Devices of the Future: Nervous System Shields and Gut Translators

In this episode of the Smarter Not Harder Podcast, Boomer Anderson, Dr. Theodore Achacoso, Dr. Scott Sherr, Jodi Duval, and Dr. Allen Bookatz give one-cent solutions to life’s $64,000 questions that include:

• What is "Biont Hacking" and how does it differ from traditional biohacking approaches?
• Can technology truly balance the autonomic nervous system — or are we already equipped to do it naturally?
• What would a real-time communication device with your microbiome look like — and could it transform health optimization?
  
• What does it mean to live as a “holobiont,” and why does this shift our understanding of human health?

What We Discuss:

00:00 Dinner with Legends: A Playful Opening
01:45 Welcome to the Smarter Not Harder Podcast
02:26 What Is "Biont Hacking" Anyway?
04:05 Dr. Scott’s Nervous System Mastery: A Device to Balance Stress
05:50 Jodi’s Device: "Dune" Biont Hacker Shield
08:36 Dr. Allen’s Device: A Two-Way Translator for your Microbiome
10:35 Reimagining Toilets as Gut Diagnostic Tools
12:43 Boomer’s Mineral Cocktails for Health: The Elegance of Simplicity
13:17 Regenerating Organs Without Gene Editing
14:48 Dr. Ted’s Star Trek Tech: Tricorders, "Holobiont-decks," and Healing 
17:13 Co-Evolution with the Environment: The Final Frontier
18:55 Why Humans Aren’t Superorganisms — We’re Ecosystems 
22:05 Wrap-Up: What Device Would YOU Invent?

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Boomer Anderson: If you could have dinner tonight with three people from history, who would it be? I was having this discussion at dinner tonight. My wife was like, I would have dinner with RuPaul Prince, and I forget the third one now. It was like an eclectic group of people. My answer, of course, was something a little bit more obtuse.

[00:00:16] Genus Khan Rasputin, or Anthony Bourdain and Earnest Hemingway, right? This is meant to be a rapid fire question, so you gotta be prepared. That's hard. No, no, it's not hard. Don't think. Don't blink. Go. We're Adam and e real people. Good question. Go have dinner with Moses right before he part of the Red Sea, right?

[00:00:32] I got it. I got it. Okay, go for it. 

[00:00:34] Dr. Scott Sherr: Okay. Marcus Aurelius. Oh, John God, John Lennon. Oh, imagine all the meditation. I lost my third. I had a third, and then it's gone. 

[00:00:43] Boomer Anderson: Uh, that's so typical of you. You don't 

[00:00:45] Dr. Scott Sherr: have anyone 

[00:00:46] Boomer Anderson: you just are talking about. The Roosevelt. That was my third one. Okay, interesting. 

[00:00:50] Dr. Scott Sherr: Okay. Speak often and carry a big stick.

[00:00:52] Yeah. I was just at the hot springs here in Colorado where he used to go on a regular basis. When he was president, he was all over the place 'cause he 

[00:00:58] Dr. Ted Achacoso: was 

[00:00:59] Dr. Scott Sherr: young 

[00:00:59] Dr. Ted Achacoso: too. [00:01:00] Iida named after him, and I hate him because he didn't know what to do with our little brown brothers in the Philippines. This is true. Who were on one hand belongs to us as a spoil of war who are otherwise unfit for self-governance.

[00:01:14] Lord, please help me on what to do with these people who are unfit for self governance. Theodore Roosevelt, uhoh, 

[00:01:21] Boomer Anderson: we've just, sorry, wrong question. That would be a great conversation. Dinner. I'm excited about this anyway. Alright. Alright. We're inviting Ted to the dinner with Theodore Roosevelt. Yeah, I would love that.

[00:01:29] Dr. Scott Sherr: I would love that.

[00:01:44] Jodi Duval: Welcome back everyone to the Smart Heart Podcast. Your home to 1 cent Solutions is $64,000 questions, and we are here today to talk about Biant hacking devices. If we were to invent something that could help us [00:02:00] Biant hack, it can be for personal use business, it can be for. Health optimization, medicine and practice.

