Modern Wisdom - #086 - Teemu Arina - The Biohacker's Biohacker

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

Teemu Arina is a technology entrepreneur, author and a leader in the field of biohacking. The Biohacker's Handbook is one of my favourite resources over the last few years and I've been looking forward to sitting down with Teemu - one of the Co-Authors for a long time. Today we delve deep into the world of biohacking with one of the best minds in the industry. Expect learn why bilberries are badass hardcore blueberries, which morning drink blend Teemu recommends, why hot and cold therapy might be the easiest way to live longer and what the 5 fundamental systems are which you should be focussing on as a biohacker. Extra Stuff: Buy The Biohacker's Handbook - https://biohackingbook.com Follow Teemu on Twitter - https://twitter.com/tar1na Inside Tracker Blood Tests - https://www.insidetracker.com Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howdy friends, my trip to America is coming to a close and we will be back to two episodes a week as of next Monday, but I'm finishing off my trip with an incredibly interesting guest. Timo Arena is the author of the Biohackers Handbook and is about as close to a cross between Tony Stark, Ben Greenfield and kind of like a crazy Dr. Frankenstein type guy from Finland that you're ever going to find. He is an unbelievable repository for knowledge about how the human system works, how we can manipulate it using technology, food, diet, sleeping cycles, using technology, food, diet, sleeping cycles, are absolutely everything.

I was totally unprepared for his depth and breadth of knowledge. This is one of those episodes that I will be going back to to listen to a number of times myself because I missed it as it was happening. So that tells you what you're in for. Please welcome Tu Arena. The way how you pronounce it in correct finish is demo.

I'm not going to be able to recreate that. Yeah, but but you can do that the English version, which is Timo. Timo Arena. Yeah, that's good. It's all good. So I'm sure it sounds great. I'm basically finished now. You you're working on your way. I'm adopted. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Timo Arena author of the Biohackers Handbook and all-round fascinating guy. Welcome to the

show. Wonderful to be here. I am getting big podcast studio envy of the lovely setup that you have in front of you. Yeah, I mean, I do a lot of things nowadays online and it was only like a couple of weeks ago, I was presenting to a huge Russian IT technology conference. And I don't like travel nowadays that much because I've been doing 100 talks a year for the last five, six years. So I just like to hang around in my studio and I figured out that, you know, this is the best way to do it. So I can do live streams anyway and create audio, create video. So I love it doing this way and it also helps me to keep my daily routines,

which is, I mean, as a biohacker, you want to maximize your productivity and recovery and all that. If you fly into a conference for what? Giving a 30 minute or one hour talk and you spend time in airplanes and in public transport and eating all kinds of crappy, whatever, you know, airport or conference food, I think it's more efficient to just stay here. I might not, you know, make those face-to-face connections, but if I met the people before, that's the way I prefer to do it. I totally get it, man. Yeah, there's an interesting sort of two camps of people as far as I can

see, there's people who understand that trying to focus on efficiency and marginal games in the way that you've alluded to that is something which is kind of what everything else emerges from. And if you look after those small things, that everything else comes along as a byproduct, and then there are the people who see that as a by-product as a normal part of life. It's like, no, no, well, I've got to get on the plane because I've got got to go to the thing and that's the way it's going to be done. You got it. You got it. It's basically one of the principles of biohacking is the daily decrease. How do you decrease the amount of useless things that you shouldn't be doing? And basically looking for

what is the 20% that will give you the 80% of results, an output that was Italian mathematician Mr. Parrato, who actually first devised and outlined the fact that in many things in economy, nature, workplace is everywhere, is based on the 2080 principle. So for example, 20% of people produce 80% of results. If you take any kind of ant nest, actually we think that ants are extremely hardworking, you know, guys and girls all of them. But actually most of them are slacking. They did some studies on ant nest and they realize that 80% of them are actually slacking around and not really doing much. So there is this small number who is always doing the work. So what I'm saying is that,

it's up to you if you wanna be focusing your time on the 80% that will result in only 20% of the results, or if you wanna seek for the 20% that will result in 80% of improvement. So with that, I mean, you can't optimize everything. You can't really predict everything. I leave a lot also in my life to certain dippity. Certain dippity in science has been key for many discoveries.

So people who are seeking for something completely different stumbled upon a totally different invention. So for example, post-it notes, the guys were trying to work on the most efficient glue and they actually made the worst possible glue. And it required a little bit of inventiveness to be able to realize that, hey, this can be used for something else. And that also applies to relationships and that applies to many things in nature if you want to discover things. There is probably a lot of things that you will discover by just exposing yourself to different environments.

So, that's another part of biohacking is that it's not really about optimizing yourself. It is about optimizing a relationship to your environment. And the more I look at it and the more I look at the different trends in biohacking, which we can also dive into because I'm also the creator of biohacker summit. I've been doing that for the last five years. We've done eight events in different countries. And what I've noticed is a shift more and more towards optimizing your environment, your light environment, your water, your, you know, it could be even your own microbiome, which is actually outside of you, you're kind of like a hollow tube.

And there is all these bacteria that live in your digestive tract and on your skin, everywhere. And you live in a symbiotic relationship with all those guys, and you can't be separate from them if you want to have good health. And that also applies to so many other things, like our connection to nature, that our food chain, and all of that. When I look at my home or my office, I'm always kind of thinking about the ways

how I can prime my environment so that it gives me the best possible conditions for optimal performance and health and wellbeing. And not always, it's about Calvinistic utility driven needs. I think that's a misconception in a lot of high performance and self-development talk is the need to somehow be in grip of what you're doing. And if you look at quantified self, measuring yourself, tracking yourself with an orro ring,

like trying to get, you know, perfect night's sleep, that's the utility value. But part of it is also self-realization and self-expression. So the data itself enables you to express yourself. And it also helps you to reflect back on you, who you are, in what place here in the universe and what you're up to. And it brings up important questions like, if you start tracking your sleep, you start to ask questions like, why do you sleep? How do you sleep? How long do you sleep? And the act of measuring itself already changes the equation. So when you start

tracking your steps or your sleep, you're already changing your sleep and your mobility and movement. So to me, it is also about understanding that what you pay attention to, what you focus on is in terms of your own behavior, you're already part of that equation. So you're already taking the first steps by using some maybe external ways or keys or cues to tap into your own behavior. So if you do journaling, for example, that's a big thing. Also in biohacking is like doing, you know, maybe daily affirmations or having some kind of gratitude, gratitude, journal down. It's late. So, so all of those are priming you for the day and helping you to pay attention to the signals that are key in your environment. It can be two, two different people, exactly the same conditions and environments.

