Photo by Shawn Macomber
Audio By Carbonatix
Rome wasn’t built in a day, so I knew from the outset a divorced middle-aged wretch such as myself wouldn’t be self-optimized in a weekend, but I still put in the effort at the Biohackers World Conference & Expo this past Saturday and Sunday at the Ritz-Carlton South Beach, working my way through more quantum-charged, biomarker-chasing, age-reversing, personal archetype-refurbishing purveyors and enthusiasts than you could shake an elongated telomere at. (Get your minds out of the gutter, people — I’m talking about nucleotide chains, for Nikola Tesla’s sake!)
So, what kinds of treatments and therapies can one try when the biohacker circus comes to town?
Here are eight trips I took down Guinea Pig Lane at the conference in the name of science, alternative wellness protocols, and maybe getting my act together at some point before I die; written by a woo-woo-loving semi-skeptic who subscribes to the Gaia channel and watches shows with titles like DMT Elves: Architects of Reality?
Drip IV Therapy
The things I do to avoid hydrating like a normal person apparently now include making some poor, patient phlebotomist tap around for my non-optimal, tiny veins. Actually, I was already hooked up to the steadily dripping Niagen + bag feeding into a needle taped to my hand when I decided to look up exactly what “pharmaceutical-grade NAD+ therapy” was. This suggests part of my self-optimization protocol moving forward should maybe be not taking intravenous substances without any idea exactly what they are first. Lucky for me, this “patented nicotinamide riboside chloride (NRCl)” supports “cellular energy, repair, and performance to support healthier aging,” which means I might live long enough to not be such a meandering rube. Still, it does say something about the Biohackers World brand and the lovely Niagen + staffers that they garner this level of instant trust.
Extreme Microbiome Makeover
GutID only takes stool samples by U.S. mail, so I wasn’t able to take advantage of the company’s “unique amplicon sequencing that allows for scalable, strain-level identification.” However, I wanted to include it here because, first, I met a Miami-based metabolism researcher who, to put it lightly, was skeptical of some of the claims being made at the conference (see her recap and plea for basing wellness in science), yet she rated this particular booth highly. Second, I had a very enlightening conversation with the CEO, Paul Denslow, who claims disruptions and deficiencies in our microbiome can be connected to various cancers, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, diabetes, depression, and more. Looking through the literature was also the first time I heard someone use the term “poop hammock” in casual conversation, so there’s that.
Photo by Shawn Macomber
Gong Bath
I’ve been to many sound bath events at yoga studios and elsewhere. I always loved them, even if it was more of an opportunity for a great 45-minute nap than a transcendental experience. Strange, then, that the first time I had a tiny taste of a slip-the-curtain-of-reality, Moana-in-the-cave-of-ancestors experience, it was in a Ritz-Carlton side room full of chattering people. That’s the mark of a “gong master,” I suppose, which is what Mitchell Raisman (1111 Gong) advertises himself as. When he placed me shoeless in that vibrating brass bowl and began hitting various gongs behind me — so large the reverberations power through you like wind through a ghost — it was easy to see why he had such a line waiting to get it on (bang a gong) throughout each day.
Hyperbaric Chamber
Can television sharks simply not resist a tank? I was about 45 minutes into my wait to try the luxury 2.0 ATA hyperbaric chamber from Chicago-based Oxygen Health Systems when a virtual school of amateur and professional photographers descended upon the booth with FUBU founder and longtime Shark Tank investor Daymond John. He seemed very interested, for what it’s worth, and with engineers from AT&T, Bell-Labs, Lucent, HP, Nokia, Samsung, and AbbVie spearheading the effort, a wild list of purported benefits (recovery, wound-healing, inflammation reduction, energy increase), and a price tag that ranges from $6,700 to $61,000, it certainly sounds like money, baby.
My fifteen minutes inside the ATA could be compared to a flight on descent, pressure-wise — just with pristine air rather than the airborne petri dish that is commercial air travel. Director of engineering Shah Haq was very engaging, generous with his time, and convincing, yet, while I did come out of the tank with a bit of a pep in my step, I think it would take regular use over a series of weeks or even months to get an accurate bead on benefits.
Photo by Shawn Macomber
Infrared Sauna
I love saunas and infrared-heated hot yoga classes like the ones offered at Sol Yoga (formerly in Wynwood, now Sunset Harbor), so I kinda, sorta felt like I could skip this lineup of personal sauna tents from Relax Far Infrared. That is, until I saw the sign that read: “Free 5-Minutes. Won’t Sweat (takes 8 minutes to sweat).” I’m not a competitive person by nature, and if I had thought it through, walking an air-conditioned hotel expo dripping sweat is suboptimal in both a physiological and social sense, but…look, nobody is going to tell me how long it takes me to rev up my glands, period. (Here’s a sweet sweat biohack: Be from New England in Miami in the fall when your body thinks it should be 55 degrees.) Anyway, aside from a little upper lip beading, it was truth in advertising, and I got all the cleansing, core-kindling vibes of a standard sauna without the (delightful, depending on context, of course) drench.
Light and Geometric Therapy
Walking up to The Light System booth with a recently stimulated vagus nerve (see below) may have put me into an uncharacteristically Matrix-y mindset, festooned as it was with bright screens across which images of “sacred geometric shapes and asymmetrical patterns based on the Fibonacci sequence” cascaded. And while I regret to inform readers that I still do not know kung-fu, during my time in the immersive reclined chair box between two quantum-charged rings — which initially made me a little wary, to be honest, mostly because I’ve internalized far too much of The Neverending Story, including the Sphinx Gate sequence — I went into a deep state of relaxation I would compare to somewhere between a solid meditation session or savasana and hypnosis.
In such a short session, I could not evaluate claims that the process “helps raise the body’s natural charge by creating a coherent biophotonic field, where light frequencies, geometry, and scalar energy work together to optimize your cells and align your energy systems…restoring the full potential of your bioelectric design” — phew! — but I enjoyed the hell out of it and met some people who testified to me in the most heartfelt, believably earnest way that the system had empowered them to beat back everything from cancer to depression.
Shockwave Therapy
Don’t get scared by the title — this isn’t One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stuff. In fact, the GainsWave electric wand makes a cracking sound, but its pulse is not only painless but feels essentially like the lowest setting on a home massager. The concept is that the tiny shocks send signals to the brain that a certain area requires more care than it is getting. This, in turn, stimulates stem cell production, blood flow, oxygenation, collagen production, and more. Placebo, you ask? I’ll admit I was skeptical as well. When it was applied to a luddite wrist achy from eschewing ChatGPT, however, it only took about five minutes to gain real and total relief. Twenty-four hours later, it is still so. (There was also a big advertising push for its usefulness as a sexual wellness booster, if that’s your pulsating preference.)
Vagus Nerve Stimulation
As a highly repressed man born and raised in Puritan New England, when someone asks me whether I’ve had my vagus nerve stimulated, my first impulse is to make sure my long-sleeve doublet is firmly attached to my breeches, pull up my wool stockings, and start reciting stanzas of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” from memory. Luckily, I resisted the urge long enough to put on the over-the-ear headset from Roga, which connects to the ridge behind your ear a bit like EKG sensors and delivers “gentle electrical pulses to stimulate the auricular nerve,” with promises of “promoting relaxation, reducing burnout, and improving sleep.”
The effect was not only near instant but also remarkably powerful. For a few moments, I felt a bit off center, as you might when stepping onto a boat in slightly choppy waters. The warm sense of peace lasted about an hour beyond the fifteen-minute session.