[00:02:06] If there was something that we could create, and I think Ted ha segued to this in the chat already, just after we decided to do this. So let's define what biont hacking is because there has been some really interesting comments and thoughts around biont hacking on the, the, the social medias recently. And I think we need to define what our biont hacking is so over to you first, Ted. 

[00:02:31] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well, this is actually in response to a person who actually needed a lot of biont hacking, I think? Gauging by the tone and tenor of the fangs that he was bearing, but he was saying something true too. I won't quote what he said, but:

[00:02:45] A Biont hacker is one who sees the body not as a machine to be controlled, but as a living symphony of trillions.

[00:02:53] Human cells, bacterial kin, mitochondrial whispers; all dancing through time in an ecosystem called [00:03:00] 'you'. A biont hacker, listens, respects, and nurtures the core unit of life: the cell.

[00:03:05] They do not run from aging, or obsess over immortality. Instead, they tend to the Garden of Vitality with wisdom rooted in evolution and compassion for the lived moment.

[00:03:17] Their pursuit is presence, not perfection. Quality of life is the compass. Quantity is merely the echo.

[00:03:25] That is a biont hacker. 

[00:03:27] Boomer Anderson: Ooh, that's a doctrine right there. Boom. Can use that for church.

[00:03:31] Beautiful. It's beautiful. 

[00:03:31] I think that really gives us a bit more perspective on what sort of device we may want to create.

[00:03:38] It's not something that we want to hack and change and create and control. It's how we can support and add and give beauty and affect or affect all the ecosystem of us and what is around us. So who wants to go first? With a aforementioned device, go first. If no one's going first, 

[00:03:55] no, no, no, no, no.

[00:03:56] We typically go to the end. Yeah. The one that [00:04:00] comes to mind is a device that perfectly balances dynamically your autonomic nervous system. So when you need to be sympathetic. So trend right now, I know, right? I have to stay on, on brand and on trend, but that's what the socials want. So you gotta give 'em what they need.

[00:04:15] Boomer, come on. 

[00:04:16] What device? A 

[00:04:17] hundred 

[00:04:18] percent correct. 

[00:04:18] That could perfectly balance your autonomic nervous system so that if you needed to be stressed and and on, you did it. But as soon as you were not required anymore, you can just go done. And you go down a parasympathetic and you have this balance dynamically.

[00:04:33] And I think the key is that it's not like there's a. A line here. That line is always moving. That's why we call it dynamic. But the problem that you guys all know, and I know personal experience and also from our clients, is that most of us are running in sympathetic mode most of the time. And you can't heal, you don't digest your foods well, you don't detox well, you don't sleep well.

[00:04:56] You have anxiety, you have depression, et cetera, et [00:05:00] cetera, when you're always in fight or flight mode. So when we're working with patients or clients, what I've noticed is that if they're in that dominant stage, it's very difficult for any of the health optimization and medicine. Practice stuff to work like at the foundational, looking at metabolomics, looking at gut health.

[00:05:16] But if they're stressed all the time, no matter how many probiotics you give them, if they're always not getting enough blood flow to like their S flak, neck mesentery area, nothing's gonna work. They can't digest their food. They're not gonna heal leaky gut. Maybe you can inject them with things and help a little bit.

[00:05:34] In essence, a device that dynamically balances so that you have the perfect control, as it were, of whether you're sympathetic or parasympathetic. 

[00:05:41] Mm. Love that. It's similar to what I had, Scott, that I had in my mind that I was gonna, but mine was slightly more, been watching too much June recently. So mine's a little bit more on the s 

[00:05:53] Ooh, spice, spice spice ness flow.

[00:05:55] All right, here we go. 

[00:05:56] Mine is like a, A shield. So I've been [00:06:00] watching the, the dune and they put the shield on when they go into a fight. So. What I would love to create is my shield. As soon as I hit, like you said, into this sympathetic nervous system drive that everyone's at as a parent, you know the kids are coming at you and you can't get away from it, and you can't actually get out of that state of nervous system.

