Teemu Arina discusses the dark side of biohacking and personal development, including the concept of the "wounded healer” in the health space, the dangers inherent in developing online personas, how the mask can start to dominate one's life, and how trauma is often the root cause of never-ending personality development. He emphasizes the importance of becoming aware of one's own story and developing mental, social, and spiritual resilience. Arina also voices concerns about becoming addicted to achievements and pleasing others, noting how it creates a false sense of self. Ultimately, he encourages individuals to wake up to who they really are.

The presentation was recorded at the Health Optimisation Summit 2023 in London, UK.

Teemu Arina has a professional career of two decades as a professional biohacker, author, and speaker. Mr. Arina is one of the forefront figures of the biohacking movement. He is the co-author of the bestselling Biohacker’s Handbook series, curator of Biohacker Summit, host of the Biohacker’s Podcast, and co-founder of the Biohacker Center.

Adam Parker is a detox specialist, podcaster, and speaker. He is also a certified Primal Health Coach and the host of the Ideal Day Podcast. Adam joins Teemu to discuss the content of his presentation.

Check https://biohackersummit.com for upcoming events & tickets!

Check https://biohackersummit.com/xlondon for the event on September 1, 2023!

Devices, supplements, guides, books & quality online courses for supporting your health & performance: https://biohackercenter.com

Key moments and takeaways:

0:00:00 Introduction by Teemu Arina

0:02:51 The Dark Side of Health and Wellness Conferences

0:12:27 Biohacking for Healthspan Optimization

0:22:43 Models of Self and Others

0:33:30 The Importance of Resilience in Different Aspects of Life

0:34:06 Introduction by Adam Parker

0:38:36 Wounded Healers and the Search for Perfection

0:42:11 Recognizing Shadows and Disconnect in the Health Space

0:45:18 Biohacking and Lack of Depth

0:54:03 Perfecting oneself for personal gain vs. making a meaningful impact

0:57:03 Exploring consciousness through psychedelics and alternative techniques

1:04:28 Embracing Imperfection and Connecting with Humility

1:13:14 The Dark Side of Biohacking and Inner Work

1:19:14 Today's Malformed Leaders and the Deeper Question

1:22:24 Biohacker Summit Events and Facilitating Conversations

1:25:38 Experiencing Nature with actual Foragers

Music.

This is Teemu Arina, and today's discussion is about the dark side of biohacking and personal development.

In the health and wellness space, we often focus on the positive, which is how to optimize

your health and well-being, how to kick ass, how to perform better, and how to live as long as possible.

Now, often this can come with a cost, or there has been issues that led to health problems

in the first place that one is trying to resolve with health optimization and pie hacking.

Now, that shadow aspect is what interests me a lot. Last year at the Packers Summit in Amsterdam,

the topic was hack the ego, and I opened up on this very topic, and it proved to be very popular.

And I noticed after my talk, which also focused on the darker sides of the psyche,

people were very heart-centered and less ego-intentional also,

considering the topic of the conference.

Now, I was invited to speak about this topic in different podcasts and also different events.

I spoke at FlowFest in Germany and Health Optimization Summit in UK,

as well as in Mindvalley in Estonia.

And the following is my presentation on this topic at the Health Optimization Summit.

And after that, I'm having a conversation with Adam, who invited me to discuss this

topic in his podcast.

He was in the audience and heard all the talk.

He is someone who has a very typical story like many of us with health problems, depression,

anxiety and finding biohacking to heal himself.

Nowadays he is a detoxification expert, biohacker and coach. Anyway, I hope that

the following presentation and the conversation will be eye-opening and beneficial to you in your pursuit for better performance, health and well-being.

Because in the end I believe that addressing the suppressed, darker, deeper

shadow aspects of yourself and why you do what you do, you might actually elevate yourself to

the next level to achieve the things that you actually try to do with all of these things.

By recognizing what's going on. There's a saying that one doesn't become enlightened

by imagining being so polite, but by making the darkness or the shadow seen or visible.

And that's exactly the aim of this podcast.

Music.

I've been going into health and wellness conferences for quite some time, last

decade at least, and it's all about best practices.

It's all about the icons, optimizing yourself, taking things to the next level, better, faster, stronger, being superhuman, all that.

We gather to celebrate this kind of stuff. But I want to talk about the dark side, the other side of things, because.

There's a good reason why you are in this room and there's a good reason why

there's certain characters or caricatures on stage. I call them circus animals. I'm one of them. And I'm happy to share with you how those circus

animals come to be. Because we are not human beings, we are human becomeings.

And in a sense, have you ever asked yourself how you became? And in a way,

when you think about biohacking, optimizing yourself, optimizing the environment inside and outside of you. We're kind of on this personal evolutionary path.

It's about the hero's journey, right? You meet challenges, life is difficult, challenging,

you get health issues, you have brain fog, you don't sleep sometimes well, you don't get things

done, you have depression, physical symptoms. But I'm a stoic philosopher myself in my life.

You can be at the peak of your world leader, CEO, or you can be someone who

has nothing and both of them are struggling.

Both of them have limitations, but both of them have a choice to change something every single moment, including what leg they used to stand up in the

morning, if they're going to get grounded or not, if they get morning sunlight or not.

The most common question I get is daily routines. What is your morning routine?

What is your evening routine?

We learn by imitation. As children, we imitate, we are mirror cells, we copy each other.

And through copying others, we become, in a sense, we copy mastery.

That's why we read personal development books and we go to conferences to learn

from personal development gurus who made it because we also want to make it.

Because of our mirror selves, we have empathy. We can relate, we can recognize something.

And if someone has gone through your struggles, had the gut issues, brain fog,

all these things, and overcome those challenges, to master those challenges, we want to learn from

them. We want what they have. And in the process of wanting what they have, we also become.

Personally, I put most of my life aside and focused on the hustle, focused on the work.

So I became a startup entrepreneur when I was 16. I was teaching in high school when I was 17.

I was preparing university students when I was 18.

I became a professional speaker when I was 19.

In my 20s, people called me a guru.

I know now that you shouldn't trust gurus. I'm not separate from it.

My need to succeed and get things done led me in a pretty dark alley in terms of the workload.

I give one presentation, I got invited to do two.

I get one email, then suddenly I get a hundred emails and people want me to all kinds of things.

And I have the problem of saying no.

And what happened, I started getting stress symptoms. I guess it's like in your 20s, you get away with it, unhealthy lifestyle.

But once you turn 30, that's when the system starts to break down.

So when I turned 30, I noticed some pain and it went away when I ate something, so I didn't

think about it much. I had a little bit low level of energy left.

And after a while, the pain didn't go away.

And then I did what most people would do. I went to a doctor and I got prescribed proton pump inhibitors that lower stomach acid levels.

I had an ulcer, a wound in the stomach.

Not from HP lorry, but from stress. Not sleeping enough, working too much.

And I got some medication and the medication took the pain away.

I was able to function so I continued hustling and after a couple of months the pain came back.

Once the medication ran out I went to the doctor and I prescribed more of the same medication.

And the doctor told me that some people they just have to be on this kind of medication

for the rest of their lives.

I didn't want that.

So what I did, I went to do my own research. I went to PubMed, because I don't trust gurus.

And neither should you. You can learn from gurus, but you have to integrate your own perspective,

become one yourself in a way. It's just a mirror. These gurus are just mirrors for you.

I went to, because I don't trust gurus, I went to the medical literature.

I went deep into it, gathering PubMed articles, first about inflammatory gut issues, ulcers,

proton pump inhibitors, anti-inflammatory diets, all kinds of things.

And my gut healing protocol, my last resort, my reach for health, was a holistic approach.

My thesis was that the disease was a result of an imbalance, an inflammatory disease,

So my body was not able to heal itself.

And the idea was that if I restored the balance, the body would be able to heal itself.

So I would eliminate foods that would cause inflammation. I would add foods that would lower inflammation.

I would correct nutrient deficiencies. I would sleep. I would meditate.

I would do breath work.

I would make sure I'm hydrated, sleep enough.

And if it was exercise, not to stress myself too much, but just to take good care of myself.