The other one is freaking out and the other one is enjoying him more herself. There is a saying that when it rains, some people get wet and some people feel the rain on their skin. So it's a matter of perspective. And what these things are really helping you to gain a perspective to yourself. And that to me, that is what biohacking is to me. It is a modern approach to enlightenment in a way. It is using modern tools combined with ancient wisdom and natural living principles, systems from, I mean, there's so many biohacking systems that have existed for thousands of years.

You take yoga, meditation, you know, different schools of martial art, different nutritional schools from, you know, from Mediterranean diets to, to let's say very much a wild herb plant-based stuff that we do here in the North, in Finland. It is, you know, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. There are so many people who have mapped the territory, and they've mapped really like

what is key to understanding your place in this universe and this human being and also to kind of push your boundaries. So if you think of like a martial artist, like you take any of these Eastern schools, I practiced myself some Baikido for example. And the Japanese, the Chinese are also some kung fu tai chi, I've done also. And what I've learned from those is that as much as you focus on the ability to produce extreme force with the least amount of effort, you also practice the counter of that, which is meditation and breathing techniques and all that. So that's also what biohacking should be. It's not about better, faster, stronger. It is also wiser. It is also about more being reflective on how you do things and not always try to

you know, sleep for hours and night and you know, that's worth of coffee and just want to rest. Yeah, I think certainly a lot of people that are listening may think that when you hear the word biohacking for most people who are maybe uneducated about it, I think a lot of terms come to mind about people being quite utilitarian, quite transactional with these

marginal gains and things like that. I recently had a discussion with Stephen Wolfram. Now, he, as the listeners, will know if you've been tuning in and if you haven't, you need to go back and check it out because it's an awesome episode. He's tracked, I think, 3 million emails that he sent over the last 30 years and about 30 million key strokes. He's the true pioneer of self-tracking. Yeah, it's a, to a degree of fidelity that at least with regards to work

that I've never, I've never really seen before. But what he actually had is his justification for it was quite philosophical and pretty beautiful that he said, I like to work. I like my job and I like what I do at work. Why would I not facilitate me doing as much of what I like to do as efficiently and as effectively as I can? And I think that transcends for me what, you know, so we've got by Hacker's handbook here in front of me, it's a beastly, a beastly thing. There are- You're also.

Is that as a reference just in case you forget some of the things that you need to go back to? You know, before you have a look through that, and I guess with one reading, you could potentially see each of them as discrete individual hacks or techniques or whatever it is. But the emergent end result of this is that you're able to do more of the things you want to do. You can spend more time in good health. We are recently spoke to Professor David Sinclair from Harvard Medical School. And he was talking about just making people live longer. And he talks about the health span, not just the lifespan. It's like feeling better for longer, having more energy to do the things that you care about, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think you've given us a pretty robust introduction to biohacking there so far. Where would you say are the key areas that Biohack is tend to focus on? So what you actually described already, like what kind of people are drawn to biohacking, the kind of utilitarian people, those people are often struggling already with our modern society, like they tried to push themselves for results. So those might be startup entrepreneurs, they might be, I don't know, some high street investors or real estate brokers or in name, it's like people who are really, you know, working in say in hours and not really taking any vacation. So they struggle with hormonal imbalances,

they struggle with all kinds of blood sugar regulation issues. They might suffer from gut these biosis, there is so many things that they seek and answer for in biohacking. And they might try things like ketogenic diet and see that the lights go on suddenly. And they might start tracking their sleep and trying to figure out like how to get more deep sleep with the amount of sleep that they're getting. And to me, that's kind of the first step. And many of those people who I see are joining the barking movement are really like neurotic about performance in many ways. Do you see that as a good thing or as a bad thing?

I see many of them being quite unhealthy with it. And what it enables them to do is the same, but in an accelerated manner. So suddenly they start popping new tropics. It's a big, big thing, you know, that you can have increased mental performance, even physical performance. Maybe some athletes also look for, I mean, but they've been doing supplements for 20, 30 years, already pretty consistently.

So that's nothing new, but when it comes to working in front of your computer, suddenly there's more than coffee that you can take to stay awake and focus that your work. So to me, they are seeking a solution to their problem. And once they get some advantage from this, they push the envelope even further. And I don't think that's very healthy. So I see a lot of bioculars like not really pushing away their old lifestyles. So they might be still sleeping quite little, but they're doing all these new tropics and diets that keeps the inflammation lower so they can get more out of the system.

So they're basically juicing themselves faster. And once they take all the new tropics, that you take something like Modaphinal or you take Adderall or you take some stack of supplements, often there is side effects that are related to increased heart rate. So once you increase blood flow, once you expand capillaries, yeah, you improve nutrient flow. But once you get like 5, 10 beats higher heart rate because of doing all of that, I wouldn't be surprised if down the road

you age faster for so many different reasons. And it's, if you think of the heart as a muscle, it's a mechanical muscle that is doing work. When the heart rate goes up, the time speeds up. When the heart rate goes down, the time slows down. So that's why it's so super important to do things, to counter that kind of behavior, which is meditation, breathing techniques, just going for a nature walk, whatever.

