Walking barefoot, over all manner of surfaces, feels good, increases your connection to your surroundings, and slows you down.

I've done it lots, both in the countryside and in the city. You have to watch out for spiky plants and fox shit in the country, and in the city you soon learn which surface textures require more care :-)

"Where would I find enough leather to cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet, it's as if the whole world has been covered." - Shantideva, 8th century Buddhist monk

That's really remarkable.

"I have a bucket of mud, in which I stick my hands for 15 minutes every morning.

Every weekend, I inoculate at a 1:5:5 ratio with biologically active stream dirt (after petri-dishing to check for activity), and a mix of poor-quality soil cover, and some compost; I finish by adding a 10-10-10 balanced fertilizer.

Recently, I've been seeing if there are any additional benefits to smearing all over my arms; I'm conducting a 3 month/3 month comparison experiment, with a washout period in-between...

Don't forget to buy my exclusive eBook!"

I also got a $30 "grounding mat" that you plug into the ground part of electrical socket, and I dunno, it feels amazing to have skin touching it. I put it in bed and literally slept the best I have in years in the last two night, by far. Comments online generally are snake oil, but many others are first person accounts saying that for whatever reason, the grounding mat worked for them. (I have theories that the people who it does nothing for are those who already have an outlet. Like a dog where you're in nature and on walks, and also a dog can do the discharge for you). Other comments online are stories of how when the mat is plugged to ground, their cats love sitting on it, but if unplugged, the mats are ignored. That seems like some study that would be interesting at animal shelter, seeing if animals can tell and prefer.

But anyway, wondering what others opinions on this topic are.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4378297/

That GenZ and Gen Alpha have started doing this thing they call “private podcasting”. Where they invite a friend over and discuss topics like one of those podcasts where dudes just talk about stuff…but they don’t record it or post it anywhere.

I was stunned. Is this generation really so socially starved by the attention parasites that human beings are starting to reinvent “hanging out” or “just having a conversation”.

It’s so ridiculous I just refuse to believe this is how they actually think and this has to be some kind of rage bait. I pray that it’s rage bait because if it isn’t we failed our children badly.

All that to say that I get similar vibes from the “grtting your hands dirty is actually good for you” thing. It just screams that entire generations of people have been stunted by helicopter parenting that this just seems like novel information. It seems we’ve completely abdicated our duty as parents and dumped our responsibility to educate our children onto profit seeking media companies. And that terrifies me.

I do subscribe to it myself but not out of evidence. It’s just vibes. Built my daughter a little dirt box with grass and edible herbs so when she would muck around at five to six months she could do it in there on the balcony of our San Francisco apartment and she enjoyed destroying the plants so at the worst she got some fun out of it.

Conversely, trying to keep your hands too clean might create more severe bacteria problems--which is known as: system blow-up.

A good layperson-friendly example of such blow-ups (that are inevitable, due to avoidance of small 'failures') was masterfully depicted in Matthew Lewis's 'The Monk'-- in which he shows how a pious, religious abbot whose piety was not earned (but merely guarded), descends into the worst possible outcomes because his piety and morality was not antifragile (and hence blew up). A fascinating read.

Feeling some pâro, again:

https://youtu.be/w7l2hUp0CkQ

"I take my preworkout, do my exercise, then I sit for 12 minutes at 90 degrees in sauna, before three minutes in the cold plunge-pool at 8 degrees, before going to sauna again for 19 minutes and I finish with a seven minute warm shower".

Just the thought of looking at a watch in a sauna, and timing things minute by minute sounded exhausting.

I assume going to sauna takes an hour, it might be I leave it on for a couple of hours, but beyond that the minutes inside/outside are a mystery and I like it like that. Same story with being outdoors in a cabin/cottage. I might dig up some plants, or move the hammock around, but whether I get (literally) dirty is just down to whatever random things I've done that day!

“Pair it with our full spectrum sun lamp and you can have all the benefits of playing outside from the comfort of your standing desk”.

Washing in the river used to be normal + good for the body - we do cold plunges now.

Probiotic supplements exist, we used to get those for free.

We're gamifying nature. Not saying it's a bad thing, just amusing to me that it used to be our entire lives and we're using technology to get it into our lives in smaller amounts.

--- My Treadwater Desk

If you're the CEO of company, like me, you do a lot of sitting and talking. And all the evidence points to sitting being a disaster health-wise. As a father it's my responsibility to take care of my health over the long term so that my kids, Dagwood and Spaniel, have their father around for a long time. Sure, they don't see much of me because I'm building Yellow Yellow, but I want to be there when we can all enjoy the fruits of my labors.

So, I looked into the current fads running through Silicon Valley. NoSitting has displaced NoSQL as the current buzzword and there are two current solutions: standing up and walking.

At Yellow Yellow we like to blaze our own trail and in NoSitting we're no exception. But rather than standing up all day (which kills your legs and leads to varicose veins---a major problem if you plan on spending your retirement years in the Caribbean on the beach) or walking on a treadmill (which causes wear and tear on your ankles, knees and hips) I've come up with a far better solution.

The Treadwater Desk.

In our basement we had a disused well from back before our brownstone had municipal water. It didn't take much to fill the well with water and a bit of carpentry later and I had my laptop and an Apple Magic Mouse (wrapped in Saran wrap).