So this was what do I have to lose kind of thing. Let's try this out.

This was the executive summary and then there was like hundreds and hundreds of research articles.

And because I'm being a computer programmer since I was 13, I wanted to understand how

this computer works. How does this biological computer work?

What are the inputs? What are the processes? What are the outputs?

Because you're a cybernetic system in a sense.

I wanted to see if I do something, does it really result in changes?

Figuring out what would be the 20% that would result in 80% of improvement. Peter Drucker.

Was a knowledge management theorist.

Leadership expert, and he coined the term knowledge worker and knowledge management.

He said that what gets measured gets managed. So I tried to figure out how do I get the data.

That's what I did. I started optimizing myself, and after three months, the pain was gone.

What happened next? I noticed that my cognitive performance was better than it was before I got

sick. I noticed that I learned the hard way the gut-brain axis. When I fixed my gut, my brain

turned on. I had all kinds of gut issues. I thought they are just part of me all my life.

There was also other things that I just thought are part of me. For example, in summer usually I

have pollen allergy and suddenly the foreign protein fragments didn't trigger my immune system

to have an allergic reaction. Now I know it's because of an epigenetic change. I had lowered

the stimulation of my immune system and my system was no longer overreacting to what's going on.

So I changed the environment around myself and inside of me, and the relationship changed.

Now, after a decade of biohacking and health optimization, I've been able to reduce my heart

disease risk, my diabetes risk. In terms of genetics, I have higher risk for kidney problems.

I've been able to improve my kidney function. And in terms of hormones, when I was 30,

my average testosterone levels, although they were within reference range, it was more like

an average testosterone level of a 45-year-old man. And now, at the age of 41, we can talk about

more of an average testosterone level of a 25-year-old. This is without drugs,

without hormonal replacement, without any of that stuff. Its lifestyle changes,

its systematic health optimization. So that's quantified self-knowledge through numbers,

which has become easier than ever to take data and use that data then to optimize and figure out like

what is the 20% that will result in 80% of improvement.

We have become not just blood donors, but data donors.

For systems that analyze the data and connect that to people like you so that you can be provided

actionable knowledge. And I believe what AI, big data and machine learning and large language

models potentially can have a conversation on a daily basis about your health. What should I eat?

What should I order? When should I go to sleep? What is a good time to wake up? Like we could

potentially use this data to leverage in our future in a sense. But we're not just blood

donors. Maybe we need a blood boy. Because people like Brian Johnson, the strategy of our times is

that we work our asses off to gather all that wealth. And then when we lose our health, we

spend all that fortune, all that wealth to get back our health. And this is precisely what he's

doing. I see the enthusiasm. He's on a honeymoon now with biohacking. He's going extreme. Glad boy.

I think he's gonna settle a little bit. Give him 10 years. He's a bit crazy. But I was also crazy.

I saw the craziness. I see the craziness. Many of you see the craziness. Health is to be in balance,

and imbalance leads to disease. This is the biggest lesson for me. Biohacking in the end is

not better, faster, stronger. It's about health span optimization. 27% of world population lives

with one or more chronic disease. If you live more than 65 years old, 64% of population have

two or more chronic conditions. Behind that, you have chronic low-level inflammation, chronic

oxidative stress, chronic insulin resistance. All of those I had when I had my ulcer.

Now, when you deal with those things, you reduce risk of all the degenerative diseases that are

more likely to kill you than a virus. Now biohacking is not better, faster,

stronger. It's not sleeping less. It's not kicking ass, being superhuman. I know it's a very American

way of thinking. You take a pill and you're a freaking superhuman. But the European approach.

Is much more about balance and resilience and homeostasis and connecting to yourself and to

to the environment and to the natural world, to each other,

because we crave that connection.

We crave that balance.

It's not about overstimulating your nervous system because you will pay for it in one way or another.

Now, what is optimal health and performance? Maybe it is about optimizing your environment,

inside and outside of you.

Maybe it's about your body, but I think it's also about your mind,

your values, your virtues, or your principles.

You become the best version of yourself, for what reason? To be a narcissistic asshole?

Self-centered, or to make an impact in the world? Do you perfect yourself?

To be able to sip in meditation what was the original idea of yoga? Or do you perfect your

body to look good in front of a mirror and the mirror now is social media? Arguably,

last 10 years I've been quite successful doing biohacking, winning all kinds of awards and

becoming pretty successful, all that. But right there is a circus animal 10 years ago, 2013,

with headgear. And I know what media does. They see this image, it's the Time Magazine of Finland,

they see this guy and they're like, I want to make an article about this guy. So they come over and

they want me to put all kinds of devices on, all kinds of, let's put the craziest gadgets on. Put.

The blue light blocking glasses on. And it becomes almost like a gang sign to have blue light blocking

glasses. In archaic societies, you had like tattoos of your family history on your skin,

yeah I'm part of this tribe. Blue light blocking glasses, yeah. Red light there.

Okay, I played along. Hundreds of media, television, newspapers, all kinds of stuff.

And people want to see the circus animal. Same with Brian Johnson. Everyone wants to see his

blood boy and his crazy routines and his nutty pudding and super veggie. I wrote about this

stuff in the Biohacker's Handbook together with my colleagues about optimizing yourself. You can

can learn more about it. But what I want to focus on is the psychology of this. Have you ever

considered how you became who you are? What I was, and what most of these people here in the room and

on stage are, they're wounded healers. They thought they are immortal, living their lives,

living their dreams, and then burning out, like Icarus going too close to the sun, burning their

wings, getting healthy issues, like immortal Chiron, who got wounded,

then became mortal, not immortal, and then dedicated the rest of his life for healing others.

Carl Jung said that a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists

of the doctor examining himself. It is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal.

This and nothing else is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician.

Think about your health influencers. Do they have a story?

Story. I was inflamed, brain fogged, overwaked, doctor told me I'm gonna die, half of my body

was not functioning, I was at risk of removing organs and whatnot. But then I spent $200,000

and bought a non-superhuman. If you don't have a story, you make one up. And many of

them do. 74% of therapists have experienced a wounding experience leading to a career

choice. So the people who you go to with your psychological problems, you go to a shrink,

they are not gay psychos themselves. They are fixing their own problem. That's why they

got interested in psychology. That's why they got interested in trauma and healing from

trauma and now they dedicate the rest of their lives as wounded healers to heal others. Think.

About the shamans and all that, all kinds of characters out there. Social technology

on social media is like a mirror.

We use social media as a type of a mirror. We judge each other's worth, our values and behavior

through acknowledging. And of course, everyone knows that what's on someone's Instagram profile

is not the real person. It's all fabricated. It's all made up because you are doing exactly the

same. You're making shit up. I remember being in the home of one of the top freaking biohackers

in Finland, a couple of weeks living in his home, and he couldn't sleep. So he didn't sleep all

night. So at 5 a.m. he woke up, basically didn't sleep at all, went to make coffee and make content

like, yeah, let's wake up at 5 a.m. and make some upgraded bulletproof coffee. And then he would.

Lie as a zombie on the sofa. And then he's, okay, let's do some more social media content. So he

would take a book out of the bookshelf, an exercise book, open some random page, take a photo and post

on social media. Yeah, I want to read one book every day. Everyone should read one book per day.

Takes the photo, close the book, puts it back into the bookshelf, goes to the fridge, takes a piece

of bread. This guy burned out. He couldn't be that character anymore. He went to Ayahuasca ceremony

trying to heal himself. The shamans ended up tying him up in a tree because he became aggressive.

He lost his memory, he didn't know where he is. Eventually he told everyone what happened.

And actually that brought in decency and even more respect and trust from his following.

Not being superhuman but showing vulnerability. He couldn't be that super kicking ass every second.

Do you have anyone who comes to your mind in terms of leaders in the biohacking movement who

don't seem to be healthy anymore. And we wish that person comes out and tells us, I fucked up.

But they still try to hang on to that role they built. You know why we hang on to the role?

We become the avatars we create. When you fuel that machinery online, you create that persona, that mask online.

You feed that machinery. The people seeing you are expecting you to be in a certain way.

It's like a fire in the madhouse to come to a BiHacking conference.