And if you're only doing all the new tropics, and you're doing all that, you know, you can do many of these things in excess, even things like red light therapy for mitochondrial function, or things like antioxidants, there is a dose response curve to many things, also neutropics. So basically, those response curve describes the fact that there is a sweet spot for dosage. If you get too much, you get side effects, you get potentially dangerous imbalance, it's also... If you do it too little, that's also, I mean, that's often what people are correcting, but then they go to the extreme. They might be using blue light blocking glasses all day long. So that's the thing. They might be drinking

bulletproof coffee all day long. There is a balance, the things. And I think there is a need for homeostasis in biohacking. So homeostasis in medical terms is the balance that your body strives for. And if you are artificially tilting it to a certain direction, like constantly pumping up your heart rate and blood flow. I don't think that's healthy. So, I mean, I come from Europe, so we are slightly different than Americans, for example.

I feel that the American culture of biohacking is much more like performance driven. While the Europeans, like, I mean, in the North, in Finland, which is, by the way, one of the backing capitals of Europe, if you go to any of these health food shops, we have we have we have great products and companies and huge aisles and you can get in every supermarket. There's super food sections. You can buy MCT all from all the large supermarkets. And it's all high quality also. You get really high quality coffee. So it's all available. But people are driven more by things that come from wild nature,

like extracts from medicinal mushrooms like chaga, they might be getting bilberic extracts, which is basically the more pronounced exponentially, more powerful, the original form of a blueberry. The blueberry that is sold as a superfood is actually the one that grows in a bush. It's quite high on sugar and it's not, I mean, it's a woozy compared to a bilberry, which is basically growing on the ground. There's bilberry, it bilberry is a hard-core blueberry. Yeah, yeah. If you cut a blueberry, you can see that the things that give

blueberry is the color, the Antosuonins, which are also the the menacing properties of blueberries that are being thrown around. It's also great for eye health and all that extremely strong antioxidants. Often these very dark dark pigments are like that. You take coffee, chocolate, chagga mushrooms, you take blueberries, the dark pigments are usually very strong and the oxidants. Now, in blueberries, you have only these pigments in the skin section, a little bit maybe one or two millimeters below the skin. But if you take a bilber, that's the original badass motherfucker version of the blueberry. The blueberry is a selectively bred kind of thing that is bigger and has more sugar content. But if you take a bilber, you cut it. It's all throughout these dark pigments and it has so much more flavor.

The same goes for raspberries, the local raspberries we have here, those are much more, but they pack all the bitter compounds, all the nutrient and stuff in there. So in Finland, it's not really that much about supplements. It's really about the real foods. And that's the thing. I don't know if it's part of the culture that we have every man's rights that you can actually go to nature on private land and you can pick anything you want. And you're not being chased, chased down. It's okay. It's part of the Nordic culture here in Sweden and Finland and Estonia. You can go to the nature.

You can take berries, mushrooms, herbs from someone's backyard, and it's okay. I think you'd probably be chased out of someone's backyard in the UK if you try to do that here. Exactly. So the same in the US. So people are not really accustomed to the fact that nature is theirs. But here it's, I mean, we have a hundred thousand lakes.

Sona, the Finnish Sona is part of our culture. It has always been. It was the method through which we heated our homes. Did I read a thing where sometimes people leave their son as honor out overnight and sometimes neighbors just go and use other people's sonners? Yeah, public sauna culture is big,

but you're probably referring to the smoke sauna. Smoke sauna is something which you heat with smoke. In the end, you don't have smoke in there, but you basically use that to really bring the temperature up and then all the heat is in a huge pile of stones and it keeps hot for 48 hours. It also takes at least six hours, often 12 hours to heat a proper finish smoke sauna.

And a great, you know, a proper smoke sauna also burns at least once in 10 years to the ground. And you build it again. You can't have those in apartment buildings. So what we have nowadays in apartment buildings are these, I guess they are like electric grills. So an electric sauna, it's not really. Are you grilling yourself, team? Yeah, I'm gonna be grilling. Yeah, but the problem with these electric stoves is that they reduce the humidity in the air. Yeah. And often because they are in apartment buildings, you don't have direct connection to air.

And the greatest qualities of a proper sauna experience are actually invisible. They're not physical. So it is the combination of the basic elements of water, fire, air, and then you have earth, which is basically the stones. And you throw water on the stones and the water water evaporates, and that is called lul, which is the spirit of the sauna. And in some countries here in the Baltics, for example, in Latvia and Slovakia,

they hang these different herbs in the ceiling, and once the water evaporates, it takes the volatile oils with them and carries them in the air to your lungs. So that's the essential oils thing. Yeah, now we don't need a diffuser for it. It just goes for a sauna. And then you also make this,

I don't know how you call them, but you basically put a bunch of branches together, usually birch. Some other countries here in Baltics, they also use other trees like maybe oak leaves or maple, whatever. You can just make one of these from just about anything, tie it up and heat yourself with it. And it really brings the blood flow on the surface. And you also

basically literally beat the volatile oils into your skin. Now, now that's good. Actually, in Finland, they also used stinging nettle. That is hardcore. Yeah, you basically get a bunch of sting metal together and you beat someone with that. Is it a friend? You beat a friend or you beat an enemy? You beat a friend who has kidney problems in the back. And it increases blood flow greatly. I mean, you probably got sting by a sting metal at some point. It's agony.

And it really increases blood flow. That's medicine, man. It might hurt for a while, but it's good for you. Definitely hurt for a while. So, you can also, I mean, it's one of the highest sources of micronutrients that you can get from your backyard. If anyone who is listening at home, I employ you not to blame it on us, if you were just singing that line, it hurts. I'm going to advise you that it almost, almost definitely will hurt. But yeah, so you've touched on a number of areas there that I think a lot of people will consider. They'll think about the fact that they need to focus on the sleep. I need to track my sleep. I need to understand that it's not just getting eight hours, it's getting varieties of REM sleep, etc, etc.

