a little exercise each day. Exercise is the magic pill. Okay. There's, the body of research on this is indisputable that if you want to do

something to increase your lifespan, your cognitive abilities, your, your physical well-being and how you look and all of these things, there is literally, you could not make a medicine or a pill you can take that's better for you than exercise. And so it is interesting that a lot of people are looking at these other far more expensive options. And, you know, and I get some people are looking to gain the 1%. okay, they do the exercising, they do everything else, and they want, you know, they want a little bit more. And we'll talk about maybe what you can gain from some of these things. Yeah. Because it turns out to not actually be a lot, according to what we can tell.

I'm curious, have you run across any of the men that are talking about living forever and not being able, not dying? Have you seen that at all? When I researched for this episode, I did. I came across an interview with a guy who believed that the interviewer asked him. So, like, do you think you're going to die? And he's like, no, I actually don't think I'm going to die. I think that. They all say that, by the way.

Because I'm doing this, because I'm doing these biohacking things, I'm going to stay younger, longer such that medical science will catch up and continue to exponentially grow such that I can continue to ward off any new ailment that might assail me and continue to live longer and longer, which is a very bold claim. It's quite bold. We'll see. It's going to be easy to test, though. It will be extremely easy.

All we have to do is wait. And we won't even have to wait till these people die, actually. We'll just have to wait long enough to see that they've discernibly changed in age and say, okay, well, you're aging. Clearly, this has one direction it's going to go. You're not going backwards. Maybe you are halting the flow of your aging, or at least how it appears. You might live longer? For a while, yes.

And I think most of us have met somebody who's in their 80s or 90s and are still really with it. Yeah. And that's pretty amazing. And maybe they live a little longer than other people. but yeah, nobody's living forever. No. So let's talk about kind of the broad categories of biohacking and some of the practices that are extremely useful

and then some that are extremely like, okay, what are you doing? Is that why are we spending our time and money on this? So there's lifestyle biohacking. These are just literally healthy choices, food, exercise. Meditation is a big one. Turns out people have been meditating for thousands of years. Yes. It is actually pretty good for you to sit still and breathe slow, which is pretty much all that meditation is.

There's a little bit more to it, but... I'm sure you can make it complicated if you'd like for it to be. Oh, you could absolutely make it complicated, but at base level, that's all meditation is. So then there's also molecular biohacking. This is where it starts to get a little bit crazy. You use chemical compounds to achieve biological effects. Now, at its simplest, this is just supplements, right? I'm taking iron.

I'm taking whatever. But people, this is where the gene testing comes in and then, blood paneling will come in because you can look at a blood panel and a blood blood panel will give you an ideal range based off of research that tells you, okay, where should my vitamin B12 be at or something like that? And you can say, okay, mine's low, mine's high, it's in the middle, whatever. And then you can supplement in order to optimize that number. And then the last category that I came, well, not the last technology kind of fits in, but the last physical intervention I came across was what they

called biologics. So these are cellular products. These have to do with stem cells, IV transfusions, anything that operates on the principle that ingesting some kind of cellular material will benefit your health. Does that count as biohacking? Sure. Okay. Sure, right. And the idea, I came across some fairly wild stories, one particular guy who was taking stem cells from his own bone marrow and injecting it into his joints in order to just reduce inflammation and things like that. And he experienced all these wonderful benefits and I'm not entirely skeptical that in principle it could work. What I'm skeptical of is the idea that this is somehow going to reverse other bad habits, like not exercising enough. My question is if these people that are saying, oh, I'm experiencing

all these biohacking benefits, if you dropped everything that wasn't exercise and eating right, do the benefits change at all? Maybe not. I don't know. In many cases, these people start doing lots of healthy things all of once. You know, okay, I start taking all these supplements. Oh, and I actually started to walk 15 minutes a day. Like, it turns out that might be the thing that's making you feel better. Yeah, people have been talking a lot about taking 15, 20 minute walks after you eat and how it can Yeah, it's tremendous.

It's tremendous for your health. The last category is technology, so wearable things that offer diagnostic data about your body. They help you adjust and improve all these different things. And there's even, you know, you could be in a hyperbaric chamber. That's a little bit more of an extreme measure. or I came across electromagnetic simulators. Yeah, stuff like that.

