In this episode, Teemu Arina meets Joe Cohen, CEO of SelfDecode, to discuss the complex nature of a purely data-driven approach to biohacking via genetic testing and various biomarkers.

Joe recalls his biohacking journey, his trial-and-error approach, years of self-experimentation, following gurus (and then choosing not to do so anymore) and the incredible insights which led to him ultimately founding SelfDecode.

SelfDecode is the only company in the world which directly provides their users with a holistic set of accurate health recommendations based on their genes. This allows them to take charge of their own healthcare with data-driven precision health decisions.

In order to make the best health decisions, we must take all of our health data into account. Otherwise, we'll end up addressing individual problems or symptoms without looking at the whole picture. The problem is that there is just too much information for any human to analyze - this is where the power of AI comes in.

This conversation was recorded in August 2024.

Visit https://selfdecode.com and follow @mrbiohacker on Instagram to learn more!

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

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

Key moments and takeaways:

00:00 Introduction by Teemu Arina

01:23 Joe's biohacking journey & fighting 75 different health issues

02:43 Getting into genetics, gaining knowledge and experience

03:42 From healing to optimizing - but how?

04:26 Referencing the best people in each category

04:57 Optimize every realm possible

05:53 Mood regulation matters

07:14 You don't know where your limit is (until you test it)

08:40 Joe's elevated neuroticism & anxiety

09:28 Iterative improvements over 4 years

10:56 Joe didn't consult a psychologist, only used supplements

11:47 Mood is quite complex

13:30 It's tough to talk to people with whom you don't share common interests

14:39 Optimizing lab results and data

15:52 Chromium as an example of a less immediately obvious supplement

19:00 When biohacking becomes an obsession (but for Joe it's more of a hobby)

19:49 Exercise and the adverse effects of blindly following guru advice

21:38 Challenging the body in different ways

23:15 Lab testing provides insights as you progress through your improvements

24:31 Megadosing vitamin C

27:16 Optimization cannot be done in isolation

27:46 The consequences of overtraining

31:27 Optimal is contextual

33:33 You have to look at multiple biomarkers to get an accurate picture

36:24 IVs: yes or no?

38:23 Megadosing makes it easier to observe the effects of a specific compound

40:15 Software algorithms can interpret your metrics and help you avoid mistakes

41:51 What works for one person might not work for another

44:22 It's hard to identify which particular supplement works best

46:58 SelfDecode provides the tools which help you understand your results

48:22 The industry is rife with sh*t technology

50:04 Companies should leverage AI and build their own technology, but most don't

54:37 Most software out there is just bad

58:17 You can provide results from other labs, but it's best to use SelfDecode's own chip

61:13 Most labs look for illness - but if longevity is the target, other metrics are more important

64:04 Biohackers shouldn't just blindly believe what they read

64:33 SelfDecode also has a GPT bot to help you interpret your data

Music.

Welcome to the Biohacker's Podcast. My name is Teemu Arina and today I'm interviewing

my long-term friend, biohacker and health optimizer Joe Cohen.

There's probably no one else on the planet who has done so much in terms of

getting his biomarkers into optimal range.

He's absolutely obsessed about this and he's using every and all tools out there

to achieve that from laboratory testing to genetic testing.

He's also behind a genetic testing company and lab testing company as well.

And over the course of time, I have noticed that he has some very unique techniques,

including megadosing on certain supplements to figure out what works and what

doesn't, to actually taking some very novel approaches to correcting his biomarkers.

So I'm very eager to learn more and get an update from Joe on what has he been up to recently?

Because I think this guy will never stop. There is always something to optimize,

and he's definitely taking this to a completely next level.

And with that, welcome to the show, Joe.

Thanks for having me, Teemu. You just returned from India, from the Iowa Clinic,

and you've been doing some extensive testing.

I also understood that you have some of the best biomarkers that they have ever

tested. What would you highlight?

Yeah, so just to zoom out a little bit, my approach to health has been evolving over time.

I would say when I first got into it, I had 75 different health issues.

And it was about solving those health issues. And the original approach was

to try as many things as possible.

Actually, the original approach that I had was follow as many gurus as possible

and try what they were doing.

When that approach failed, I said, okay, I started this website called self-hacked

based on the principle of trying everything and seeing how I felt,

reading the underlying biochemistry of things, and trying to understand how my body was working.

That had a lot of success, but at a certain point, it fizzled out, if you will.

Meaning the success wasn't, I

wasn't noticing as big of success using that approach at a certain point.

And I almost, I reduced my biohacking because of that, because it was just like

I wasn't seeing that much success for the effort that is being put into it.

And there was still success and I was always doing experiments over time,

but it was less. Then I got into genetics.

That also led to some success and the starting of my company, Self Decode.

And as the genetics became more advanced, I started to also evolve how I was doing things.

Initially, I would do things based on looking, trying to see my pathways and

individual variants, trying to understand my biochemical pathways better with genetics.

And then I started to use polygenic risk scoring to understand also big picture

stuff. What am I at risk for in the future?

And that also helped guide me in figuring out my body and also what I'm at risk

for and how to prevent those things in the future.

We then started to get more into lab testing.

And what I realized was I had this, we integrated a lot more lab testing and self-decode.

And there was a certain point where I said, there was a shift in my mindset

of initially was like, try to get rid of the health issues. That was one.

Then the next shift was, okay, I want to optimize. But the thing was, it wasn't clear to me.

I started in 2018, I started to get this idea that there's an optimal range of lab tests.

But it just, for some reason, it didn't really click. It more started to click a few years ago,

where I realized that I was looking around and my idea was that I didn't want

to just be better than average in health, right?

You could be better than average, but to be better than average is not,

still could have certain issues.

So I would look around and be like, what I started to do is I started to compare

myself to the best, in each category, the best people.

So I would look at the best people and I would notice some people,

for example, that they never really got sick very much.

Or if they got sick, it didn't really disable them for any amount of time.