You've put some sort of sonotherapy as well and a few different. Different saturation. Yeah, we combine that with also ice swimming. So it basically combined that. I can get into the details of the health effects if you're interested, but yeah, that'd be good. Let's throw it on us about heat. But anyway, so in this book, we go through five pillars of your life, sleep, exercise, nutrition, mind, and work, and how you can see all of those systems and how you can track them and how you can optimize them based on latest science. So, heat alteration is something that you can use to improve your recovery from things like exercise, or it can be a form of exercise. Actually, if you go, if you don't exercise at all, but you go for a sauna once a week, it is already a really good training for cardiovascular system and you reduce

your risk of cardiovascular disease by that already. And it also improves your immunity. It increases white blood cell count and certain immune system cells. Also something called heat shock proteins proliferate when you expose yourself to hot and cold, by the way. Also, actually, heat shock proteins on a cellular level were discovered when they studied cells and they realized that certain proteins increased the number once you exposed the cells to heat. That's why they called them heat shockings. But then they realized later on that it also is something that increases the number when you expose the cell to cold or radiation, a bunch of different environmental stressors. And it seems that it's key for its recovery or

self-reparemchanism. So it will clean out intercell or waste. And it will also activate certain pathways that are related to longevity like FOXO3. So there are many benefits of that. What has not been studied very well is the combination of sauna and ice-wimming combined. Those have been studied in isolation, so cold exposure and heat exposure.

If someone is interested in like, okay, if I go for a traditional Finnish sauna or a dry sauna, how do I get the health benefits? Now, what is the protocol? What you should aim for is that you wait until your heart rate goes up. That's when you are generating those heat shock proteins and you're getting many of the benefits to your cardiovascular system. And when you go for ice-wimming,

a good duration is once you get in there and you start hyperventilating, you stay there until your breathing gets even. You just try to kind of breathe through it. And that's once you get past a certain point, you have already got the shock to your nervous system that is beneficial in this context. And also the cardiovascular benefits. So another thing that for ladies out there is key is also skin. Now, your skin is your largest organ. And most of the time we spend our time in pretty much heated environments, in a tropical environment almost like heated indoors,

cars, we have all kinds of air conditioning and heating systems and buildings. Now, we don't really expose ourselves nowadays that much to heat alteration. Now, if you do that on a regular basis, it will also improve your skin quality for many reasons. Part of it is related to the expansion and contraction of capillaries of in microvents.

And there's many benefits to that. So yeah, I think some of the best biohacks are actually pretty simple and natural. Very straightforward stuff, right? So I mean, how often are you suggesting or what appears to be optimal twice a week, three times a week? I would recommend doing it two or three times a week, but if you even do it once a week, you reduce your risk for seasonal flu by 66%. That's an insane statistic. Yeah, so it don't need much.

Okay, so we've got, we've got sauna, heat and cold therapy is one of the top lists. So, okay, if we were to take that, if you were to, I'm aware that with biohacking, bio markers are a key element of what we're talking about here that it's not simply a one-size-fits-all solution and that people need to make adjustments to their own home, to reach home your status and to then improve on that

based on where their imbalances lie and yours will not be the same as mine or not be the same as the listeners at home. But if I was to ask you for your, as the experience that you've seen and with the broad cross section of the public, which you've been exposed to, what would you say are the rough-hune?

What's the 80-20 of the 80-20 for people to look at doing? If it was to be a top five things that most people could benefit from or your favorite things that most people could benefit from that you think have emerged from the biohacking community recently. Yeah, if you look at biomarkers, what you should pay attention to. So I'm not a big fan of any kind of reductionist logic that you break down a human being to a single number, like your blood sugar value or something like this, but in the end those are pretty good indicators, many of them. But a combination of them is perhaps even more beneficial.

So what I would look for is certainly the classical ones. I would look at your fasting blood glucose, but not just your glucose tolerance test, but your long-term hemoglobin A1C is I think one of the key markers to follow on so that you understand the long-term exposure to blood sugar fluctuations. The other one that I would look for is definitely lipid biomarkers that is related to cholesterol, but I wouldn't look at total cholesterol, I would look at results of rides and their relationship to HDL, LDL cholesterol. And that is already giving pretty good indicators of where you are in terms of particle size versus cholesterol levels. And cholesterol is a carrier, so when inflammation goes up, cholesterol levels tend to also rise.

When you exercise a lot, your cholesterol tends to rise. So it doesn't only rise when you eat food that is high in cholesterol. It rises in response to your day-to-day activities. And now, what is kind of key to understand there is definitely inflammation. So high cholesterol is not that dangerous if you have low inflammation, if a high inflammation, then there is a risk that you damage your arterial walls and that creates problems than with high cholesterol. So now, what you would track for is things like homocysteine and highly sensitive,

see reactive protein. They often check for CRP, but that tells you more about things like bacterial infection or massive systemic infection or inflammation going on. But if you track your highly sensitive, serious, reactive protein, you get a better idea of low level inflammation, which kills you over time and kind of exposes you to all these degenerative disease that come with age, even things like Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease that lurks in slowly or in ability to deal with glucose or insulin resistance. Now, what I would look for definitely in terms of sleep quality is the

amount of deep sleep. I wouldn't look at sleep duration. I would look at the amount of deep sleep because deep sleep is the key phase when you're at sleep in the first stages of sleep when you get most of your deep sleep usually. That's when your brain shrinks a little bit and there are these, the lymphatic system expands to the brain and it's mediated by glial cells in the brain and it pumps out any of the metabolic byproducts that accumulate throughout the day. So basically being awake is a catabolic state, it breaks your body down. Now when you sleep, that's an anabolic state when you build up things and you clean out things and you de-frag yourself. And that's where things like amyloid plague or amyloid beta, which accumulates in Alzheimer's disease tend to be cleaned out. Now, if you don't get proper deep sleep,