Is a term from Sanskrit that means descendant from God.

So we create like a God version of ourselves online and then our audience expects us to be in a certain way and we start to build this disconnect of

who we truly are and what our audience expects us to be.

And for some people like some YouTubers, some OnlyFans models, some biohackers, wellness gurus, they just end up in deep depression because

they can't be that character anymore. We all have this narrative identity. What is a narrative

identity? It's the internalized evolving story of the self that you construct, you make it up,

you made up your story, you selected from your history who you are, you choose how you tell

your story. It's very interesting when I ask people like, okay, tell me your story. Some

Some people tell their career, they basically tell their achievements.

Some people tell the labels they got, what university they graduated, what their position as a CEO.

Some people tell the struggles they went through.

I was born without nothing, my parents had nothing and then I'm a self-made man nowadays.

It's very interesting how people tell the story of who they are.

And this is an idealized version of you.

It's like your CV for a potential employer. You tell a best version of the story, right?

Your achievements, you hide the darkness, you hide the shadow.

You don't want to tell your weaknesses and your losses and your failures.

And the role of an employer is then to figure out what are you lying?

What is the truth here?

But in the end, through this feedback loop with the environment, with technology, through

other people, through potential employers, workplaces, all that, the masks that we

wear, we are not different from AI.

We are being trained. You're training me by laughing at my jokes.

We all have these masks and personas. Carl Jung spoke about it, that you have to have a dark side to be whole.

And that's the ego shadow work stuff. It's becoming a cliche, but it's super important to go to the subconscious,

the unconscious and understand why you are doing what you do.

And what are you hiding? Think about your internal and external locus of control.

Do you believe that the things in your life are the result of your environment or are they a

result of your own initiative? So do you believe that you are a result of your education, the work

that you did, the country you were born in, the ethnicity you are in, or are you the result,

are you a self-made man in a sense, that you have the power to change things, you can manifest?

It turns out that this mirrors your parents. If your parents were very entrepreneurial.

Model, more likely is that you believe that you can change the world.

If you're born in an environment which was all about education and status and all that,

it's more likely that you will believe that's also the key thing.

And through this parenthood or parental relationships, we develop different mechanisms through we relate with others.

For example, if your model of the self is good and your model of others is also positive,

you're more likely to be a secure person. You can set your boundaries. You're not afraid to

upset someone, but you're not afraid to apologize either of your behavior.

If your model of others is low, your model of yourself is low. You're more likely to be avoidant.

If your model of others is positive, but your model of self is a bit insecure, you're more

likely to be anxious, fearful.

And this all fear leads to people pushing themselves to achieve greater and greater

things as a result of that insecurity.

They fear failure. They actually need to beat everyone else.

They need to achieve more than others.

And when they achieve something, they feel empty. So they need to top their own achievements also, they're never happy.

And there's a certain type of person who ends up in this kind of place.

And we see them in our world leaders, in the leaders of our companies. I, Elon Musk.

In this conference, he was asked, how can I be like Elon Musk?

A child asked, how can I be like Elon Musk?

When Elon Musk answers, I think it sounds better than it is.

I don't think you want to be like me. And actually when you go into the interviews of his history, he would say, I didn't have

a happy child.

Elon Musk's father had a child with his own stepdaughter.

Elon Musk has 10 children, how many marriages, broken marriages, same with his father.

How many companies? Never happy.

And when he, we think of him as the founder of Tesla, but he's not the founder of Tesla.

Tesla was founded by someone else.

He invested money in it, like 3 million. Then there was a news article about the company and it didn't mention Elon.

And Elon was furious. He contacted the CEO and told that issue correction immediate.

And what I want you to do is to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

And the next year he started the campaign to get the CEO and the original founders voted

off the island and he succeeded.

And he installed himself in the place of those people.

And nowadays he is telling the story how he's the only guy who can build this.

We build all kinds of neurotic coping mechanisms and behaviors through which we relate with others.

Do you have excessive desire to be liked?

Do you seek approval, compliance, are you clingy?

Or do you have more likely feelings of hostility from others?

Do you seek power and control and exploit others?

Or do you feel isolated and alone, detached? Are you a perfectionist who's never happy?

You have some inner coldness.

So we have all kinds of coping mechanisms. Coping mechanisms are the strategies people often use in the face of stress and or trauma

and help that help them to manage their painful emotions in difficult situations.

The horrible thing about psychological trauma is that physical trauma you get hit once,

but with the psychological trauma you experience the same thing thousands and thousands of,

times, often subconsciously, you just repeat the whole thing.

So then you get things like hypochondriasis, illness anxiety disorder, worrying excessively

that you are or may become seriously ill.

We are in a biochem conference. I think there is a lot of hypochondriatics here.

Then there is orthorexia nervosa, unhealthy obsession with optimal nutrition.

You become preoccupied with the perceived healthfulness of food that it adversely affects

your health and your daily activities.

So you start to control the food that you take in. even the idea of having gluten in the food will immediately increase inflammation,

even though you didn't eat it.

Separation individuation. This is what happens when a child grows up.

You are in a symbiotic relationship with your caretakers. And then in that time, mother or father is the most beautiful,

amazing thing ever, or you want to be exactly like that.

But when you get into your teen years, there's this process of separation,

individuation, separating from your caretakers, becoming an individual.

You start to go against the authority.

Suddenly, things that mother and father do are no longer interesting.

You want to do the opposite.

And this process is actually very important. If it doesn't happen, if the child doesn't have the

opportunity to explore the boundaries and try to build their own identity and interests,

where there's a strong mother or father not allowing that to happen, often the end result,

or there is neglect, there is not enough love, not enough caretaking, both of them can lead to.

Cluster B personality disorders characterized by dramatic over-emotional, unpredictable thinking

and behavior, including antisocial, borderline histrionic and narcissistic personality behaviors.

And these people, they feed on attention. They feed on validation. They need narcissistic supply.

The whole idea here is that the person there is a cult leader, and you're the worshiper.

And they idealize you in the beginning. You're the best thing ever, because they relive this

thing. They relive you. Suddenly, they take you in as their parent or caretaker. They're

in symbiotic relations, suddenly everything you do is the most perfect, amazing thing ever.

But they need to experience the separation individuation, so they go through it again

in their adulthood. So they start to devalue you suddenly. And you're confused, I was the

best thing ever, now I'm no longer. And then they discard you because they need to relive,

but they can't. So they find another partner, another business partner, and they do it again

and again, they idealize the caretaker and then they discard them. Cerebral narcissists are in

love with their own thoughts. Somatic narcissists are in love with their bodies. They get sexual

arousal looking themselves in the mirror. Nice biceps after the workout. Damn, I'm smart.

There's this grandiosity, but it can also be hidden. It can be vulnerable narcissism.

They actually feed on other people's attention to them by acting like, oh, I'm so broken,

Okay, now I feel better. Thank you.

Then you have this spiritual narcissist like Bikram Yoga guy raping his students while the

family is sleeping upstairs in his hall. Yeah, we have penis-worshipping temples built for saints

that would urinate on holy signs and where women would come from long distances to be served holy

seeds where spiritual bypassing, tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep

and avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental

tasks. Anyone heard about psychedelics being called sacraments or medicine? People going

into having medicine only thinking it's good? Spiritual bypassing right there. I introduce

your new term, I coin a new term, biohacking bypass. Masking insecurities with the need to

become superhuman by neurotically controlling the environment inside and outside of you,

in order to avoid resolving deep psychological trauma that led to the health issues in the

first place. So these people who become sick, what was first was psychology that led them there

often, very often, not always, but very often. Then they resolve that, but they don't resolve

the underlying thing that led to that neurotic control of something in the first place.

We are led by the least among us, the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.

We are led by the least among us and if we do not fight back against these dehumanizing

values that are handed down as control icons, we are doomed.

This is a good place in a sense, this whole biohacking conference, compared to what's out

there as health conference. Had anyone been to like a health, med care conference?

It's horrible. Look at the food they serve.

If you're worried that you're a psychopathic narcissist, go to darkfactor.org, do a test.