They still did whatever they needed to do.

They didn't really, they weren't disabled by it. and I started to see other things as well.

There was different things that I noticed about people that they had certain

advantages that I felt like I didn't. If I would get an infection, I would get sick.

The other turn was, okay, I want to optimize every realm possible, right?

You could optimize your mood, for example, and say, okay, I'm not depressed

anymore or I'm not anxious.

But it's a different level if you say, I'm never going to be anxious or completely

getting rid of any kind of anxiety or any kind of negative feelings.

And so those are two different ways of looking at it. One is, do you have depression?

No. Okay, you fixed the issue. And another is, how do you become the least depressed

person or the least anxious person out there?

If I can add, what people really seek is just like with longevity,

they don't really want to live forever.

They want to have a good life where they

have a fully functioning body and mind and

eventually they die boots on so that there's less

suffering i guess with mood also it's not about having a sad day but having

better mood regulation is what they seek it's the same with if you think of

any kind of diagnosis people might receive we all humans have the spectrum of

emotions we can have and behaviors,

and when it turns against you or someone else, then it's a handicap.

And it's the same with physical health as well.

In the end, if you're all the time sick, it's a handicap.

If you have a disability that limits your ability to do certain things, that's a handicap.

And if you have a degenerative disease, that's a handicap.

So it's all about stabilizing the system in such a way that it doesn't mean

you're perfect all the time.

But you have better resilience, you have faster recovery. recovery,

and in the end, your body is adjusting.

Just from an evolutionary perspective, it's more adaptable to what is happening,

and it has a better ability to function the way it was designed to in the face of adversity.

Would you agree with me? Yeah, absolutely, for sure. So I think there's,

first of all, everybody has their baseline.

So the question is exactly how much can each person and optimize.

And that's something that you'll never completely know, because I don't completely

know that about myself, because I keep optimizing, right?

So you don't know where the limit is, where your limit is.

But let's say for mood, for example, I'll just give you one example.

And everybody is going to get into a bad mood or some big life tragedy could

happen or different issues.

But I took a big five at the Iowa program, for example.

They do this big five with the 30 facets and they

ask you like 200 questions or something

the big five personality model and this

i would say this is like a test of sorts right it's

it is a tracking thing it's not a blood test but it is a test and so what i

wanted to see was how my mood changed over time because i noticed that my mood

was a lot better in in a bunch of different situations and i want to see how

does versus how does this compare to other people,

number one, and also how to compare to my own results two years ago, right?

And in this big five, the mood is basically under neuroticism,

which is the tendency to have any kind of negative emotions.

And I think people want to minimize negative emotions as much as possible, right?

If somebody starts off with super high levels of neuroticism,

I'm not going to say that it's going to go down to zero.

I don't know exactly where it could go for each individual, right? That's not 100% clear.

What I can say is you could, everybody could optimize it by quite a lot.

The question is exactly how much is a self-discovery thing for each individual.

And so for me, for example, you know, I have higher levels of neuroticism,

including anxiety, depression, and other things.

And when I took the test actually recently, it came out as very low for each

of the six facets, very low anxiety, very low angry hostility,

very low depression, very low self-consciousness.

Very low impulsiveness, and very low vulnerability.

These are the six facets for neuroticism. And the psychologist said that she

never saw anybody that had very low on all these metrics.

And it was actually higher before. Two years ago, my mood was already quite good.

And because I already did a lot of changes for my mood at that point,

but I wanted to see what it is now.

And I also know that four years, basically my mood has been improving overall

over time, But I want to see what is the difference in the past two years.

So two years ago, my mood was already very good in just in terms of the general

population and my overall neuroticism levels.

So I scored low instead of very low on three of the facets.

So let's say for anxiety, two years ago, I had low and now I have very low.

And did you see changes in the other areas like openness or agreeableness or other? Not really.

So there were some things that changed a little bit, and I would say that extroversion

changed as well, which is something I also noticed.

Last time I got overall, let's see, it was average on extroversion,

and now I got high on extroversion.

And this isn't something that just, okay, this is just the variability of the test.

I've actually noticed it. I've said that publicly before, that I've noticed

I became significantly more extroverted.

Based on certain things that I was doing. My question to you is,

okay, this happened in a two-year period.

And what do you attribute to the change in personality and how reliable you

think this change is, at least subjectively you feel it changed?

Big Five is a very well peer-reviewed and tested method.

And you came out with lower numbers for neuroticism.

And did you also do some other things than supplementation, health optimization?

Did you also go to a psychologist?

I didn't go to a psychologist, no. So it was just supplements.

This is very interesting because, yeah, you induce a change in personality and

do it on your own without outside help. That's quite an achievement, I would say.

Yeah, it's not 100% clear. I mean, this was my goal also, was one of my goals.

I did want to become more extroverted. extroverted i wanted to

and i know for me i just changing

my mindset wasn't working for me there was nothing that i

could really do i knew i had to change my neurotransmitters for me that was

the only thing that was going to work as a result after two years you have achieved

to be more extroverted that was your goal but at the same time your anxiety

went down yes yeah always optimizing Optimizing mood was a goal, so that was something.

But mood is actually quite complex.

And it's something that I've noticed over time because you can improve mood

in a certain way, but then in

certain circumstances, it didn't improve in the way that I wanted it to.

And I can give you an example of one of those circumstances.

For example, let's say I do Acra yoga, okay? When you're doing Acra yoga,

you have to give feedback to your partner. Now, you have to do it in a way that is...

You have a certain kind of positive mood, or else your partner doesn't take it that well.

Like you have to, it's not only that, okay, you also want to be more extroverted.

Like I wanted to be more extroverted when I'm doing it, because the difference

is, okay, so this is an example, let's say you're walking on the street,

and I, this is, I'm in Tel Aviv, it's a small city, you meet a lot of people you know.

And for me, a test of how introverted I am is, is am I in the mood of talking

to people or do I start pretending like I didn't see them so that I could just

continue to be in my own world?