which comes in the first four or five hours of the night, you're not cleaning the system properly. And one easy way to reduce the amount of deep sleep is actually to drink more than two glasses of alcohol. So obviously, I mean, many of these things that we already know, the like excess consumption of alcohol or smoking cigarettes is definitely linked to many of these conditions. One of my friends recently, I was having a discussion with him and I was, we are big advocates of going sober on the show. I've currently just testing myself to see if I can do 18 months sober. I run club nights, which means that it's the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing,

but it's a good challenge and I am enjoying it the moment. I actually met a DJ friend today, who's into electronic music. And he also said, like, I mean, he's in the biohacking nowadays, but he's spent most of his youth basically, like, you know, watching, hardying hard. Yeah, and watching when other people like get wasted. And it, I mean, I was just like a couple of nights ago, I was, or yesterday, maybe two, two, yeah, yesterday I was in the evening, I was in a just a summer, you know, first outdoor event here. And I just realized that how many people are smoking cigarettes still. I don't get this passive smoking thing at all nowadays, but when

I go to a place like that, I realize that, hmm, okay, some people are still doing this. It blows my mind, man. Like, it's, there's been the anti-smoking, or the, I guess, the smoking health advertisements, especially in the UK, have done such a good job. I'm terrified of being nearer cigarette now. And now and I kind of always have been the fact that people still see it as a viable thing to do. To me kind of blows my mind. But yes, speaking to my friend and he was talking to me about how he said alcohol helps me sleep better at night. And I was like, you're not sleeping, you're sedating yourself. And there's a big difference between the two. and going to bed sedated is not,

it's got nothing to do with sleep. It's just the fact that you've knocked yourself out with two big glasses of red wine at like 10, yeah. Yeah, drinking wine in the evening, that increases gaba, newer transmitters in the brain with an inhibitory neurotransmitter. So it slows down signaling. So definitely it relaxes you and you feel like you're

more easily to go to sleep, but it can also inhibit your deep sleep stages and and depending of your genetic makeup. So one thing one kind of key thing to look for if you do any of these genetic tests is to look for your cytochrome B450 system in your liver, how it basically metabolizes things like alcohol or caffeine. So if your faster slow metabolize, if your liver is able to produce you two months of glutathione that breaks down alcohol, yeah, I mean, you're in a safer side. If you get a red flush reaction from alcohol, you should stop immediately. Yeah, my business, my business partner Dave is Asian heritage and he still gets Asian beer flush, which he has to take his little tablets

for. And stuff for anyone who is listening that doesn't know what this is, you may have an Asian friend. I think it's disproportionately skewed towards the east in terms of population. When my business partner Dave is about to be as deep if he's forgotten to have one of his special pills, it just looks like he's been out in the sun for too long. And he just instantly gets like a flush face, which is super funny in the middle of the night out. The interesting thing about alcohol here is that here in the northern part of the globe, Finland, Russia, people drink a lot.

And we are actually quite tolerant to alcohol, so we don't get the red flush reaction that easily, genetically. And that might sound like a good thing that you can deal with alcohol more. But the problem here is addiction. So if you're not getting the beating of getting a red flashing reaction, you risk yourself getting addicted more easily. But there's no early warning system, right? It's going to keep going. There is no punishment, but there is all the reward. So you get basically the release of dopamine

and it makes you feel good and enjoy yourself. And in terms of any addiction, what is key is repetition. And the sequence and the time or the duration between the moments when you release a certain pathway or connect certain neurons in your brain. So becoming an alcoholic is not really about the amount how much you drink. It is about the frequency. So if you enjoy alcohol because you're not getting this red flush reaction, you start drinking wine at every dinner, suddenly you drink bottles of wine. That's the problem. The frequency of use is the issue here, and over time, that's also what makes you an alcoholic,

and you start to enjoy it. Why is your brain for that activity? Now, if you get the punishment every time you drink, you're more likely to steer away from drinking. And if you do, you just, you're super careful. And I think it's a blessing to get that reaction. Yeah. Now, you can hack that. So in bi-hacking circles, you can use things like liposomal glithione, you can use things like anositose stein, which is a building block for glutthione that breaks down osteoidahide, which is one of the metabolites of alcohol. Now, is this a pre-opost?

That's effective when you do it pre or while drinking. So it doesn't help that much once the damage is done, but that's part of the reason why you can drink more if you eat simultaneously because of from food you get from amino acids, you get cystine, you get some building blocks, some amino acids that build up more glutathione. So you can break down alcohol. It also slows down the absorption obviously. Now, the problem here is that if you start supplementing on alcohol years, which is kind of a biohack, so you're getting a risk of getting hangover,

you know what? You can drink more. You can drink more. You're more likely to get addicted also. I spoke to a researcher on this and he said that you increase your risk for becoming an alcoholic tree fold by doing this biohacks. So that's terrifying man. Like it's what you said before about the nitropics and the use of smart drugs. You're layering on top of an ineffective system,

more speed and for people who listened to the episode we did about mental models, you'll remember speed over direction and a lot of the time you can make yourself go much faster in the wrong direction. And this is exactly what we're talking about. A lot of people ask, like I recently did a story about, I mentioned Neutropics and had my inbox got flooded with, oh, so what do you recommend, what do you use? And I'm like, so many people say that they have a time management problem when what they have

is an attention management problem. If you don't understand how to do deep work or you don't have the beginning of the understanding of a Pomodoro technique, or whatever your particular focused work strategy of choice is, but if you don't have any like hammering shitloads of nitropics and caffeine into yourself, you're layering extra speed on top of an incredibly ineffective system. You got it. I mean, as a philosopher, you might say

that, you know, there is time, you know, infinite amount, you know, it comes and goes. What do you have a limit that amount is your attention? So if you if you do a bunch of new tropics and all that, like, and you think you have a time management problem, you really have an attention management problem, that's for sure. And sometimes taking these substances that might make you hyperactive might make you a little bit too stimulated, a little bit too much dopamine, they might make you more easily distractable, actually. So it's a sweet spot. I noticed for myself, actually,

Athane is not necessarily the best thing to do if I want to write. It's good if I want to go for a run or talk to you. That's where it works for me because it helps me to rapidly fire and make connections. But if I want to do deep work or create the work, I need to slow down the system really. Like for me, things like, things like thinning work pretty well, things like lemon balm might be good, maybe a cup of tea. So less stimulatory things are good in that state for me, or, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less I have too much, I'm overshooting by such. Yeah, anxious, anxious. Yeah, I can't allow everything to slow down and to really focus on what matters.