[00:06:22] So I would put my shield on, it's called ke. 

[00:06:25] That's why you're going with spice. It's like spice must flow in the air. So everything is is nice and calm. 

[00:06:31] I'll just. Spray methylene blowing my eye, so it looks like I've had spice. It's, it's that shield, I think. But then I, I was driving to work this morning and I was thinking, well, we do actually have that, we already have this breath.

[00:06:45] We don't need another excuse to have another device. And I think this is the chat that I wanted to have today with this topic is like. Do we need another device or are we already equipped with everything that we have and we do. [00:07:00] We use these shiny objects and new machines to actually give us something that we can deter from instead of building our own internal ecosystem, our own power within ourselves.

[00:07:09] So. We already have a breath system that can do this. We already have that breathing and that sort of shield that we can create, but we just feel like we need to have something that we can hit a button and up goes the shield. But what if it was imaginary? If it was invisible, I think that would be very impactful.

[00:07:28] Like you say, Scott, I think it's the nervous system really governs so much of what we do and what state we're in and how well we think and how clear we can be in our decisions and our reactions. So if we have something or whatever we have already equipped within us. We can create that in any situation or any circumstance.

[00:07:47] I think that's the most powerful thing that I could think of that I would want to create. Right on the same line as you, Scott 

[00:07:56] Lizanna, Gabe? Yes. 

[00:07:56] Yes. I'm reading the book too. I've watched that [00:08:00] in one two and I'm now reading the book. 

[00:08:02] When does three come out? It comes out next year. Next year. 

[00:08:06] All right.

[00:08:06] Who wants to go next? Alan, do you wanna go? Now? You, 

[00:08:10] you didn't watch the original with Sting on it. 

[00:08:13] This is David Lynch. Right. So that would've been a, a very appropriate thing recently to watch. Go 

[00:08:18] ahead, Alan. So before I get into mine, every winter we have this beautiful arboretum that gets transformed.

[00:08:24] This is, this is winter in la Correct? Winter in la Exactly. So. Oh, okay. Everyone gets your, so it's 60 degrees instead of 70. Get your best. Yeah. So we have more dark than light. There's this event called Astro Lumina, where they convert this entire huge arboretum into this sort of psychedelic lay ground with lights and music and it's astro.

[00:08:43] So it's very, you know, cosmic feeling. And they have this quote as you walk in that says. What if the stars could reach back out to you, you know, something along that line, but what, what if the stars could reach, reach to you? Right. Because we're always like reaching [00:09:00] to the stars. Given I'm coming off of a night shift idea was gonna be something around circadian biology, but as Ted was just sharing, and Jody and Scott.

[00:09:08] The concept of like, what if you could have a two-way conversation with your microbiota, right? What if your microbes could talk to you? We understand that our gut microbiota is central to our health, right? It affects our immune system, our mood, our energy, sleep. It's so important that we actually have an entire module in health optimization medicine and practice called the gut immune system, and those are linked for a reason.

[00:09:31] We talk about how do we detect incorrect imbalances in there. Like what if the relationship. Let's just say became instead of re, and it is, in a way, it is still reactive. What if it became interactive? So imagine like the concept of some type of bimodal communication device for your microbiota, right? I don't know if this would be like a sensor that you take and you'd have maybe some that are along your entire endoluminal tract and they are interfacing and communicating with you like in real time.

[00:09:59] [00:10:00] For example, you would. You feeling anxious or your diet is off, or you're shifting towards dys. Dysbiosis or even it can anticipate That's like minority report for your gut. Yeah, exactly. You get the warning, you know, go take three tablespoons of oreg oil, napal the, the scene. You can just imagine that you could do things like enhance, you could enhance mood, you could work through metabolic flexibility, adjusting your sleep pathways.

[00:10:22] Just interesting when Home Hope we talk about. How the gut can tell us about different metabolites or we can, we can understand what's happening in the gut in inferring through metabolomics and the metabolites that are a result of dysbiosis from overconsumption of fruit, berries, or wine. There's an overgrowth of yeast or bacteria, and then we are reacting to those.