It will look at egoism, greed, machiavellism, moral disengagement, narcissism, psychological

entitlement, psychopathic sadist-ness, spitefulness.

And all of us have some spectrum of this. No one is perfect.

I was worried I would be a narcissistic psychopath, but I'm on the lower spectrum.

But if I was a psychopath, of course I would lie to you.

It turns out that narcissism, Machiavellian psychopathy is connected to drug abuse, to.

High addictive behaviors like cocaine use and, yeah, just abuse.

Unresolved adverse childhood experiences lead to disrupted neurodevelopment, social, emotional

and cognitive impairment, adoption of health risk behaviors, disease, disability and social,

inabilities and early death. I recommend you all to get a therapist.

Being traumatized is not just an issue of being stuck in the past, it's just as much of a problem

of not being fully alive in the present. There's two inner dialogues you have to go through on

your way of healing. The first dialogue is why do you need to become someone? Why do you need

to be a superhuman? And the second question is why do you think you're less? Why do you think,

other people matter more than you? Or that you're not happy right now, that you need to achieve

something. Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.

If you want to be Prometheus, fit for carrying the fire of humanity, a fully integrated wounded

healer, you have to go into the real stuff, what took you here in the first place. And that's what

kind of evolution is all about. Evolution as a human, from learning all kinds of things as we

were a child, then to becoming, maybe reaching towards enlightenment. But in the end, it's

actually returned to the beginning. We're writing a new book called The Resilient Being, and.

There's a lot of that physical resilience, yes, but there's a lot of mental and social resilience

and spiritual resilience in this book that I think is even more important. And I want to say

the things that no one else, everyone sees it, but no one else, everyone is afraid in a sense to

say aloud. It's obvious once you look at it, but like everyone is just looking at the emperor,

even though emperor has no clothes, everyone is afraid to tell the emperor has no clothes.

That's what this is all about.

Teemu Arina, welcome back to the show. Thank you.

So Teemu, we recently caught up at the Health Optimization Summit and really loved your talk.

And it really resonated with me because I think in the health space that we're all in,

there's a lot of different brands and avatars and this individual is the healthiest ever.

And I think a lot of people coming into the health space looking for an answer can really.

Fall into certain ideologies, right? And I love that you are calling out, it's not all sunshine

and rainbows in this space. And your talk was the dark side of biohacking. So I'm really curious

to jump into that today and delve what that talk was about and what the main points are.

So I'll hand it to you. The dark side of biohacking, what is that term about when

you were writing the talk? You mentioned the term avatar. So avatar is a Sanskrit word.

It means descendant from God. So created man in his own image and everyone who is online

creates God in their own image. So you basically create a version of you online that is perfect,

which is having all these experiences in the health space.

It means it's living this healthy lifestyle. It's always eating well.

It's always exercising, always has perfect circadian rhythm.

Everything is perfect and optimized. That's the health optimization thing, right?

That's the biohacking approach that you biohack everything in your life, like

from the morning, when you wake up until the evening, when you go to sleep.

And when we seek inspiration, we seek someone as a guide. We seek someone who already made it in our eye, in our image, in our minds.

Like that person is the embodiment of what I want. That person is eating perfectly, is doing this and

that and has vast knowledge how to do it. So we seek.

Coaches and guides and inspiration and the whole personal development space.

Not just parking and health optimization, but the whole personal mastery, growth.

Mindset, wealth, whatever. The whole space is full of these kind of characters who.

Are portraying this perfection that you want. So most of the customers have actually innate lack.

They feel they don't have it. So you could see that these experts are basically exploiting even

the insecurities that people have. But what is interesting about it is that they also have the

insecurities themselves. So they don't feel enough, they don't feel they are living their perfect life,

but there's always some room for improvement. And this is the reason why they are the experts

in that space. There's the term wounded healer, which Carl Jung spoke a lot about.

If you trace back the history of psychoanalysis to Freud, etc., there is so much about the shadow

aspects of our psyches. And the most extreme characters we find online are often the most

insecure. Because someone who is secure and feels good about themselves, they

don't need to market it to anyone. They don't need to boast on the

internet about that. They don't need to turn that into a career, if that makes

sense. So they don't need external validation for their perfection. Now the.

Wounded healer story also is that someone who, let's say, like if you look at many of these health influencers, they have some kind of wounding story. They were overweight,

they were inflamed, they had multiple diagnoses, disease, maybe the doctor was telling them you're

going to die. And then they have this miracle story of turning all of that around. So through

personal struggles, just like in the hero's journey, these people embark on a journey to

to heal themselves, and then they made it.

And this is the story that most of these people share and start with.

And even if you think about it, if someone in this health and wellness space doesn't have that story, it's not as interesting.

You want someone who was completely broken and fixed themselves, because We have mirror cells and we want to associate and relate to people.

So someone who has your story, you're more likely to resonate with.

If you are broken and you see someone who was broken and they fixed themselves,

now I want that, I want to fix this problem as well.

And in the process of becoming, in the process of fixing your issues, these.

People adopt a new identity, not the identity of the broken person, but the

identity of the healed, perfect version of themselves. So let's say it was health

optimization, biohacking, certain diet, any diet, pick it, pick whatever diet, vegan

diet, ketogenic diet, one meal a day, maybe you did fasting, intermittent fasting.

Very easily you build an emotional connection to that story and that approach and you

become fundamentalist to a certain sense that this is the only way to fix yourself. Like

the vegan diet is the perfect, the carnivore is the perfect, the paleo diet is the perfect diet.

And you have to pick any diet and you find the proof, you find the scientific proof, you find

the evidence that this is the perfect thing to do. And then your diet, because you identify with it,

is the perfect one and every other diet is wrong. And so you get all these fights between vegans and

carnivores and people and all that.

And so what I want to say about that, just to summarize, these people, they,

get this emotional connection to this new story and they start to share that

because they genuinely feel this important to share.

They got help out of it, so they want to share.

So then their audience starts to follow them for that.

And these people, they build internal pressure to meet the demands.

So you need to be what your audience expects you to be, the perfect keto person, the perfect vegan person, whatever.

And the more you share, the more extreme you become, the more of a caricature,

the more of an animal in a cage you become, the more,

people will gravitate towards you because it's easy to understand. Your identity is easy to

understand. So this person is all about keto. It's Keto Mike or it's Keto Mary. Mary is all

about keto. If you want to learn about keto, you follow Keto Mary. So Mary gets hundreds of

thousands or millions of followers. And because she has all these validations, she believes,

she's onto something, that this is the truth. I'm on a euphoric state. I'm now working my

dreams, I found the formula. But in the end, you are just in an echo chamber. You're in an echo

chamber of people who share that bias, share that belief system, and who resonate with your wounds.

And in the end, it's okay, it's fine. But what I figured out when I was looking into the psychology

of this, is that it's just another form of bypassing. You had certain problems in your

life that led to the health problems in the first place. Let's say you were a perfectionist, maybe

you had insecurities, you didn't feel good enough. You worked hard and then your body broke down,

and now you went through this healing journey and this new found love becomes your identity.

So one control mechanism that led to the health problems in the first place gets replaced by

another control mechanism, which is now health optimization or biohacking.

And that becomes an identity.

And it's an addiction, just like workaholism is an addiction, this eternal need for validation or appreciation.

And it's okay. I mean, we're all wounded. We all have our problems.

My whole point of my lecture and why I tell this to people is that under all.

This love and light and gratitude and success and all of that, there's a shadow that is fueling,

what you're doing. And addressing that and recognizing it might be the best biohack you

can do. That recognition of your wounds, one way to think about it is someone who made it.

You already made it. You don't need to. You don't need any validation anymore. You don't need anyone

to tell you. You don't need to be a little bit more perfect.

You're fine as you are. And this realization might be very hard. And there's this term

imposter syndrome, which basically is all about this. It's like you're an imposter in a sense.

You try to be something else than you are, and you don't feel enough even when you achieve it.

So there's this eternal lack, in a sense, and not realizing that, dude, you made it. You don't need

to do anymore. And because you have this external pressure from your audience, it keeps you going.

And eventually there is a disconnect between who you really are and the avatar you built.