So L-thiening's one of the things you've touched on there. So yeah, going back to one of the things that I mentioned before, if you were to take a broad cross section of people and say, I mean, would you recommend to most people a sauna? I'm going to guess so based on everything that I've seen, it suggests that heat and cold therapy is robustly pretty good. Are there any other techniques that you think that are fairly robust and that most people should consider adding into a routine? If they're new to biohacking, they haven't yet got the book and they don't know where to start.

Are there some things that you think will just give them some good benefits to begin with? I mean, I'm beating the horse to death here, but light is obviously a big thing. So there's a lot of research that has come out in the last couple of years on chronobiology. So basically the biology of your biological clocks and light is a big influencer on that diet is another one, by the way. So when you drink coffee that actually pushes your biological clock forward by four hours, easily. That's really, that's really worrying. Yeah, I mean, if you are traveling and you try to adjust the time zone, that might be good. Things like fasting will be good because biologically, we are wired to move the clock forward

until we get food. So I would always like think about morning as one of the resets for the day. So starting a day with coffee, but not the first thing when you wake up, because that's when you have high cortisol. When your adrenal glands are just waking up, pushing more caffeine into the system to activate your adrenal glands is is like putting more gas on the pedal that's already pushed way down. So I would wait for the cortisol to drop. So that's typically. So that that's probably around a couple of hours from wake up. So I would make the coffee, yes, I would put it in a thermo, I would take it to work and I would drink it slowly.

You're an advocate of the lemon and saltwater on a morning, right? When it comes to hydration, I would go for electrolytes for sure. I mean you lose a lot of water when you sleep, so hydration is key and you need electrolytes for absorbing the water. So the more fluids you have in your body, the better your system also works, your joints, your discs, a lot of backpans can actually be a result of hydration. So there is not just enough fluids in your system to moist them up. Things like the discs in your back. It's dehydrated discs is what it's referred to, right? It's one of the technical terms

for it. That's right. So hydration is key, but when it comes to, like, hacking your morning water, what I like to do is, if I now had everything in my disposal, what kind of morning water would I do? I would actually use not filtered water or something fancy like that. I would use either spring water or birch sap. Birch sap directly from a tree.

That's awesome. It's already full of all the electrolytes, the natural form. I would ferment it. So I would have fermented birch sap. So I get also the probiotics. If I don't have those, I would mix some probiotics in there, perhaps.

But I would also throw in, in terms terms of a lot of people put things like lemon for some vitamin C. I might use things like spruce sprout powder or amla extract. Amla extract and spruce sprouts are one of the greatest sources of vitamin C. or I might also use C-box-torn juice, just to, you know, dose a little bit of that in there. I'm going to throw some things to help with, basically, anti-inflammatory compounds. I might throw something like an extract of ginger or turmeric in there also. Also, also beans of pinch of salt is a pretty good idea. So there you have it, you know, you have already a more like an optimized version. So your question, like what would most people benefit from? I give you, I don't, I'm going to give you a way of looking at things. So when you look at your day, look at the things that you do repeatedly. You sit in a chair, you sleep in a bed, you drink a cup of coffee or tea or whatever you do.

You know, look at the things that you do repeatedly, or an or again. And those are the areas, if you optimize those, you get cumulatively the highest benefits from. So there is not a single thing, but I would look at your patterns of behavior. I would map them out and think about like, how can I do this better? And don't compromise on things like the quality of coffee or tea or your chair or bed, because those are the things you spend most time with. A lot of people, they buy things that they think they need, like a fancy car, or I don't know, a new shirt, and they don't invest in small things, like a much better, like ergonomics. So that's what I would go for. And if you do a lot of seating work, getting some way to get more mobility in your day,

maybe a standing desk. The point is not to stand all day long, but it's really to alterate your physical position. That's kind of the key for activating your lymphatic system. So I would pay attention to stimulating your lymphatic flow because the lymphatic system doesn't have a pump like the heart does for the cardiovascular system. It requires movement and gravity for the fluids to move in and out from from from yourself. So speaking as speaking as someone who considers himself active, I train

between one and two hours a day, seven days a week, but the periods when I'm not active are incredibly sedentary. And this is a misstep, a bias that I've not been conscious of until fairly recently. I thought, right, I'm cracking out in an hour and a half, I'm cracking out a thousand or a 1500 calorie workout. Like, I don't need to worry myself with staying mobile through the rest of the day. Whereas recently, the guys from fully, they make the Capisco chair and they make the Jarvis desk. That is what I'm sat on now. So this stool, which is just behind me and this particular desk, which allows me to stand, like, this is now, I'm working with an adjustable desk. And for the listeners at home, they'll

know that I have L5 and S1 for me at two bulging discs. I have that, I have what's referred to as a Schmolls node. And you think, well, I have fairly strong extensors, I have all of the rest of the things, but it's not, it seems it's not sufficient to just look after your health or your fitness during fitness time, staying moving throughout the day. An episode I did with Dr. Ewan Lawson, who is the author of the Healthy Writer, came up with something called the 2020 rule, which I thought was great, and it ties in with Pomodoroz. He said, every 20 minutes for 20 seconds, stand up, walk around, and look at something

which is more than 20 feet away. And he talks about resetting the ocular muscles in the eye to try and, there's been some moderately strong research to show that it will stop with tension headaches and the straining of the eyes being at a scream which is a particular distance away. So that's something to take there. So we're looking at the areas of our life that we're doing a lot of. If you're a driver look at your seating position in a

car, if you're an office worker look at your desk position, look at where your keyboard is, if you're everyone's going to say, if you sleep, everyone sleeps. When you sleep, consider your sleeping position, your pillow, the surface that you're sleeping on. What are some of you other areas that people may have overlooked? Yeah, well, I started just reflecting on what you said. To me, it seems like, you know, if you think exercise even, people have recovery days. And, you know, that's when they don't do anything. And there is a bunch of research that actually shows that an active recovery day is probably actually better to have a little bit of movement in the day and maybe go for a walk.