We could unpack what exactly that means. I mean, your body works off of lots of electromagnetic signals, so I don't really know that it needs a whole lot of help being simulated. But anyway, that's another topic for another time. So these are, most of these are not interventions that are backed by scientific research. Some of them have some research, and what you have to be super careful about when you read research about things like this, is that you can label a study as successful and as beneficial if it achieves what we call

as a probability of less than 0.05, right? Which means that the result you achieved is unlikely, statistically unlikely to be due to chance. But it turns out that you can do a lot to make your data appear significant. And I'm not saying that all these researchers are doing that, but I'm saying that when you come across a study about some biohacking technique. You need to look at how many people were in the study. What kind of people were they? Are they all different? Are they being told that they're in a study? You know, all these different things can greatly contribute, especially, especially in the cognitive improvement area. Okay. Pretty much every cognitive pill that you can think of that will help you,

that's been marketing to help you improve focus or whatever, unless it's a prescription grade drug for something like ADHD, more than likely its effect is a placebo effect. Yeah. or minimal at best. Let's talk about some of the social media things you mentioned. Salt in water. Hey, it turns out your body really needs salt. Totally. So if you don't get enough salt in your diet, which actually most people do.

It's very uncommon for the American diet to not. Be lacking salt. Yeah, to lack salt. In fact, most diets in the world do not struggle to consume enough salt. There are a few exceptions. So salt in your water, I mean, maybe you're gaining a few extra minerals like potassium, magnesium, which you do need and are good for you. you, but you could get other ways.

Okay. Tape on the mouth, this is actually pretty common and totally works. Totally a thing. For what? Sleep? Yes, for sleep. So it turns out to be actually very bad for you to breathe through your mouth while you sleep and very good for your mouth to be closed and for you to be breathing through

your nose. Turns out that just biologically, the airways are designed to flow better through your nose than through your mouth and you can have all kinds of, especially facial structural problems that result from breathing through your mouth. mouth. Totally, totally real. Let's think about it this way. If you spent eight hours a day with your jaw like hanging funny or like if I spent eight hours a day with my arm like pinned behind my back or something like that. That would cause problems, right? That would be an issue. So same idea with your jaw. If you spend eight hours a day sleeping, I'm not a day, but at night sleeping and your jaw

is hanging at a funny angle, how is that not going to affect the, you know, the way it sits in the structure of your face? Raw milk. See our previous episode on raw milk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked about that already. Yeah, good for you. Beef tallow. Oh, it depends on what you're doing with it. If you are... Lathering your whole body in it? Yeah, good for you. It's very, very hydrating. There's some, lots of evidence that people for, again, for thousands of years use this instead of, like, that's why lotion wasn't really a thing. Like, you think, oh, did people in the ancient world have dry hands? Like, of course they did, right? But they just get some, lotion though, right? They get some beef fat, right? There's even certain people groups, they know the Mongols in particular. They actually

substituted rubbing, in their case it was the fat from goats, but similar idea to beef tallow all over their bodies instead of bathing. So, yeah, they made it through. They actually conquered most of the world that way. Then I guess go for it, guys. Grounding, the jury's still out. I don't know. Breathwork, sure. You know, ACV, also good for you. There's probiotics in that stuff. You know, acid in the right amount, good for your stomach. How do you feel about the concept that people are making apple cider vinegar gummies and they say if you just eat this after your meal you'll never bloat again is bloating good for you what's the deal oh bloating comes from a variety of uh different causes typically people are getting bloated after meals because they they uh let's say have a compromised gut

microbiome that's a pretty common reason so that their their their gut microbiome is not breaking down the nutrients quite properly which means that there are many byproducts in digestion that don't get used and turns out a very common byproduct of digestion are various kinds of gas and there you go, bloating. What about apple cider vinegar? Does it help? Sure could. Really?

It depends on what the problem is. Okay. Depends on why they're bloating. Biohack with apple cider vinegar guys. Yeah. Well, there's a million other things we could talk about, but I think that's all we have time for. Yeah, we got to give this guy a grade.

Are you ready? Sure. Okay. Three, two, one. C minus. I don't like the idea to begin with. I could go on a whole soapbox about why, but the idea that we can fully understand and take control of every aspect of our body.

Probably not great. It seems very social media-e to me. It seems like a marketing of something that could be good, but is packaged in a way that maybe isn't so great. Yeah, maybe just sleep enough. Sleep enough. Eat right. Yeah, exercise.

The yush. Go for a walk. A little while after the sun goes down. Intermitts. You know the yus. You got it. Okay, guys. Hope you guys appreciate our tips here on the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale

101.1.1.7. I'm Jillian. And I'm Garrett. And we will talk to you next week.