So you now created this character, this imaginary being online, this facade.

And maybe you don't like Kido anymore, or maybe you want to do something else. Maybe

you're thinking evolved, maybe you already got most out of this lifestyle, but you're stuck now

because you have this whole audience following you. And I've seen many people in the health and

wellness space going through cycles where their public image is different from who they actually

are. So they are promoting something that they are not even doing themselves every day, but they

would say, I do this every day. So they have a version in their minds about this perfection,

but they can't even eat a perfect version. And so there's this disconnect and that can lead to

depression. So there's a lot of influencers online, YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagrammers, and so on.

Pick any space, health, wellness, beauty, wealth. We all have ups and downs in our lives. We have

different cycles. And if you can't keep up with that, think of even, let's say a popular musician.

And with all the popularity comes pressure to be like, in a certain way,

if you're Lady Gaga, if you're Michael Jackson, whatever, and many of them are struggling, the more they have this.

External people looking at them, like the more they feel pressured to be something else than

what they genuinely are. And it's partly your own creation. You got yourself into trouble in

the first place in a sense. And so I just want to speak about this topic and psychology and

spiritual and psychological growth of addressing these aspects. And it's also one of the topics

of our upcoming book, The Resilient Being, which looks at not just the physical resilience, but

but the psychological, spiritual, social resilience as well.

And it dives into these types of topics.

So that's a little summary or segue into the dark side of biohacking.

And having said that, I would say that my message is not negative.

I'm not saying that all of these people are imposters and some narcissistic facades,

that you shouldn't follow them.

They have a lot of important things to share that are rooted in science and all that.

But what I want to highlight is, I guess, like kind of how surface a lot of this is,

and there is not enough depth to a certain extent and what is fueling that in terms of psychology.

Amazing. I think that's a great summary, Timo, of your talk and, wow, where do I start?

So I think for me, it's really, it's down to doing the inner work really, because if,

you'd done that inner work initially, you wouldn't have got into the situation where

you had to heal and recover.

And you said, that's the biggest biohack you can do is go within and do the inner

work and work out who you are and what resonates with you and what brings you

satisfaction, not what pleases the masses, but that's the hard stuff, right?

It's easy to buy a supplement and to do this program and to buy this latest light.

It's all exciting stuff, right? And again, I think a lot of it is why do people land in these positions?

A lot of it is this cultural conditioning.

And we're not told to shine the lens on ourselves and do that kind of inner work, that inner

healing. That's not taught in culture.

It's all external. Buy this, buy that, be respected by your group.

And yeah, you can see how these kind of avatars become created on the influencer sides.

And obviously you've been in this game a long time. I've seen many influencers who start off with a message and they realize that message is

actually making them sick.

This type of diet. You see it with vegans all the time. Obviously, that's not my space

at all, but you see it a lot of them and they then had to stop pivoting to be like, occasionally

I eat some eggs. But you see a lot of people in the carnivore space, diet's not working

for them. Then they have to slowly start to pivot and kind of tiptoe because again, they,

could just come out and say, look, I got it wrong. I now think this. I'm not a messiah,

they just have to keep this kind of identity, this avatar, and how can I keep it stable

and slowly pivot across so I don't lose...

I see that all the time.

Exactly. It's in every camp and the vegans, obviously, they might be like, hey, this is the healthiest thing ever.

And then they have gut issues and all of that, and they're ignoring it.

Or you have a carnivore who is the best thing ever and plants are just killing you.

And they have all kinds of things like constipation and changes in gut microbiome that are not

unnecessarily beneficial because they're not getting fiber or phytonutrients or

reducing inflammation as well. Like everyone on these diets feels better in the beginning,

like the first couple of years you feel amazing because it's most likely the opposite of a pretty

unhealthy starting point. So you were on oxidized fats, you were doing fast foods,

processed foods, all of that. And any kind of diet that we're talking about here is often going into

the quality of the ingredients and like really caring what you put into your mouth.

And you feel amazing in the beginning. So vegans feel great for the first couple of years, then they start to have depression

and neurological problems and all of that, because they don't necessarily get enough B vitamins.

Or maybe they have issues with connective tissue or bone density or whatever, because

they're not getting enough amino acids in a perfect balance.

Every single thing has like some kind of blind spot.

So there is no single silver bullet. If there was like supplement industry would be super easy.

We just make one perfect supplement. Everyone takes it and everyone feels great.

It's a personalized journey as well. That's what how biohacking is.

I would say a more intelligent approach because you're looking at data and you're

like figuring out, okay, what actually my body runs well on and it's removing some

of the ethical, or I would say also you remove all the bias belief systems from

it a little bit like that.

You make it a little bit more objective what you're doing. And that's great. That's what they do.

But the other thing is that it's very body centric. Many of us like start from the body because we see problems in the body.

So we start fixing it with diet, exercise, controlling our circadian rhythms, whatever.

The hardest part is not the body. it's the mind or the mindset, I would say. It's the addictive behaviors, it's the coping mechanisms.

Hacking those is a completely different thing. I believe that when you do fix your body, Fixing your mind.

Becomes easier to a certain extent, because you are now taking care of this temple.

And there is a lot of studies that show the connection between, let's say, gut dysbiosis

and issues, how those are connected to depression and anxiety. And if you damage your body.

That often leads to a vicious cycle that also damages your brain, blood-brain barrier,

maybe you get atrophy, and all of that. So often these things go hand in hand. Things like

obsessive compulsive disorders, ADHD, manic depressive things. There is often a physiological

component present as well, and you can alleviate a lot of the symptoms by fixing the body first.

So it creates the foundations from which it's easier to fix things. So if you fix your body,

often you fix your hormones, for example. So maybe you don't struggle so much with,

hormonal regulation, so it's a bit easier to start developing and going deeper into your personal

story. And the body and the mind are connected, so obviously if you think about the problems that

are in your body, they're often a consequence of your mind. Maybe those are linked to your.

Repetitive patterns, maybe substance abuse or use, and also behavioral things. So maybe you're

overworking, you're not sleeping enough. There's a lot of things like this that are rooted in

psychology. So it goes hand in hand, so body and the mind, obviously. And for myself, I felt,

once I fixed my physiological state, it became much easier to access more of the things on the

consciousness level. And that's also what has been portrayed for thousands of years in different

traditions. If you take 10 Buddhist meditators or yogis, what do they do through their practice,

is to, what yoga originally also was, it was not an exercise form or sport, it was really to.

Help the body to be able to even sit in meditation for long periods of time.

Why do Shaolin monks practice all these crazy feats is because then they are able to sit long

periods of time in meditation. Why does someone go to a cave and reduce external stimuli to minimum?

Why do you reduce your possessions to bare minimum? It's basically the opposite of the

materialistic world where everything in your life is dominated by stuff. When you strip all of that

stuff into the bare essence, then you actually see yourself. Why do you sit alone in darkness?

Is because then you can't escape.

Yourself. So the vipassana kind of practice, you have to face yourself because you actually are

utterly sitting alone with yourself. You can distract yourself with social media, with

television, with partying, whatever, you are with yourself. So there's a lot of practices that

are deliberately architecting the conditions in which you're able to look at those things

and address them. And often what comes out of there is that whatever the pain you're running

away from, you don't need to be afraid of it, you just go into it and there is absolutely nothing

in the end. It's all your own creation, it's an illusion. So a lot of this spiritual work is like

that. But what I would notice is that there's this consciousness community and all these spiritual

people who are completely ignoring and often neglecting the body. And then there is all these

who seek and body-centered people who are completely neglecting the spiritual work.

So there's this kind of disconnect that people often have, like the spiritual

people are not grounded enough, like physiologically, or you are like physiologically very crowded, but there's like nothing in terms of

your spirit that is interesting.

If you want to integrate a more whole being, like it's, it goes from all angles and I think it's a good starting point to start from the body, but the.

Body can become a narcissistic trip.

So it's like, you are perfecting yourself for what, to get all the validation, to

get followers, you get wealth, you get attention, you get money, you get opportunities.

Are you perfecting yourself for your personal gain, or are you perfecting yourself for something where you can actually make an impact and something

meaningful and beneficial to the world and help rise like the average collective consciousness?