Or, for example, yeah, it's this, are you drawn to being, to socializing more

or are you drawn to being in more of your own world?

Now, what I found was that even though I became more extroverted,

it didn't become more depressing being in my own world.

It just actually just became more enjoyable to be around people when I'm around people.

And the other thing is a certain kind of, let's say you get rid of anxiety completely.

You could still have a certain kind of anxiety when you're around people.

Let's say, for example, a certain kind of anxiety is if you're with somebody

who is just, let's say I'm around certain people that I have a lot in common with.

It's very easy to talk to those people and you feel very comfortable, right?

I could talk to you about biohacking all day and, you know, we won't run out

of things to talk about. But let's say I'm with somebody who we don't have that much in common.

You could start feeling, or at some point, let's say I would start feeling a

little bit, maybe, I don't know, there's not that much to talk about,

I'm a little uncomfortable.

That's kind of like a certain aspect of mood or extroversion that wasn't optimized

until, let's say, three, four months ago. Whereas I never feel that feeling now.

So what did you do for neurotransmitters? How did you assess them?

And then what did you do to change them so that you would get this kind of result

over time, let's say, in such a short period like three, four months?

When you say three, four months ago, it was in a different way than it is now.

Yeah. So this was something that increased my extroversion. And I would say

that there was different things that improved different aspects of mood, right?

So I wouldn't say it's one thing, but I could tell you the last thing that I

did that had a big impact.

And I'll just give you a little bit of background.

My new approach has more been optimizing towards my lab results and my data.

It's something that I look at my genetics. I look at my lab tests.

I look at any kind of symptoms, conditions I had in the past.

I look at my lifestyle risks.

I look at all that and I use software, self-decode in particular,

to help me figure out what I need to do.

And one of the things that came up was chromium. I didn't know chromium had

anything to do with mood.

But one of the things that was happening, I stopped consuming nutritional yeast

and I noticed that I was becoming more introverted.

I didn't know why, but I just felt it. I said, I'm becoming more introverted.

I don't know why. and I started trying to increase serotonin,

trying to do different things.

Psychedelics helped, right? But the problem with psychedelics,

you don't always want to take them. So psychedelics fix the problem,

but then you just don't always want to take them.

Especially one of the, I was actually getting some, I wasn't recovering as well.

I was getting injured from psychedelics and that's a whole other conversation.

I could talk about that. Now I don't get injured anymore.

I figured out what I needed to do, but essentially, but I was at a standstill

and, but I was still always trying to optimize my labs.

And one of the things that came up in self-decode and it

made sense was chromium okay i had

no idea it's going to help with my mood but actually self-decode showed

me that there was a study related to mood i said okay fine maybe mood

but what does it have to do with i didn't think it was going to actually help

me in that area actually and so actually that made me more extroverted than

anything else i've taken and i was taking it mainly because my fasting glucose

started to go up my chromium levels were showing up lower on blood tests.

And it actually showed that it lowers lipids, lipoproteins. And I said,

okay, these are good reasons.

Okay, I'll take anything that improves mood anyway. So that's a benefit.

It does affect blood glucose control, appetite, weight management, these kind of things.

But it turns out that it interacts with the serotonin receptors.

It's not that well studied, but you see it in animal studies.

And there's the small clinical trial on mood.

So there's definitely an impact on mood, but I didn't realize it was going to

have an effect on creativity.

And for me, it did.

Creativity and extroversion. Interesting. Women who have PMS, Chromium can help.

It has shown clinical improvement when taking chromium alone.

It makes sense. It helps with the serotonin system.

And for me, I was increasing serotonin, but it seems to do something with serotonin

that's different than just increasing serotonin.

There are some studies that show it interacts with the 2A receptor,

the psychedelic receptor, but also it's doing something else because it's not exactly,

you know, it's not as strong and it's working a little bit differently,

but it is doing something quite interesting in that regard.

And I just would not have gotten there with just random, it was really based

on my testing and DNA and just a bunch of facts.

Based on my, it was based on my personal data that it came up.

Right. And what I noticed is that has been a repeating theme is that I do things,

and this is not so much expected. I do things to optimize the labs,

and then I notice something else improving, right?

Which is interesting. At the previous Biohacker Summit, there was this brain scanning

company that was doing brain scans.

And they said that in the biohacking community, they saw a lot more brain injury

than any other event they've gone to.

So that there is a lot of I'm not surprised because

it's a community where people have

coping mechanisms that often lead to these extreme

diets and other behaviors different types of trauma that probably already start

in childhood but also physical trauma like being overweight or having some kind

of chronic condition and healing oneself out of it so then this health Health

optimization becomes another kind of extreme mechanism.

In a sense, to deal with life in general.

But yeah, they noticed like increased amount of issues in that area.

Of course, then everything from mood regulation to blood biomarkers and all

of that becomes an obsessive thought. It's not so much of an obsession.

It's really more of a hobby. And it's my business, right? And I realized that

this approach is just more effective by far than anything that I've ever come across.

Yeah. So talking about the mood regulation, serotonin system,

all that, you mentioned also psychedelics and you mentioned some injury.

What do you mean by that? My sleep patterns start to get disrupted.

I lost motivation. I started to get more inflammation, injuries, joint pains.

And by the way, that happens to my whole family. So nobody in my family really exercises a lot.

It wasn't clear why, it just, that's what it was.

And you'd say, okay, I'm not gonna exercise to the extreme. So what I did was I went on walks.

A bike ride is fine. Moderate exercise, what the general recommendations are,

were working fine for me. Exercise on the weekend.

Yeah, I would get sick if I exercised too much. So I'd have to be very careful about that.

I'd feel weaker, less motivated, I'd get sick.

There was just all these different kinds of problems that were occurring if

I exercised too much. If I exercised how much some general body,

what do they say, 30 to 45 minutes a day, that would have been fine for me, right?

Maybe 30 minutes a day, right? But more than that, what happened was I started

to listen to Andrew Uberman and Peter Attia.