So one of the key things for a long life, definitely once you get older, once you're not that you're young, you're going to do all kinds of heavy exercise and stuff like this. But the older you get, it's more and more important to get your proprioceptors right. And is proprioceptics. Yeah, proprioceptors, proprioceptors, I think. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of key. So moving on even terrain, you know, go, don't just go for a run on a treadmill or around a field, but go just go to the, you know, down away from a beaten path and run in nature and get some natural

movement. I think that's key really for a brain function and for learning. I'll show you what I've literally just bought. Wait a minute. Sure. So that's a great chair you have there. This is a slackline, which I just purchased as my physical challenge. Yeah, exactly. So that's going to be my thing. Hopefully I'll get that set up nearby. I work from home to fabric, get that set up at home. And then, yeah, when I eat beef, beefy on grass,

I know grounding, nothing and stuff is a little bit of research behind it, etc. I I Start my first company when I was 16 and on 37 now and When I was younger, you know, 18 or something like this, my friends would go for a smoke and for a cigarette and I didn't smoke so I had to come up with something to do. And one thing that I came up with was juggling. So I started juggling. I started doing all these juggling acts. And that was my way of getting a little bit of movement in my day. And there is a bunch of research that also shows that

if you, if you train yourself in anything that requires coordination of micromooments, like, you know, what you just showed me, the cip line, or maybe even playing something like a violin, juggling, all those things, dance, or key for increasing the connections in corpus colosum, which is the part of the brain that connects to left and the right hemisphere. There is this idea that you are either left or right brain like the geological or creative, but this is Bolognax, it's not based on any real science, some hippies came up with that distinction in the 70s and it stuck, I mean, it came from brain imaging that they noticed and the results on the brain are definitely areas of the brain that are

more... A lot of it, not activities, but when you do create the work, you're actually using both left and right hemisphere. When you're doing logical, mathematical equations, you're using both left and right hemisphere. And if you're going to be Einstein or not, it's actually the increase, the number of connections you have in your corpus colosum between the left and the right hemisphere. So the better the coordination between both sides of the brain, the better you are on both of those activities, both creative work and logical thinking. So and the best way to train that is

physical movement, especially anything that requires concentration and coordination. Quite fine, high fidelity, technical sort of things, like you play violin or slacklining. Have you still got the skills? Have you still got the juggling skills? If someone throws a set of balls at you, have you still got it? Absolutely. Yeah.

I also got into contact juggling and I also do some sticks and I really love to play with some martial arts equipment if I get the opportunity. So I think it's a fun part to play. I think that's a really cool point. A lot of people forget that these things that we're talking about aren't just necessarily tools for a more productive, longer, better life. That you can find, I suck at slackline, like I suck so bad. But I actually do enjoy the process of it.

I like being out, I'm attached to two trees, bare feet, on grass, fresh air, half an hour, and you know, it's fun. Like that's, it's, it's, it's the process of doing it isn't just like we said at the very beginning, it's not that utilitarian tool for tools sake, it can actually be something that you enjoy. Absolutely. Grasing the groove is one of the kind of key terms that have been thrown around in exercise circles. The basic idea is that you play all day long. You just don't go for a gym workout. You do push ups occasionally, do pull ups, maybe you do, you know, you do some parkour was once you're outside in a city. So you're trying to find some ways to use your body at its fullest form.

I have to testify that, I don't do that all the time. I'm still learning. I try to get more and more playful and more exercise to my day, and I'm getting there. I just got myself an X-Tree bar, and I do my... What's up? It's a resistance training system developed by a doctor, I'll try to remember his name now. But anyway, so he X X three X three bar. Yeah. So basically, what

happens is when you do something like deadlift, the highest resistance is when you're just lifting it off the ground and the lowest resistance is in the upper most position. Now the resistance bands are reversing that. So I have the highest resistance on the upper position on the lowest when you're down. And it actually pushes your training beyond what is possible, which is lifting heavy stuff. And I really like the device and it's, uh, it's easy to carry around. And it's, it's unforgiving. I mean, I call it a business man's workout because you can do it. You know, with your suit on hotel room, yeah, hotel, 15 minutes, and you're completely wasted out of breath. And you don't even get too sweaty doing it.

So you can go for a meeting right after a red face. That's really interesting. So before we go, some of the things we've touched on today that I know the listeners might be interested in, you mentioned about the biomarkers for lipids and glucose and stuff like that. I was flown out to Boston as the listeners will know by the guys from inside tracker who do some biomarkers. They do a service in the UK and in Europe, although I'm aware that it is a slightly reduced version of their main one, which is all 40 bio markers. And you also mentioned about genetic testing.

Have you got any companies that you recommend for the bio markers for dietary stuff and for genetics? Inside Tracker is great. If you want to check bio markers against your diet, they have a do-it-your it's also where you go to your local lab, you get the numbers and you then manually enter them on inside tracking to get your analysis. Another great company in US side is called Wellness FX. I think they were sold to

Thorn FX, a supplement company, I think. But anyway, so they did pretty extensive panels. And on Europe side, I mean, there is there is genetic companies, I mean, you can do it like 23 and me test and then upload the data to companies like DNA fit and from ethys and there is also this and there is also, leave it well, and a bunch of other services. There is Dr. Ronda Patrick's Genetic Analysts for Nutrition and Nutri Genomics. That's great. Or you can go for a full genome test with companies like Chronomics, which also provides an epigenetic test or Dante Labs. It's another one that comes to mind.