So I think like when you are doing all this parking work.

Like you're trying to be a superhuman. So let's assume you're now a superhuman.

What do you do with your superhuman powers now? You're so much better than everyone else.

What are you going to do with it? So that's the important question, I think.

And yeah, that's what I'm encouraging people to do. Because when I go to Viking conferences,

I see a lot of that beauty and mastery, but I also see a lot of that emptiness and just

narcissistic self-centeredness that you could channel all of that into something great

if you really want to. And it starts from really addressing questions. What are you going to spend

your time on? Are you going to spend your time on in the end, just like this endless pursuit for.

External validation for your greatness, or do you want to do something awesome with that?

So yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah, for sure. And I know you're saying about when you

you sort out the physical element of your being, that opens up a channel to focus on

the spiritual side of things.

I see this all the time, being a detox expert, and this is my own journey as well.

I was never spiritually connected or even thinking about consciousness, but when I cleansed

my body, cleansed my organs, my liver, pulled out heavy metals, parasites, all of a sudden

that opened up and it was a channel and I could start to work on that.

I probably would have worked on it until my vessel was clean.

And I see this with all of my clients. They're just caught up in this kind of just every day's a struggle.

Then they clean the vessel, then it opens up.

So sometimes spirituality, sometimes people have reconnected with gods or whatever that means to

them because the vessel is now clean and they can now, you think about it, we are water,

receiver of energy. Some amazing things happen when you clean the vessel. But I also think it's

sad when you go to these conferences, you meet these individuals and you're like, okay, this

person is going to be like this. And then you meet them and you have a one-on-one, you connect,

you're like, oh no, they're not. That's not how I perceived you to be. But it is an amazing,

they're on a platform and you say there's an opportunity to get to those levels if you so

choose, right? That's a personal choice for everyone. Yeah, nowadays there is a lot of.

Interest in psychedelics and their ability to heal and affect things like depression and

post-traumatic stress and all these mental conditions. So there's a lot of interest and

awareness right now when we're recording this, like people are going to Burning Man, for example.

There's a lot of quite privileged nowadays, I would say, upper and middle class people who can afford going there.

It's a kind of a dystopia or utopia, but it requires a lot of money to do.

Like the tickets are high, you need money to go there and all that.

And then you are supposedly living in this parallel reality for a week and people are getting high on all kinds of things and then they come back to their

lives and it's interesting that people embark on these journeys to discover

themselves, like it could be through burning money, it could be plant medicines, it could be a ceremony work, like sitting in different kinds of

circles.

That's very popular now and has become increasingly so. And our topic in Amsterdam is for the Biohacker Summit is going to be "Expanding

Consciousness".

So that's one aspect, but another aspect is all the biohacking techniques, like doing

meditation or fasting or like dance movement, breathwork.

Humans have used all kinds of techniques to access altered states and push the boundaries

of the body. It could be even through strenuous exercise, sleep deprivation, nutrition, sensory

deprivation. There's so many ways how we try to push the envelope a little bit so that we can see.

What happens. Often it's the struggle. It's often in this imbalance out of which balance can be

found again. If you go into a medicine journey, a pretty drastic change from your default mode

network. So you get a break kind of being you in a sense. And from there they discover something

new. Out of this imbalance comes new balance. And it's not very well known yet if the molecules

themselves are actually the causative agent or is it the experience that they're having that leads

to these changes in, let's say, depression. There are studies on ketamine and psilocybin and

and all of that. Looking into it, there is definitely a physiological component in these.

Compounds like increased neurogenesis and maybe reduces neural inflammation. Maybe there

is like an increased connectivity and connection between nodes in the brain. But there seems

to be also a psychological component that is accessed with higher doses. So they haven't

seen like these drastic improvements in depression, for example, from things like

microdosing, but you need actually a serious dose. And it's not only about the

dose, it's really the experience you're having. And with a therapist or experienced guide, these can be powerful tools. Now, why do I bring up this topic

is that that shows to me like this increased interest in these things, how much people are struggling, they need this. We have certain individuals on the.

Internet that are raving about these things, Joe Rogan or Aubrey Marcus or whatever, going to these kinds of journeys, they definitely made it.

Like Tim Ferriss has been one of the biggest promoters of these things.

Many of these individuals are also leaders in a certain sense in the backing space as well.

So why do the icons of our industry, why do they need most, I would say also

healing in this kind of level and through these kind of techniques is probably that the position

they got themselves into is you have to have a certain urology in a sense. You have to.

Have certain drive. Why do entrepreneurs become serial entrepreneurs is because they're often

driven by lack. They're often driven by, they're fueled by the need. And Tim Ferriss, for example,

he has spoken at length about his depression, anxiety, all of that. So maybe this perfectionist

type that he is and many of us are is like

is linked to his depression in a sense as well. And recently, I was listening to a podcast by

Peter Attia. He's a very famous spiker, especially I would say heart disease, cardiology-related

spiking. And in this podcast, he was speaking about his own struggles with himself, like how

at one point in his life, he realized that he's not a good person and people around him don't have

a lot of good to say about him. And he went through a therapy. It was not some kind of

plant medicine thing, but it was pretty powerful work with these kind of aspects.

And he said on that podcast, he wouldn't even be a guest in the podcast if he had not gone through

it. A lot of these people are struggling. Recently, I listened to Tim Ferriss speaking about

how important it is to live an unoptimized life, because he's the icon of an optimized life. And

And now he is promoting an unoptimized life.

And same thing, speaking about depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts.

It's letting go of his need to control and to be perfect.

That often helps these kinds of individuals who have had this tendency and need to be the ultimate optimal, perfect, whatever.

And so all of us go through cycles. So you can see them going through some kind of cycles.

There is a peak where they are the fully optimized ones and realizing that was not the answer.

And then they find the opposite.

And a lot of things go through this kind of ebb and flow of just like seasons in

your, like your life also goes through the seasons, you're having a child now

that's challenging you in different ways and pushing your boundaries.

So you find realizations will come out of that experience.

It's not the comfort zone from which we discover things.

It's the uncomfortable.

Irritative things in them that help us grow. It's never the easy way, it's the challenges that

really shape us. And I think that's also like how it's all connected to the resilience of our

species. We are pretty hard to kill, like we're pretty resilient and your immune system, your.

Adaptations, your physiological struggles, the fact that we learn from our experiences and how we go through these kinds of cycles, that's important.

It's not to find the ultimate optimal comfort zone where everything is perfect

because the higher you are, the further down you can drop going too close to the

sun and getting your wings burned in a sense. And I see a lot of these characters are going.

I would say looking at people like Dave Asprey, for example, who has been the

iconic person in this whole space, like self-proclaimed father of biohacking. I think like he didn't look very healthy during the pandemic. Like he looked terrible. I met him recently here in Estonia and he looked much better. And I would say now looking at like.

His public stuff recently, like he seems to do better. I went on a little nature trip with him

and he was a nice guy. So, but I definitely see like in him, like the pressure that has for

carrying that persona and probably like pandemic was super hard for him. Like in many ways, it,

showed physiologically and the disconnect was the inability to maybe talk to his audience,

could see that something's going wrong here, but he couldn't like say it publicly.

And it's okay. Everyone sees that. But what I would say here is that people who are struggling,

who are perfect, if they would open up a little bit and tell, hey, I haven't had a perfect day

for weeks. I've gone through some serious struggles here. Like I can't, I've been eating

kryptonite foods, whatever. So maybe if you just told that to your audience, that you would be

able to connect to their humility as well, because in the end all of us are not perfect.

We have like these vices and virtues and if we showed up as we are and not try to pretend all

the time to be something, maybe you would get actually more empathy and appreciation from your,

followers in a sense by just showing up like have the courage to be like if you are a beauty queen

like beauty blogger, maybe you have a day when you look absolutely horrible and

you have an incredible outbreak of acne.

And then you posted that life is not always perfect all the time.

It's just, and you can have a new angle, which is resonating with your audience

because in the end, they are following you because they have this weakness as well.

But it's our egos that are on the way in a sense that are afraid.