And before you're exercising like 25 hours a week.

Okay, you got to do zone two first, 10 hours a week. You got to do weight training.

You got to do this. You got to do all these different things.

And then before you know it, you're like, wait, I'm exercising 20 hours a week.

I'm starting to get injuries left, right, and center.

So I was already at a better place two years ago.

So I started working out and more. I started exercising more.

So still not going to the gym too often, but still exercising.

And I was just getting injured more and just different things.

My body was starting to break down more.

And I realized that, wait a second, this is not optimal.

So, what I do now is I challenge my body in ways that most people don't,

and then I try to, because when you don't challenge your body,

it's easier to optimize.

Once you start challenging it, then you start to, it becomes like,

you start realizing certain underlying things that are wrong or that are not

being done in the right way.

Right I was starting to challenge my

body in different ways number one i started to

get infections like just exposing myself to every kind of infection i started

traveling more number one going indoors more acroyoga just being around people

more just everything yeah so it was like four and a half years ago was covid

so for two and a half years people were much more isolated

and then covid came down and i

just said i want to just and i used to

be way more isolated i was just like always wasn't around

a lot of people in the past and and then covid hit but i just decided i'm just

going to expose myself and figure out how to improve my immune system rather

than just be isolated so what i started realizing is when you expose yourself

a lot you start picking up infections left and center.

And that includes going to planes, international traveling, doing acroyoga where

people are breathing on your face and just not being, not caring.

Somebody's sick. Okay. Whatever.

I just started not caring about infections.

And the reason isn't because, the reason is because I want to understand actually

how to get the infections and then optimize my immune system.

So, and the same thing with the exercise. It's okay.

Let me, Let me try to exercise, do all these exercises and try to optimize my

body so that I don't start breaking down or don't start getting all these issues

that I would have normally started to get.

So, yeah, that and I basically, I mean, there's been massive progress on those two areas.

And it was actually all through lab testing that I figured out what was going

on. It was very hard to do it without lab testing.

I can give you an example through lab testing.

I try to test as much as possible. I find that everything that I test for,

number one is you can move everything.

I haven't found anything that just can't be moved.

So you can optimize everything and everything is going to have an optimal range.

Range not everything do we know exactly what the optimal range

is if they don't have the exact studies but you could if you look at

other people's results if you you know you could see

certain things like they have like metabolic studies

of what should be what's better if it's higher or lower and so i started optimizing

in that way and i found massive improvements in my immune system and my recovery

based on that so that was like huge and even recently i found something that I didn't know before.

So my recovery has just been like 10x better.

I don't have any pains anymore, even if I subject myself to very rigorous exercise.

So I've been able to recover quite a lot. But I would say the last thing,

the most recent thing that I discovered from testing was a week ago,

I discovered that I needed more vitamin C.

What happened was I took, let me pull up my vitamin C results.

Yeah, you could check your serum vitamin C. And I took this test three times.

And so I took it once just to give you an, the optimal range is 0.85 to 1.2.

That's what studies show around is optimal.

Mine was, this is November 9th, 2023, was 0.214.

It was almost considered low, which is weird because at that time I was taking

like 500 milligrams of vitamin C or.

Yeah, something like that. And I was like, okay, 500 milligrams is seven times the RDA.

And I was eating a reasonably healthy diet with some vegetables.

So my vitamin C should have been higher, but it wasn't.

So then I said, okay, let me increase my vitamin C intake. So I started to take 1500 milligrams a day.

I didn't want to go crazy because my genetics show me that I have an increased

risk of kidney stones and above two grams, you can increase your risk of kidney stones.

So I just said, okay, let me go with 1500 milligrams. I go with 1500 milligrams.

Then my vitamin C goes to 0.4, still not 0.85, which is the optimal range.

And I said, okay, let me test it again and see what's going on. Test it again.

This is July 23rd, 2024.

So not long ago. It's 0.26. It actually went down.

And mind you, I'm taking 1500 milligrams a day still.

And these are slow release also. So I take it three times in the day and they're all slow release.

And I said, okay, I'm taking 1500 milligrams. It's still not helping here.

So I just said, okay, I'm going to start mega dosing on vitamin C.

Chris Masterjohn was saying you can't really absorb it and it's not going to

help and this, that. So that's why I never did it. But I said, you know what?

Look, I'm going to follow the lab test because if you take vitamin C,

your serum levels do go up. That's just a fact.

I was obviously utilizing it too quickly.

And I said, okay. And there was probably other reasons, like there's a combination

of reasons why it was probably lower.

But I said, okay. So, I started to make a dose on vitamin C and I started to

notice interesting effects on it, like mood a little bit, but also better recovery actually.

Yeah. So, now I take six grams a day and I'm going to retest and see what happens. But the idea is that.

And I started to read research where when they give six grams,

it actually is good for the immune system.

I found my immune system has improved, by the way. Number one,

my recovery has improved.

And studies do show that it can

improve immunity. And six grams is more effective than three grams a day.

This kind of optimization cannot be done in isolation of looking at how you

interact with the environment.

Basically, what is the context in which the optimization happens?

So you did increase the workout load in your life.

Also, if you take the mood side of things, you start exposing yourself more to people.

So all of these will have effects on the homeostasis of your system.

So the body is full of these compensatory systems that strive for balance.

If I take the exercise as an example, if you start to increase exercise load,

and this is in the Biohacker's Handbook as well, how you actually,

as a result of starting to exercise and you're getting into this overtraining window,

what happens, there is a decreased TLR expression.

There is effects through epinephrine, cortisol, and interleukins.

That does lead to decreased macrophagy production and cytokine production.

That leads to impaired cell-mediated immunity and inflammation.

So your body is basically dealing with more inflammation, and then there is

a reduced production of cells in the cell-mediated immune system,

and that increases the risk for viral infections.

Now, then we can start looking at, okay, is there increased need for certain

building blocks for building certain cells, nutrient intake, and all of that.