[00:10:41] And we understand also that we have serotonin precursors and other signals that give us a sense of what's happening. If they could tell you what's happening before you're actually being affected by it, how cool would that be? And you could be proactive instead of reactive. 

[00:10:56] Yeah. So minority report for your gut.

[00:10:58] I love it. 

[00:10:59] Yeah. 

[00:10:59] Yeah. [00:11:00] A translator. Mm-hmm. Speaking the language of the gut. Yeah. That's really cool. Maybe that will be a toilet someday. So we'll talk about this before, but you know, you could actually say the Japanese toilets, but now it's like giving you daily and then, and then 

[00:11:14] like the bide will shoot it right up for you.

[00:11:17] Yeah, yeah. And it'll be like. It'll be perfect. Good sample. Yeah, you can 

[00:11:21] probe 

[00:11:22] And here we go again. Oh, here's, I thought we were gonna make it through this 

[00:11:27] one. I know. I love that. That's awesome, Alan. But yes, a circadian, um, hacking machine would also be good, wouldn't it? And on hacking, especially for those who can't do night shifts and, and not work.

[00:11:38] Do you wanna go next? What's your 

[00:11:40] Yeah. Practice, uh, divine. Divine inspiration for this came at 4:00 AM twice. The first is my favorite cocktail. Back when I used to drink alcohol was a Negroni. And Negroni has three parts to it, and they're all equal size, and it's Campari sweeper, vermouth, and gin.

[00:11:55] Interesting about a Negroni similar to you guys making fun of me for coffee [00:12:00] is that if you just follow that and do it in equal parts, it's a beautiful drink. When these bartenders try to deviate from it, it gets all fucked up and so you just don't want to touch it. Uh, so there's beauty in that simplicity.

[00:12:14] Hold that thought there for a second. The next part of this is another 4:00 AM story, so it's 4:00 AM in Manila, and Dr. Ted here decides that he wants to have a podcast with our dear PhD friend, and I think he's Russian, right? Michael Levin. And I, I just remember because I, I was staying at, uh, Dr. Ted's condo that night that there's, there's sort of like.

[00:12:36] Blabbing and it's 4:00 AM and I'm jet lagged, so I'm awake, but listening to this and Michael Levin, just for people who don't remember the name is Nobel Laureate or like nominated and he fast track too. Fast track. So you have two people with incredibly high IQs speaking and I'm jet lagged and haven't yet had a good cup of coffee.

[00:12:55] What I love, uh, Michael Levin's work, he's regrown organs on frogs and done [00:13:00] it largely with mineral cocktails, right? And how that works in the body. Dreg can explain to you, uh, essentially what I would love is a very simple and elegant. Mineral cocktail to take every morning and be health optimized because there's beauty in the simplicity.

[00:13:14] There you go. That's my thing. 

[00:13:16] Oh, brilliant. I love this. Well, yeah, it is. 

[00:13:18] Well, the mineral cocktail acts like an electro in the body, right? That's what you're ultimately getting to. But I didn't want get into the whole voltage gated calcium channel discussion that you guys can all have later 

[00:13:30] V docs for you anyway.

[00:13:32] I thought you were going after Electroceuticals, but. In leaven for actually the, he wasn't doing this by electrical current, right? He was doing this by the ionic currents that are from the iron channels. And essentially you change the gating every channels, or you add, remove channels in there and you get the pattern of activation and that pattern of activation seems to hold.

[00:13:52] That's why, you know, you could do regrow empire limbs without any DNA activation. But the most, uh, incredible thing that I actually took away [00:14:00] from that is aside from growing entire limbs from frogs, I have a special place in my heart where frogs, you know, I decapitate them, I eat them, they eat their legs and all that stuff, 

[00:14:11] and they can, they actually do taste pretty good when prepared well.

[00:14:14] Uh, other part of this project, as aside from a spinal cord growth, right? For those Hispanic quality intersections has very, very useful because in, uh, heart attacks, for example, you could actually regrow, uh, muscle cells with actual correct orientation and correct. Innovation and functioning so you don't have to do anything.