And if you're not afraid and you show up as you are, like maybe you get more

appreciation. And you're afraid, of course, that it will be abandoned, but you won't.

That's the thing. This is an interesting point because I think we're trained in culture to follow

these idols who can do no wrong and can only always be healthy and great. So you made the

example of Dave Asprey. Yeah, he didn't look great, but he didn't share it with his following.

And yeah, maybe if he had, maybe nothing was going on. Who knows? But if you look at him

now versus then, there was a difference in his appearance, but we wouldn't know.

And I think you're right. People are searching for, you talked about increasing psychedelics

and all these other solutions. So people are looking for answers now. And I would say there

is no magic bullet for health. As you said, there's no supplement. There's no take this

one supplement and be healthy. There's also, there's no single kind of death shot to make,

someone sick. It's normally a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So for someone,

it might be toxicity. For someone, it might be their dopamine receptors are blown out because

of this on social media and God knows what. I think a lot of people, there's always some trauma.

You can have the best upbringing in the world, but there's always going to be.

And it's funny, I chatted to my wife, I was like, let's try to get as little trauma in my,

because he's going to grow up with trauma. There will be trauma. He will have to do his own

inner work. Cannot avoid that. Let's try to just minimize it, right?

So there's always, everyone's dealing with something, but it's interesting now,

the need for it's increasing. And also the solutions that people are looking for,

they're still looking for the give me the thing. I'll take this thing and it will solve

my problems, right? And again, it's, that really follows this kind of allopathic

model of a pill for every ill. It's not that. I think it's a holistic approach.

It's fix the vessel, focus on the inner work. There's all elements to it, right?

Then as you said, there's either the spiritual guys who just focus on the mind, and then there's the health guys that are just about the body. You've got to do

the whole, all the work. And I started in the body side of things. And I now, when I

think about my growth and my development and stuff I love to do outside of coaching

people on detox and this podcast, I'm into like the mental sciences.

I'm into reading Neville Goddard and all of those guys and Troward.

That's fascinating me right now because that's an area I'm quite immature in.

So that expansion's important. Yeah, it's important to evolve.

My biohacking career in the beginning was a lot about the data and people saw me

having a lot of beer balls and gathering data. Nowadays it's not really that much about the data. I got what I needed from it.

So, I don't have any wearables on me right now.

I haven't used an O-ring for nine months.

The gadgets on your head. I remember in Sweden in like 2018, that's kind of part of the identity.

And the thing why I'm talking about these things right now is because, and about these influencers.

Is because the health and wellness space is not the first one in my life that I've become like

some kind of a guru in a sense for some people, or at least some kind of thought leader. I did

that in the field of education and in the field of technology and in the field of social media as

Well, in my career, there has been decades where I've been like another.

Biohacker, but I became pretty famous in certain areas.

So I went through my cycles into this, like on other fields.

So when I got into biohacking, I was utterly aware what the media was doing.

They were taking photographs with me, like always asking for all the gadgets

on and show me all the data and all that.

And I didn't take it too serious. I was like, okay, let's play this game.

So let's put these things on. I will become the caricature you want.

And I had this self-awareness for a decade, so it definitely helped me to avoid some pitfalls of turning into an asshole in some sense, but you mentioned

the upbringing, like you have a child now and like all that and trauma.

The thing is that you can avoid it. If you try to grow your child as the perfect thing, having the childhood

you never had, which every parent wants, you might still do something.

And that's kind of humiliating. I've looked quite extensively recently on the studies on mental illness.

And if you take narcissistic personality types, for example, you can develop that through

two different ways, primarily.

One of them is parents who are neglecting you. So they are building this deeply founded insecurity in you, like true neglect.

And then you build this facade often in your teen years, this perfect version of you that

is loved and that continues to your adult. So you always have like this grandiose side and then the insecure, vulnerable self.

Now these can also develop by parents who overvalue their child and love bomb the child

and always communicate to the child, you're great, you're the best, you're going to be

the best and gives child all the opportunities, basically spoil the child to oblivion.

Happens there is that person develops a deeply founded, insecure, and rough feeling enough,

like not being the idealized, idolized version that their parents want. And there is this almost

rebellious act against being perfect also that leads to maybe flirting a little bit

darkness occasionally and so then that's another way to develop.

Let's say, vulnerable narcissistic traits. So both of them are very demanding.

If you think of neurological development, all of them are quite stressful conditions to be in.

Parents who don't love you and parents who overvalue you.

And even if you do it, think you're doing things perfectly, like always giving the

child something they want or never giving them something they want or occasionally

withdrawing what they want, like you can still grow someone's issues.

And it's okay.

And often like the hardest part for parents is to realize that,

oh my God, my child has some of the weaknesses I know I have.

Like, and also like children seeing that, oh my goodness, I have the coping

mechanisms now that I hate that my parents have.

Like maybe they used alcohol a lot, like now I'm drinking. So it's basically like this realization.

To me, it's this awareness that this happening is the first step on any kind

of healing. Choosing that I'm not going to pass this stuff to my children, it's going to stop

with me. So taking responsibility of your issues and healing them is important. And also having

some empathy on yourself. It's not so easy and it's fine. But it's the suppression of the darkness

that often leads to the problem. There is nothing more dangerous than someone who is not aware at

all that they have issues going on, right? Or they're pushing it away that I don't have them,

but you actually do. And that is interesting to me that we all have different aspects of this,

maybe by our upbringing or life experiences, romantic relationships, hard years, tough times.

Probably a lot of people are traumatized by the pandemic and they will start to show

like post-traumatic stress related to that, like in different dysfunctional ways.

And yeah, it's quite hard to be a perfect human. Maybe that's the message here.

It's really hard. And again, it depends on, we all have trauma. As I said, we're raising our young

boy and he will have things he'll have to work through as he grows up and matures. And we pick.

Up and collect trauma through our lives. Definitely people will be impacted by the pandemic. It's just

how do people address that? Some, and I would say most won't, and they'll just confide to society

and drink and put it into external things. And some will do the work and first maybe clean the

vessel and that they may just stop there or they might just focus on the mind. So I think everyone

on this planet has things they need to work through. So I love how your this topic, which,

really resonated with me, the dark side of biohacking, it really resonates to, I think,

life. We all have our struggles, we all have our own internal battles and it's this, really it's

let's look at the inner work because we all live in this projection of how we want to perceive

ourselves and how we want to fit into the world and it's, and that can give us validation

for a certain amount of time.

But actually you said a lot of these YouTubers, influencers get depressed because are they.

Doing the inner work?

Are they being authentic with themselves as maybe their images change and they decide

that they don't want to do certain things anymore, but then that conflicts with their true self.

So really that, this talk that you did really, there's lessons for life, I feel that we can

all take with us and learn from.

Because if we don't, very easily it becomes a violent experience. Talking about these,

influencers, depression is often a very violent breakup with that identity. It's basically ended

up in a mental asylum or it's, there can be pretty drastic consequences of having a version of you

that you know is not real and then trying to maintain that. I've seen that happening like

this kind of breakdown or depression burnout in a sense of that to several influencers I know.

And maybe the key term here is...

What you said, authenticity. I think there is a lack of authenticity in our world and having a

bit more authenticity and realness is what is really needed. And because our society is fueled

by fakeness, fake eyelashes, all kinds of pretending you have wealth but you don't.

Pretending you have a perfect career and you don't. It's this whole personal branding industry

And this whole competitive landscape where we are competing on attention.

And I worked over a decade in the startup community and every startup or company

is like, every team is pretending they have a product, but they don't.

They're pretending they have a great team, but they don't.

Every investor is pretending they have money, but they don't.

And it's like all these imposters and just talking to each other and trying

to figure out who's lying here. Like what, what is real?

And everyone is portraying themselves as better than they are.

And somehow it's quite funny that the people who we rise to power are the average of our traumas of our generation.

And they are mirroring directly back to us the weaknesses we have.

If you think of the world leaders in US or in Russia or anywhere, I would say

these people are not perfect, like they have a lot of issues. But somehow, because they resonate with

our wounds, we like that. We rise to power the people who have our issues, in a sense,

often in an amplified, grandiose way. And if we want to heal, we have to start from ourselves.