So obviously, when you start exercising more, you have more inflammation,

you need more antioxidants like vitamin C to deal with that.

So none of these kind of things like dosages for supplementation cannot be looked

in isolation of the behaviors.

Obviously, if you start exercising more, injure more your muscles,

you will need more minerals, for example.

You will need things like zinc and selenium and magnesium.

One of the things is that we have been doing lab testing with Polo Habits Test Kit,

and what we see is most people

have magnesium deficiency and it's not

that they're not receiving enough magnesium it's that

their lifestyle is very prone to stress both

mental and physical so that increased the

utilization of those nutrients so then you're deficient of them if you live

like just like you said when you don't challenge yourself the optimization is

maybe easier perhaps but like Like then when you start to do changes or you

start to do things in excess or you are under like almost athletic load,

your upper respiratory infection risk that goes up based on studies two to six times.

So to deal with that, obviously, you need to do interventions in terms of nutrition

and maybe recovery as well so that you can give your body the window to build

up that extra needed capacity.

It's the same like when someone is dealing with chronic illness who has chronic

inflammation, their body is fighting a constant war.

So there is increased need for certain things. Now, let's take one biomarker

as an example, cholesterol.

So we think of cholesterol, blood cholesterol as a bad thing.

One thing that increases cholesterol is exercise.

So the more you damage your muscles, your cholesterol levels go up.

Why? Because it's a transporter, it's a carrier.

These lipids are needed for also for transporting things around that are needed for recovery.

When someone has chronic inflammation, their cholesterol levels go up.

Now, obviously, the issue is if you have inflammation somewhere in the arteries,

the lipids might start accumulating there.

That's why we try to bring down cholesterol levels, because there's a statistical

significance in high cholesterol and heart disease risk.

But it's usually in the presence of inflammation.

If you don't have inflammation, higher cholesterol levels are not just such a big problem.

So that's the problem in isolating a single variable and not necessarily looking

at environmental behavioral factors or what's going on in your body.

That brings me back into kind of the question of what is optimal,

because if optimal is contextual.

Then reference ranges from labs, which are population study-based,

they don't necessarily speak about your individual needs based on your environment.

So your magnesium need will be higher than what is the average if you do very stressful things.

You might be deficient, but even your need needs to be much,

much higher. Can you speak a little bit about what I'm trying to express here?

Yeah, actually, you bring up a lot of great points. I'll try to parse what I

think. First of all, I think that what I found is that if you need something

more, it actually will go down in your blood levels.

So if you're utilizing more magnesium, your blood magnesium levels are going

to go down. I've seen that many times.

And if we go back to vitamin C, I think I'm definitely utilizing it more in a lot of ways.

Number one, I think the exercise is making me utilize it a lot more. And the infections.

So every time I travel, I'm getting infections. Even if I don't notice it,

I see it in my blood markers.

I've become really good at understanding how to know if I'm fighting an infection

based on my blood markers.

What I've noticed is that I'm taking enough amounts of minerals.

And in my recent blood test, I was doing the Biohacker Summit, working a lot on.

Putting that 10th anniversary event together and my

blood levels for magnesium and many

other minerals seeing for example came down as low as deficient but then i also

measured intracellular values and those were optimal basically there's a difference

between intracellular and what is in the blood as much as there is a difference

between what's in the bloodstream and what's being secreted through urine.

You can't really have a total picture of your magnesium deficiency by looking at one marker.

One marker might tell you you're deficient. One marker might tell you you're

actually getting enough.

One marker might be telling you you're not secreting it enough or you are secreting it too much.

So you have to look at all of these at the same time. What is the input?

What is your dietary intake?

What is in the bloodstream? And then what is being utilized that can be in the

hairs, in the bones, in the intracellular level, in different organs,

and then what is being secreted.

And we don't have comprehensive enough tests that are able to get the total picture.

You have to do all these different tests, and it can get quite expensive to

figure out what the bottleneck is.

I'm taking more magnesium now because I saw that my blood biomarkers were low,

but looking at the intracellular level, it was still optimal.

That's a great point. And what I would say for that is you want your blood and

your intracellular levels to be optimal, right?

So, you could look at a lot of these minerals and vitamins.

So, I'm not, I wasn't checking intracellular vitamin C, but let's say your intracellular

levels are higher, right?

What that tells me is that your body's actually trying to utilize more of it.

And so, it's sucking more out of the serum. Still means that you want,

you want to make sure you're, you want your intracellular levels to be high

and you also want your blood levels to be high.

Right you don't only want your intracellular because you're that

probably means you're burning through it a lot quicker and you want

your reserves you want to have so much that it's just your body can't utilize

it anymore and it's just you have extra floating around your blood same with

vitamin c right so i don't know my intracellular levels of vitamin c but what

i can tell you is that i'm using a lot utilizing the shit out of it and i want to make sure that

I saturate the whole system, including my blood.

And what I tend to go after is what the studies are looking at.

The studies tell me that, hey, look, there's better health effects at this range.

I'm going to go after that rather than, because while intracellular vitamin

C may be better or it's looking at something else that could be useful,

the studies aren't looking at that enough for me to know what it would mean, right? Right.

So you're right. Each test has its limitations, essentially,

but you could still tell from blood levels of all these vitamins and minerals through the blood.

Do you take intravenous therapies like IVs? No, I don't see any need for them, to be honest.

Yeah. What I'm concerned about IVs, those are becoming super popular in different

biocaine clinics and like all kinds of health clinics around the world where it's possible.

And what I'm worried about is how it bypasses your self-regulatory systems.

So if I take it as food or supplement, my body will regulate how much it's going

to utilize. Of course, it depends on the form.

Yeah, you're also getting a huge amount in a small period, which is not necessarily

the way how it usually should work, right? So let's say vitamin C.

You could pump the system with IV vitamin C, saturate it, but then it goes away after a day.