What's the sort of cost of that? I mean, these are probably cheapest. You get them is like 150 bucks and up to a thousand. Yeah, for the real, every full MOT. Yeah, but I wouldn't definitely go for a genetic test as the first thing. I would get my basic biomarkers in place. I actually sold my own problem here, trying to get these lab tests here in Finland. We founded a company, I helped to found a company called

HealthDX that does biomarker analysis. So we do very extensive full blood tests. So like over 100 biomarkersers and we have another package that's for the basic metabolic, but we have another package which is nutrition where we look at micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, and we also look that from full blood. And so you get a long term understanding of many many things and we are working with the only mineral laboratory in Finland to do that. We are not just providing you the numbers, but we also provide you the deeper analysis and feedback on those. Actually, our biomarker analysis comes with

an online course that helps you to dive in a customized manner to your own blood work. And the amount of material that you can learn from there about your biomarker results is about the same size as the Bi-Akkers handbook. So, we're actually putting that as a book later also. So, the Bi-Akkers handbook is out now. You can find more information about it from byhackingbook.com. So, byhackingbook.com, you can already order the Bikers Handbook.

It's not on Amazon yet. We're working on it. It's a big book. It's a big book to ship by Amazon. Yeah, it's a big one. It's also big for us to get it there, especially on the US side, we're working on it. And there is some books that are coming out later. So we are working on one book that is more focused

on your nervous system and building resilience. So that will be a follow up to this book. We're working on it. Would that be kind of like on top of the immunity side? Yeah, that will combine basically everything that goes into stress management and building a better resilience version, resilient version of yourself so that will go in more in a

more detailed manner into breeding techniques and called heat exposure and but also supplementation for your adrenal and HPA access that controls your stress reactions also. I mean, if the listeners at home, I'm sure making a lot of notes and then trying to catch up with a lot of what we've gone through today, my taking notes from reading the biohackers handbook is moving very slowly, embarrassing them reading the book very slowly, because I'm then having a distilled down what it is that I'm looking at.

But I have to say, if you thought that there was a wealth of information in today's episode, that is about as close to a encyclopedia as you're going to get. I think you've done a fantastic job, but you get like a PDF that's kind of like a partner of it as well. And then there's a link to stuff on the website, which is all the recommended products and resources and stuff like that. I haven't even started on that yet.

Like that's still for me to get stuck into. Yeah, so in this book, you don't have any product or device or service recommendations. Those will be basically outdated in a year. So we took all of those out from that book. So that book is mainly research strategies based on science over a 1,500 references. Mainly meta studies published in the last couple of years. So this material will last a long time. And once we get into the different practical techniques and tools,

that's where we have our extra materials, pages, which are like online databases for everything from sleep optimization, exercise, nutrition, all that. And we keep on updating those lists as we go forward as new stuff comes out. When we started writing this book five years ago, so I worked with a medical doctor called Olisoviaarwe and a nutrition specialist called the alcohol mettoia. When we started, people didn't do things like photobion modulation that much. Blue light blocking was not yet there, like glasses. Some of those things were kind of already emerging a little bit.

Keto-genic diets were not really big. People were talking about more about anti-inflammatory diets and all that. So things have changed a lot while we were writing this. And we've been updating the book while we've wrote it for five years. updating the book while we've wrote it for five years. But I mean, it's a huge book. A lot of research went into it. And for no reason, I mean, it's not a surprise that when you put your heart in mind into something like that,

people really give good feedback. So we have already a second, 100, you know, five star reviews and raving reviews about the content. It's a coffee table book, really. I mean, you can't just read it and digest it in one go. It's like you want to go back to as often as you have questions. Yeah. I think it's certainly certainly one of the things

you touched on with the potential for a morning water, right? And that recipe for a morning water is probably more lengthy than most people's lunches. And I think that the overwhelm that comes with that, you are right, you need to pick apart the elements that you need. But to have a heuristic for prioritizing, you've given it. It's what are the things that you do the most? What are the things that you, no, no, no, like as whoever it is, it's listening.

What are the things that that person does the most? These are the areas in which any small increases will compound most effectively over time. Yeah. So we research like what is the 20% out of all the material out there that has any likelihood of doing something and we handed over to the readers. Now if you did everything that we have for example in the sleep optimization chapter, you would be preparing for sleep all day long. Yeah, you would. You would be preparing to sleep since you woke up.

So it's your task then to figure out like out of that material, what resonates with you, what works for you, what is the 20% of the recommendations that, you know, you could fit into your daily schedule. And we guarantee that most of those are research that they will definitely statistically, perhaps improve your sleep, but you can't know really until you try yourself. So that's the value of patient zero, you know, being N is one, being the one who is being the guinea pig for all these self experiments. So when you read stuff online or you hear experts, you know, do your own research,

try those things on yourself. Be it well informed, be guided by the best experts, but in the end, you don't know until you try yourself. I totally get it, man. Timo, it's been fantastic to speak to you, byhackingbook.com and where can everyone find you if they need to get you online? So I mean you can you should definitely come to Biahakir Summit So Biahakir Summit takes place first and second of November in Helsinki, Finland. It's our five-year anniversary And there is a lot of people more intelligent than me in Biahakir who are coming along like We over half of the people coming along are from other countries than the Nordic countries and we get often over 30 different nationalities.

But if you want to follow me online, I mean, just look for biohacking book on Instagram. I also have a personal account, T-A-R-1-N-A, like Tarina, my first name, Timo, Arina, Tarina. If he, Tarina actually means story. So I'm a storyteller. Oh, yes. You are a storyteller indeed. You're a storyteller of making people's lives a little bit less shit than they are already and making it, making everyone a little bit healthier.

Man, Timo, it's been awesome today. Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. My pleasure. Have a healthy rest of the day and rest of your life. you