I really like the indigenous people because the people they rise to power are often the people

are not playing the social games we do. The wise men, the shamans, the elders, the ones who are

leading the wise people they are often being a little bit outside of it every day.

Politics in a sense. So if you seek for spiritual help, you can go to these people for answers.

While our society is built on leaders who are probably fully medicated and there's absolutely

nothing inside of them that is interesting. You would never go for spiritual help to these people,

but they know a lot about how to play games and get a little bit more for us instead of

or the opponent or someone else. I think this is a very human characteristics. Why do corporations,

why do countries, why do any kind of institution like end up as a caricature or far fetched from

ideal? There is a great documentary called The Corporation, which basically looks at

organizations and companies, specifically private companies. Why do they start to

to show characteristics of psychopathy.

So if a company could be diagnosed as an entity, as a psychopath, it basically ticks all the boxes.

While at the same time, the organization is not made out of psychopaths.

Maybe there is one or two and the leader could be, but why do people in these

organizations collectively start to behave like they're a psychopath instead.

Of building things that are for greater good for the environment and for the

people working there and all that is that individuals, maybe their values are like, this is wrong, but I'm doing it because it's in the interest

of the organization.

So why does a country leader lie and do all kinds of crazy shit is because they believe this is in the benefit of our country.

And so we detach ourselves. We believe there is an entity, which is a collective entity and it's

interest.

Is why I'm doing something wrong. And in the end, the whole organization starts to behave like a psychopath.

Unfortunately, that's what we do. We tend to rise to the power

and the people who do succeed in these kind of structures.

They call it social media, call it the country, call it the corporation.

We rise to power, the individuals who are reflective of its shadow.

And that is interesting to me, just on a more of a philosophical question,

like, why is it often we are led by the least among us? We're not led by the greatest and the

wisest and the most pure and pristine. We are led by the most malformed version of that ideal.

And that's a deeper question. Maybe that's needed for some growth to happen in a sense.

I don't know, but it's very interesting to me.

Yeah, no, I love it. And yeah, these indigenous tribes, I think we have a lot we can learn from

from these individuals. Right. And I love the work of Weston A.

Price, obviously that was more dietary, right? Him studying different tribes and what they eat.

But yeah, we definitely can learn. And there will still be tribes out there that live in

alignment with their traditions and their culture.

And yeah, I'm sure there's lots we can learn. I think in our culture, it's about the best marketing.

You can come across the best and again, it's the image, The avatar versus the reality.

I think it's fascinating stuff.

Yeah, I think this kind of connects to where we started from, that we spoke about conscious

people and people seeking these things. And why do we seek answers from indigenous people? Why are

we now, right now, why is there so many gringo white dudes running around with feathers in their

hats and acting spiritual? Is that I think there is a disconnect, like our world needs this. And

we have this innate intuitive feeling that the indigenous people knew something we have lost.

And Terence McKenna was one of the leaders of the old psychedelic thing in the 80s, 90s.

He was a continuation of the psychedelic 60s and 70s, and he spoke about archaic revival.

That as things get weird in our world, we need to go back in history. We go,

as far as possible to seek the answer. So we find the paleo diet, we find the shamans,

the holy men. We seek advice from yogis and Zen Buddhists, or plants, or the living world.

Because we are so disconnected that we need to reconnect and we intuitively feel it's like

something we have lost centuries ago. And there is this lack of spirit also. We don't believe in

God anymore. There's this whole thing that we need still some kind of belief system. We still

need something to believe in. We still need like a fulfillment and answers to questions that we

don't have answers to. And that's where we seek these things. And that's the archaic revival.

That's why I also chose one of Terence McKenna's quotes for our upcoming event in Amsterdam.

And so that's 14 and 15 of October in Amsterdam. People are very welcome. And in preparation to

that we have in London, 1st of September, an event, a bit smaller one, but still

has the same vibe and all that, like where I gathered some of the top European

biohackers from different countries, sharing some of their daily practices and top biohacks and all that.

I'm going to speak a little bit about these like resilient being stuff there.

But I think it's important to share these things and facilitate and architect the conversation.

So I try to do my best.

That's my contribution is to put these things up and write some books and talk about these things.

So people want to learn more. They can go to biohackersummit.com and check out the upcoming events.

Amazing. Yeah. So I was going to say, so obviously you've got the Biohacker Summits.

I've been to ones in Sweden and Finland. This year's in Amsterdam and that's coming up in October.

But you're doing a preparation event this weekend in London.

That's exciting. I don't think you guys have been in London for a long time, so

I definitely recommend the viewers to check it out and we'll leave the details

in the show notes for the listeners. Which speakers are speaking in London?

We got, for example, in addition to myself, there is from UK, we have Tim Gray,

who likes to remind us about all the things we should avoid in our lives. That's his thing that

he's doing now. And then we have Veronika Alister from Czech Republic.

She's a well-known biohacker in Czech Republic. I think she's going to speak a little bit more about the plant medicine stuff because that's been important for

her. And then we have Eduard de Wilde, who is Dutch, one of the top biohackers in

the Netherlands, and he's going to share some of his longevity hacks. In addition

to him, longevity is a topic for Siim Land, who is Estonia's top biohacker,

he's written many books. Yeah. I know Siim, he's a good guy.

Yeah. And then I have also Samina Rind, who is American. She's in her fifties, but she's biologically and physically looks

like she's more like 30 and she's a brain tumor survivor, very good speaker.

I'm really looking forward to hearing from her.

I also have Japan's top biohacker, Tateki Matsuda. It's a nice collection of people and individuals who have been doing this kind

of work for a while on this globe and especially Europe and sharing some of

their top advice and it's a cool location under the Waterloo station.

It has, it's the place where Banksy invited artists to paint graffiti on

walls and that's the only location in UK where you can do that legally.

So it's a beautiful location for that type of art.

And because we are in a metro tunnel, I think it's awesome to also have a nice party.

So we're going to do an Ecstatic Dance, we're going to have upgraded non-alcoholic cocktails,

and things like that.

To feel that, my friend Mikko Heikinpoika. And also Yogetsu Akasaka, who is a Japanese

Zen Buddhist monk who beatboxes, and Mikko is generating music basically with loopers and his

voice, and he's a multi-instrumentalist. So it's going to be not a DJ set, but like a live performance,

a journey that the architects wrote for us. It's cool. And I always want to connect also,

So as much as we are very highly technological and driven by science and molecules and devices and chemistry and all that, I want to also bring a little

bit of the natural world into all my events.

So I have Miles Irving who wrote the book Forager's Handbook.

So he's one of the top foragers in UK who introduced wild plants into culinary kitchens across UK.

Last time we did a dinner with him, he had a hundred plants that we used in the dinner.

And that's what we're going to do also on Saturday with some of the speakers and want to come to our little getaway outside of London.

So, yeah, I mean, it's going to be an awesome event and great conversation and we're looking forward to meeting everyone there.

And I think it's gonna be a great event. I think the venue is really cool as well.

You're saying it's arches and graffiti.

And I would say I've been to many of your buy hacker events over the years.

And I love the energy. I love the themes each year.

So I highly recommend it for my listeners to check it out. Where can they learn more about it online? Yeah.

So the Biohacker Summit in Amsterdam, you can find more at biohackersummit.com.

And the London event is biohackersummit.com/xlondon.

So the letter X and London.

We'll put that in the show notes for the listeners for sure.

Yeah. And if you want to pre-order my book or get the latest one, the Biohacker's Handbook, you can.

Find that from biohackercenter.com. Fantastic.

Put it all in the show notes for the listeners and definitely check out the event in London

because as I said, I love the themes that you guys deliver and anyone interested in

health by hacking and also, as we've said, not just the physical, also the mental side

of things, it's worth a look.

So definitely check that out.

Teemu, it's been great having you back on the show, man. We, I really enjoyed this conversation.

We've gone in depth and we've explored areas that I think are really important.

So it's been great to have you on and it's much appreciated to talk to you again.

Thank you, Adam. It's been a blast and stay healthy.

They will. And if you don't, it's okay.