It doesn't stay in the system for too long Maybe the intracellular is a little

longer But the idea is that you're going to reset after a week And I'm not doing

an IV every single week You have to stick a needle in you.

I'd rather get a blood test. Some things do elevate it for longer term.

NAD IVs, for example, do elevate it for a longer period of time.

But then if you want to keep it up, you actually have to activate the so-called salvage pathway.

And that is being activated by exercise and improving VO2 max and all of that.

If you take all these things, you have extra, but your body has nowhere to use it.

It's just going to get rid of it. It's such an optimal system.

Them. If you want it to be higher and stay elevated, you also need to send it

all the signals that, hey, this is needed now.

Let's take NAD as an example, right? I've never done an IV maybe three years

ago. I don't remember, right? I think once, three years ago.

The point is that my NAD levels were 67, which is quite optimal. So above 40 is optimal.

There's supplements to it take to increase your NAD levels, which I do.

And what's the point in taking an IV, right?

If I can take supplements. So I don't think I've ever come across something

in order to get it, you need an IV. You can't just take it internally.

Like people take B vitamins, you get absorbed reasonably well,

right? If I take B vitamins, I could see every single one of them shoot up in my blood.

So why do I need an IV for it? So that's why I don't see the purpose. That's the truth.

Okay. That's very interesting to hear because you like to megadose on stuff, right?

And IV is one way to megadose on it, but you have actually done it through dietary intake.

So can you speak a little bit about your method of testing supplements and why

are you megadosing them?

Yeah. Megadosing allows me to feel acutely what a supplement is doing, right?

There's different ways where you could see how something is affecting you.

One is you megadose it and see how you're feeling.

You could look at the biochemical pathways and understand what your biochemical

pathways are, which I do as well.

And then you could also measure your lab markers and see what makes sense for

your genetics, your lab markers.

And I also do that. So I try to get as complete of a picture as I can for each thing.

So if we take vitamin C, for example, I look at my blood.

There's other markers for vitamin C as well. You could look at,

for example, hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine.

Those could be indicators of vitamin C status, which I also check for.

And you could also look at certain symptoms. For example, I've been trying to

increase my collagen production.

And the reason is because of these, basically, if I over strain certain tendons,

it could start getting a little bit of pain.

Now, what I found is if I accelerate the healing, if I increase collagen production,

accelerate healing, then I don't get that.

And so I've been trying to and I go I've

tried everything to increase collagen production vitamin c

and basically I felt I still felt like something was like slightly missing and

then when I started taking vitamin c that seemed to be the last thing that I

needed right and so it's like it's a little bit of a balancing act because I

started I did for me MSM initially had the biggest effect.

And that actually got rid of my, all my issues by over 95%. So I had,

I told him I, you know, start to get a bunch of injuries and they start to accumulate also.

And then after MSM, it all went away.

And I figured out to take MSM based on my blood markers, right?

It's a big conversation, but exactly which ones, but essentially I figured it out through that.

The software told me to take it and it showed me the blood markers.

And then, but and I've always read vitamin C is important and I was just doing

everything I was taking every precursor to increase collagen and for example

taking collagen itself didn't help at all I was taking like.

At one point, 120 grams of collagen a day and just didn't help.

And for some people, it does because it depends what your rate limiting factor

is. But for me, that wasn't it.

I was just like, all right, 15 grams is not helping. Let me try 30. Let me try 60.

Let me try whatever. Just wasn't helping.

MSM actually helped the most. And then I would say now vitamin C seemed to get

rid of that last few percentage points where it's just because vitamin C is

the rate limiting factor for collagen production.

Production so let's say i did an intracellular test

for vitamin c it might come back as normal because maybe

certain immune cells are sucking it up or whatever but that

means that there's left to go around for collagen in circulation maybe my tendons

are not sucking it up as much you want to have high levels circulating in the

blood because also there's not that much blood flow to the tendon so you want

as much vitamin c as you can get in the blood to circulate and so that it reaches the tendons.

And for some people, it might not help at all because they might have sufficient levels of vitamin C.

And let's say Liver King, I look at all of his blood markers every week and he checked vitamin C.

His vitamin C levels were great and he works out like four hours a day.

It's not for some, and for me, if I worked, if I work out four hours a day,

it just, it would suck it up.

So for me, I think the, there's obviously differences in between people.

And I think the two biggest factors for me was just infections.

Whenever your body gets an infection, just uses up vitamin C a lot. And then also exercise.

So any kind of like just increasing collagen production for recovery.

So those are two things that I think really used up vitamin C a lot. And I found that.

Just taking six grams a day, I see a difference.

I feel a difference, number one, just mentally even. I feel like it actually makes me even too calm.

Like it makes me calm. And then I also noticed the better immune system, better healing.

If you already have, let's say you're already optimizing vitamin C,

just taking a lot of vitamin C is not going to do anything.

And so that's what I think is the case for a whole bunch of these markers.

I see that there's differences between people. And just to get to one other

point that you said with LDL, it is very important for immune system and it's

also important for recovery, for healing.

And I know that. And so one of the things also for me for optimization is I

will do certain things that will make me worse in a certain way.

So for me, I have brought down my LDL.

At one point, it was like 250, right?

And I brought that, and I think it's, if I would have still been 250,

it probably would have been helpful for recovery, for injury healing,

for mood, for immune system.

There's a lot of benefits to it, but I wanted to bring it down while also not

having these issues. truth. So it's like you want the best of both worlds.

And so I do certain things to make me worse in some ways for a different benefit.

So for LDL and ApoB, I bring it down because I want to prevent heart disease.

And all the research that I've read, it's not clear.

Yes, if you have inflammation, it's worse, but it's also causal in and of itself of heart disease.

For me, again, Again, everybody could have different opinions on that.

That's how I read the research.

And so for me, I brought my LDL down to 60 in the latest test.

And it's been pretty consistent now around 60.

And my ApoB is also around 60 now. How did you do that? Through supplements and drugs.