Now my day starts by changing into a suit (in this case a wet suit) and plunging into the chilly waters of my treadwater desk. That blast of icy water is better than any espresso from the Daily Grind and really gets me in the mood for work. Also, the vasoconstriction of most of my body means more blood for my brain to keep Yellow Yellow running.

Then it's treading water while Skyping with my team. I've found that using Siri I can dictate emails without a problem and the Magic Mouse is working well.

And let's face it, we all came from the sea originally and so treading water is natural for us all. It's also aerobic and far easier on the joints than walking. It's also a full body workout. Rather than just working on my legs I get every muscle moving. And the health benefits of that are well known.

It's also a metaphor for what it's like to be a startup CEO: I'm literally keeping my head above water all day long and if I don't keep making an effort I (and Yellow Yellow) would go under.

Finally, I'm planning to add Epsom salts to the water to increase buoyancy and help keep my skin in tip top condition.

[1] The inventor of double stealth mode (the public doesn't know what we're building and neither do we). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4166183

Not quite but close enough :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWzWwx8T3nE

If we could only get them to collaborate, we could get some real knowledge out of it!

Really it’s the logical conclusion of living your whole life by studies-show. Studies show that friends are good for you. That’s why I have friends. Studies show that laughing is good for you. That’s why I indulge in merry company. Studies show that dirt is good for you. That’s why I go off the beaten asphalt.

This entire idea of charging or discharging your body for some physiological effect is fundamentally flawed. It is indeed true that touching the ground will change your electrical potential to that of the ground, however that's as far as it goes, the rest is just nonsensical.

Let's start with the very first part of that, specifically changing your electrical potential to match the ground. The problem with this is that the ground is 0V because we define it as 0V, not because of any sort of fundamental property. Between two points on the Earth you can see hundreds of kilovolts. So the obvious question is why should the electrical potential of a particular piece of soil where your grounding rod is installed be physiologically preferable to whatever potential your body happened to be at before?

Now lets go on to the next part of what these scam artists usually claim. That is that the Earth's electrons enter your body and do good things of some description. When you touch the ground some small charge does enter or leave your body, however that stops nearly instantly when the potentials equalise[1]. How is the Earth meant to to keep putting electrons into your body if there's no voltage? That's just simply not how electricity works.

As an aside, note that I said enter or leave. A positive static charge and a negative static charge can both easily build up in your body. Therefore any claims that specify that electrons enter your body (or leave you body) is immediately nonsensical because it could go either way.

I'll leave it to someone else to explain all the nonsensical biological claims that follow on from the already fundamentally wrong electrical side since that's not my area. I will however note that none of these sponsored papers actually show and measurable biological effect, they all just hand-wave about redox reactions.

[1]: Yes, you're coupled to mains wiring and other changing fields that are around, however that's getting too far into the weeds for a short comment. If the claim made by the snake oil salesmen was that a current going through your body is good then they'd also suggest wrapping yourself in an electrical cord to maximise the effect, or just taping batteries to your skin.

Science will never show that grounding has any measurable effect on the chemistry of the human body. But it also can't show how conscious awareness may affect quantum wave function collapse probabilities, allowing free will to migrate to the deterministic timeline in the multiverse that most supports its well-being.

In other words, magic only doesn't exist if you don't believe in it.

We know the reason, and it has been studied extensively.

The placebo effect is very strong.

Now, my big caveat here would that one shouldn't confuse effects with explanations. Even if the explanations are pseudoscience, it could still work. But... you really do need to rule out placebo if you want to claim there's an effect.

(The other caveat is that if it's otherwise harmless, and works for you, then it doesn't actually matter if it's "just" the placebo effect.)

Wouldn't shoes ruin the effect?

If you live alone, get 2 more identical cord. Have your mats cord and the unconnected ones going into a box. Blindly label the cords a b and c.

The unconnected ones end there, the real one continues to the mat. Cycle through your cords every evening. In the morning log your feelings and the cord used. After a month see which cord was the connected one and whether your feelings were correlated with that

When I say "come as a surprise" I mean they would be unable to articulate the exact mechanisms behind the health benefits before being told what they are or that they exist. Liking a thing and presuming it must have health benefits aren't the same.

Naturally, it's possible to take this too far; letting the conversation flow naturally before occasionally snapping back to the agenda is both more enjoyable and often more productive.

...this is also a common podcast format.

I have never heard the phrase "private podcast" used in this sense before (vs the group / company internal sense), but... I kinda like it; sets up some potential useful expectations!

If it's just you and one species of bacteria, you're closer to a circumstance that would call for the activation of such behavior than if diversity is high.

So it's not that the bacteria are intrinsically good or bad, but that the different circumstances call for calm or aggressive behavior, and all your friends going missing cues aggressiveness in species who have evolved by filling that niche in the past.

For one it's just competition. If you have regular contact to a diverse set of microorganisms chances are higher that they will keep each other populations in check. The dose makes the poison applies here too in some narrow sense.

Additionally (or even mainly) our immune system always on guard (me/not me) gets to play around with the obvious stuff and not be overwhelmed or be "bored" but constantly trained/tamed. We have evolved to have constant contact to a diverse set of microorganisms which modulate our immune system e.g. through toll-like receptors.

As an extreme case some people develop some natural immunity to the tetanus toxin through regular exposure to a extreme variety of microorganisms, obviously this isn't reliable nor a gamble remotely worth the risk.

[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3980089/

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6827147/

Edit: don't know why OP gets downvoted it's a perfectly fine entrance question/bafflement to motivate some deeper digging into microbiology/immunology.