[00:14:31] But the work on cancer was actually fascinating. It's like in home hope with the cell that's actually cancerous, decide to metastasize. Since he's kept in the cooperative mode by the by electric signal, then no matter how much angry and wanting to get. Out of the control that he wants. It's actually a stay there in ecosystem of the cells in the body.

[00:14:50] They're all in competition with the others. Um, but for me that's bringing back boomer's point to health optimization medicine. You're always looking at us as being part of [00:15:00] the en environment. We are also part of the environment to others. We could be the loving or the toxic spouse or partner. Right. And the thing that I want to create, actually, Jody, is.

[00:15:10] Very retro. It's from the Star Trek series. For those of you who remember the Star Trek series, the first one I actually tried to do, but the technology wasn't there yet. I think it is here now. It's the tray quarter that they have, you know, the medical tray quarter where they go DD and it diagnosis everything about you.

[00:15:29] I think you could do that with a mini MRI and source of, uh, a few other stuff. I even had a grant application for eight fish. Of course, I knew was never going to be granted, right. It's just for me, a fun thing to do. Yeah. Can this be done, but not with that, uh, kind of technology. But the other technology, I think that can be done now, anyone instant you go, results happening now it's portable and it's connected to, okay, this is whatever you need.

[00:15:57] What you need is an electric shock. It'll [00:16:00] just shock you. So the other side to that is actually, um, more of, for me, like a home unit that I wanted, which is like a hol deck. It's just this display thing that could just be anything like a beach, all the settings you want, where you could actually be sit and veg you want or you wanna watch a sunset.

[00:16:19] The technology is here now. I mean, uh, it's being used in filming, right? They have the 360 where the actors are saying it's actually easier to see a sunset that's in front of them and emo. Something romantic or something sad because they're seeing the actual sunset rather than imagining, uh, the sunset.

[00:16:36] Right? So, and the signals that are coming to you by vision, by hearing when the extensions were being developed, I wanted to propose an extension called dot ssa, which is dot sense, right? That's before the sensei thing in Netflix. Of course, it would capture all of the inputs of what you're seeing, hearing, smelling, touching.

[00:16:53] There was even a device before called Ice Mel, right? It was, uh, based on the mixing various aromas, virus [00:17:00] things and then heating them so you could smell it. So when you actually go to the holodeck, say, you know, you can travel anywhere, right? But you can remove the crowds. You can be in, in a relaxed mode all the time.

[00:17:13] Or you could be in a place where you, you love to go. And I know some people heard their favorite place is not on earth, but in some other dimension. But, you know, let's push it aside. That's what I like is a holodeck. But the one that was really nice, we said it could be made, it's not a room, but it's actually in instant.

[00:17:33] Apple Vision Pro didn't do it for me. I was investigating like retinal uh, projection stuff, which is very dizzying. It didn't capture all of the things in the census. And the way I'm drawn to this is that people always separate. From the environment. The thing is, we are actually part of the environment and the way I always remember this is the way we breathe out carbon dioxide beliefs that the plants actually grab the carbon dioxide and then give out oxygen.

[00:17:59] [00:18:00] For me, that incredible simple thing is enough to make you pause. Like Scott's heart in Colorado can our air molecules that will reach here in DC sometime soon, so it's, it's. So the, the key in health optimization medicine is the realization that we actually co-evolved with our envir. All the changes that, uh, are happening in us were also changes that were demanded on us by the environment.

[00:18:21] But our problem is that we're a generation late. Usually we are make and model is adapted to the hunter gatherer. But we have created a, what I call the Lamborghini world. We have a Model T Ford as our, uh, make model. That's why I, I want that kind of ion hacking room all by deck. So instead deck 

[00:18:40] nice. Uh, I don't think Lynn Margolis ever trademarked the term, so I think we're Okay.

[00:18:45] Holby on holodeck or just Holby on deck. Deck, 

[00:18:47] yeah. You gotta simplify it the more holos you have, but yeah. 