Supplements brought it down quite a lot, at least 50%. So let's say if I were

just taking supplements, I would probably be at like 110. 10.

It's hard to figure out with the supplements exactly what does what.

I did figure out berberine helped probably the most as a single supplement,

but berberine actually causes muscle pain for me, so I stopped berberine.

So this is without berberine. It is very effective though for bringing down

LDL, let's say 20% or something.

But what I found was for me, I take a PCSK9 inhibitor and I take ezetimiol and

I take three times a week, I take benpidoic acid. it. So it's every other day.

And that brings my ApoB to 30, 60, and my LDL to 60 as well.

Even maybe even a little lower action. I have a high risk of cardiovascular disease in my genetics.

So it's important for me to prevent that. And I also have it in my family.

And also when I did it six years ago, I did a CAC scan and it actually found

that there was 0.6 calcium, which you should really just have zero.

And for me, I also have high lipoprotein A genetically.

And that comes up in my blood test as well. So I have high ApoB genetically, high LP.

And when they do these Mendelian randomization studies, they show if you have

higher ApoB, your lifespan is shorter, right?

Because it's an independent variable.

It's not looking at if you have ApoB and if you have inflammation.

It's just looking at ApoB, nothing else. If you have a genetic predisposition

for higher ApoB, nothing else, which I have, your lifespan is shorter,

which means that it's causal, right?

And this is besides the other evidence that is out there, pharmaceuticals and

other kinds of research.

When I see that kind of research, I say, hey, this is causal.

Now, Now you could, people could have their theories about it needs to be in

combination with something else.

And maybe these genetic studies are showing that it's, that it's causing heart

disease because everybody has inflammation or most people.

And therefore, but that's, we don't know. That's a theory, right?

And so for me, and some people are also going based on that when you get older,

LDL is protective, which is true.

But these Mendelian randomization studies are showing what happens when you

have low levels throughout your lifetime.

So for, at the very least, I want to keep it down until I'm like 70, 75, 80.

And I also need to bring down my lipoprotein A, which I've done. So I've.

Brought down my lipoprotein A by 50%, and my LDL went down from 40 to 60,

which is quite a very significant change.

And my ApoB also went down quite a lot.

People listening to this might be like, whoa, this guy knows a lot.

He's been reading the research, doing all these things, testing. Sounds complicated.

Now, actually, it's easy because of the tool you have built that knows all the research,

will take in your lab results and it will provide you the dietary justifications

and recommendations on why you should take something more, why you should take something less.

And it does take into account these genetic predispositions and it will explain to you why.

Now, can you talk a little bit about that and how comprehensive it is compared

to other genetic tests out there that seem to be more focused on the ancestral

or you could even say disease risk.

And I think optimizing a genetic test from a medical healthcare,

pharmaceutical standpoint is very different than optimizing it for longevity,

preventive healthcare and dietary intake.

So can you speak a little bit about the product that you have built?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple things that I think are quite unique and

important. One is prediction.

So it's not so much like taking one brand of supplements versus another.

It's not the difference between Mercedes and just Toyota Camry.

Or Toyota Corolla, both drive, both are, you could get from A to B.

When it comes to genetics, if the technology is not good, and I'm sorry to say

that the industry is just rife with shit technology.

It's really just, it's a very big problem in the industry because people don't

know the difference before you buy it, at least, right?

It's easy to just say to somebody, yeah, we have the best, whatever.

But if you don't have, if it's not good, it's actually worthless and even potentially harmful.

You want to actually have, and the only way to know if it's good is if it's validated.

So you need to look at public biobanks and see how good your predictions are

based on a bunch of different metrics, like how well can you predict different conditions?

And so that's what we've done. And the results are that it's the most accurate in the industry.

Now, other companies are not doing this. And if they did, I would guarantee

that it It would be more or less almost a coin flip between if their predictions

are correct or not. So that's the sad state of the industry.

So that's one of the aspects that is very important in terms of value, what you have, right?

Now, there's certain things like checking APOE, APOE4, that you don't need any

significant technology to do.

Or MTHFR, that's stuff that we do, and it doesn't require any significant technology.

And so some of these companies are just dealing with these genetic variants

plus some other genetic variants that people are interested in.

The other genetic variants that people are interested in are often not significant

enough to really predict anything.

So because it's only accounting for like maybe 1% of the change in a certain trait.

So it's just not predictive enough.

So it's important that a company uses sophisticated AI and they validate it.

The technology, which is what we do. And that is very expensive.

And that's why companies do not do it. It's just extremely expensive to do.

And a lot of genetic testing companies out there, they don't even actually build

or how would I say the underlying technology is not even theirs.

They have just built an interface for it.

So all the lab, everything is done by someone else, all the research, everything.

And they're just providing basically a report. A PDF.

And that's the second aspect of it as well. So there's the actual underlying

genetics technology, and then there's the application, the software that goes

into it. How sophisticated is that?

And what is just a PDF, right? It's static.

There's no real recommendations database.

We have 100,000 studies in the system and all these recommendations that are

showing how it interacts with each condition and each lab test.

And we take all the information into account in order to prioritize recommendations.

And we show you what we're taking into account so you could see,

you could follow along in a certain way.

The software is the other element. So the genetics is one.

We can give you a PDF report of here's all your genetic risks and here's... and that's that.

The other is like an interactive system where you can put in information and...

The recommendations are dynamic. They're changing based on what you input.

So you could put in symptoms and conditions. You could put in goals.

And then as you input more information, the recommendations actually change.

You could input lab tests. You could fill out questionnaires for your lifestyle

history, like what's relevant if you were dropped on your head as a kid,

or there's certain lifestyle things that play a role.

Have you gotten these kinds of infections or whatever? whatever.

And then there's, yeah, and then there's the lab tests. And so you want to combine

all these types of information together.

We built a system essentially how I look at health.

And that's the way I see it is it's extremely complex and very multifactorial.

So the way I used to do it is I would say, okay, I'm going to take this supplement for this one reason.