[00:18:51] Yeah. Uh, I'd like to also, this, you know, um. We say we're ion hackers and after hollow bion, right? Holloway beyond is really made up of [00:19:00] different organisms, right? Where mitochondria are different organisms and, and a nucleus.

[00:19:03] Cytoplasm is a different, an anaerobic organism or our microbiota are different organisms and so on. And some people make a mistake of calling us super organism and we're not. A superorganism is really just made up of one type of cell, but it has different phenotypic. Expressions, meaning it appears differently at different stage of it life.

[00:19:21] Its life cycle, but it all uses the same gene set. It's just activated at different parts of the lifecycle. And my favorite example of that, which I played with in biology and regards in biology, was a slime bulb, right? At one phase of a lifecycle, it looked just as a mold and other phase look like a, like a, like a little tiny mushroom with a fruiting body.

[00:19:43] You could see all this, this, but that's a super organism, right? It's made up of the same type of cells with different phenotypic gen, uh, gene phenotypic expressions of the genes. But we however, are not super organisms. Were holobiome, right? Basically an ecosystem of all the different, different types of cells that [00:20:00] decided to actually live in cooperative mode.

[00:20:02] They cooperate and they compete at the same time. They have their own niches. And when we, we do that in home hope, we are very, very aware, aware that all of these organisms actually have the same fundamental cell underneath all of 'em, that no one takes care of. That's why we are half optimization medicine.

[00:20:19] We take care of the fundamental cell. So you could see how the whole process just repeats itself, even in the cell. In fact, they just discovered another organal. The news was just today, it's like called the hambi fuso or something like that. It's something to do with garbage collection. When you look at the hallmarks of, well, you know what?

[00:20:38] Comprises and do organal. You know, I, I really rely on more of the way the mitochondria is defined as an organal, right? It's d it retains, its DNA for, for def formation of the transport chain complex. It is dependent on the nucleus for the structural material around it, right? So, uh, and that's because it cannot break the electrical circuit.

[00:20:58] It cannot break the wafer from [00:21:00] between the mother and father. So you just inherited from the monk for the organal. You see very clearly that the, uh, direction to form that organal is coming in from the gene. Essentially what evolution does is it transfers the control of the creation of the organism that it has a.

[00:21:15] Assimilated and then slowly transfers, you know, the creation of the structure over there. And you know, I haven't read much about the Hemi Fuso and the way it, it's developed and formed, but my definition is that there's a definite signal from the nucleus to actually form this organal. In other words, it just doesn't form because of actions of the cell membrane being fluid and so on.

[00:21:37] The vesicles going and coming like this. Exosomes, right? So, uh, they, they're, they're not, they're not organs. Okay? So, and these are important for us to know because the network inside the cell of these organisms or organisms that they're being assimilated in there, and then the network of the cells itself.

[00:21:53] You know, which, like in my 11 example, you can actually control by controlling the relationship of the network within [00:22:00] an individual cell. And that's what we do, uh, is to take care of different people's cell and internal and external networks. And that's health organization. I 

[00:22:08] love that. We are looking after the, the basic cell in our nervous system suits, drinking our perfectly matched simplistic electrolyte or electron drink, and then we are measuring our farts and our poo and giving us a diagnos.

[00:22:20] Stick look and the machines that tend will devise for us to be testing all of this within our beautiful room that we've created for perfectly what we need to match for our physiology. So we have a pretty good, well here, this is a a like what we've created. It's beautiful. And I wanted to have this question 'cause I knew that one Ted would come up with something that would blow our minds, but two, that he'd already tried to create it.

[00:22:46] I knew that Craig Quarter was like, really the one of my ambitious, ambitious reaches right when I, when I started developing, uh, the, an a nano camera, right? That was more feasible than actually creating the Craig Quarter. 

[00:22:58] Oh, I love it. And [00:23:00] I think we'll, uh, we'll leave it there for everyone to, to mull over and think about their amazing devices or their perfect world.

[00:23:07] Boomer Anderson: So thank you for joining us. Again on another fun episode of the Smarter Not Harder podcast. We look forward to joining for another fun one next time. See you.

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