And I've since, I've gotten away from that system because otherwise you're going

to be taking a thousand supplements every day, right?

So, what I figured out was you can't just do something for one reason,

right? I don't take anything generally for one reason.

I take it usually for multiple reasons. Either it helps multiple labs or it

helps multiple symptoms or conditions that I've had in the past, helps multiple goals,

multiple genetic risks in the future, or because I have a high genetic risk

for cardiovascular disease, I'm not going to just start taking a whole bunch

of supplements that are helpful for cardiovascular disease.

Now, it's one factor, it's an important one, but I still want to look at how

this thing helps with all these other things.

Just with the chromium example, right?

I'm not going to, maybe now I would take chromium just for mood because it was

actually quite strong for me.

But the idea was that I'm actually taking chromium for a bunch of different reasons.

Blood sugar, cholesterol, mood, and just a bunch of other reasons.

So what I realized is you want to try to look as big of a picture as possible

and make decisions based on that.

And also, in addition, we take into account certain genetic variants that we could show you.

Sometimes you have a genetic variant that makes you more likely to do well with

something for a specific condition.

So taking all that information into account is very important,

whereas the other companies are just taking into account genetic variants, and that's it.

And here's the typical genetic testing company.

They're looking at anywhere between 50 and 100 genetic variants.

So they're not using polygenic, sophisticated polygenic risk score. It's not validated.

And then they're making some recommendations just based on a couple of genetic

variants without knowing anything about you.

And if they do make recommendations, some of them don't, but they're making

certain recommendations just based on one or two genetic variants.

Hey, you've got this genetic variant, you should do this. It actually makes

zero sense because you have 100 million genetic variants, 200 million,

right? So you have to look at,

All of these factors. And the reason why people don't do that is because it's

very complex. That's why you need software.

So it's just... And what I found is this approach is just amazing.

When you do it this way, the results are unbelievable.

And now I see people doing things in other ways. It just looks like they're

living in a stone age a little bit.

I agree. Most software out there is really bad.

Now, let's take the point of view of a typical customer on the market right now.

And they're looking at the genetic test if they have

done a test they would be like oh i've done already a gene

test i don't need another one now here is

the point that most of the software that is out there is not taking your individual

context into account it's not basically taking your lab results or your behaviors

or anything into account to give your recommendations just like you said it

will change the other thing is they are not looking at enough information even on the gene side.

So they're just looking at a few variants, giving advice. So yeah,

there is statistical correlation between certain variants and certain things and certain intakes.

But in the end, if you want to optimize that further, so that you figure out

what is the 20% of things that will result in 80% of improvement in your case

this week, this month, this year, not just for the lifetime,

that is where you need this kind of software.

Now, can you maybe talk a little bit about how people can assess that the test

they did is actually even a good starting point, is actually providing enough data?

What should they ask for? Is there like different generations of genetic testing

that they can ask for? Is there a certain amount of variance?

You mentioned that. Yeah, I'll talk about that.

That's actually a great question. So let's say if somebody were to say, oh, I did a test.

I'd like to upload it to your system. Okay, so there's a couple factors to understand.

Number one, if the test only looked at 1,000 variants or a few thousand or even

100,000, we can't take it in because what we do is we,

these chips will have, let's say, anywhere between 700,000 and a million variants around.

And what we do is we have very special techniques and software to be able to

predict what all of your other variants are.

So you can actually do that because if you have a million letters in a book,

with AI you can figure out what the rest of the book is talking about.

You can fill in, just by basically just by having certain letters,

it could understand the patterns and say, okay, based on this pattern,

this is what the whole sentence would say.

Right and so that's what we do but if you only have a thousand letters in the

book in a 200 million page book we can't help you out right we cannot figure

out what's going on there so that's number one that we cannot do anything with that test.

The other thing is, even if you get a test that has this, these number of variants,

each chip that you do the test with is a little different.

And when we do quality control and validation, we're using our chip.

Like we use a very specific chip and it could be that a different chip is maybe

just as better or just as good.

Generally we have, it's the best one, but let's say somebody else could have

something just as good technically.

The problem is that we've trained our system on

our chip and so all the quality control

and all the all the validation is on that chip when you

use a different one probably 90 of

the results are going to be the same but you don't know right it's just it could

be significant differences sometimes or even whole genome sometimes people do

whole genome it could be complete shit and we see these files and we look at

them and the team says it's complete shit, right? It's like garbage data.

So we recommend doing the test with us, right?

And certain features we only give based on our test because we're afraid that

if it messes up the results, we don't want people to get bad results and we

want to be as sure as possible that they're getting the best results possible.

So we recommend just doing the test with us to get the best results.

And the results do change. I've uploaded a 23andMe file and 20% of my results changed with our chip.

And what we have is more, it's more accurate.

Partially also because when you download the file, they strip it down.

There's a couple reasons. Number one is we get the file directly from the lab.

And the VCF file has a lot more data that you don't get when you download a text file.

That's one. One, two is it's what we have is geared, like I said,

to validate it to our chip.

And so everything is more accurate with our chip. And again,

it's not even necessarily that the other chips are bad or whatever.

Some of them can be bad, right? But the idea is that it's also the software

that goes into it is quite important and it's geared towards what we're doing.

We just recommend people get our chip. If somebody is very against that,

they could still use the system, right?

We allow it, but there's certain, the medical reports, certain,

we have this longevity screener product that we just released.

That one you cannot use without our chip.

There's certain products that we feel like are too important to,

if it's 20% off, we're not ready to give you bad results.

So that's how I would explain the testing from other companies.

It basically, just to To summarize it, a lot of them are not doing the proper testing. Not good.

Some of them are going to be selling your data, like 23andMe.

And even if everything was great, it's still problematic, right?

Yes, this all sounds good. And I can basically confess that this whole market

of testing that I'm very familiar with,

self-decode is definitely the one that shines on the top, especially for those

people who want to really optimize their diet and lifestyle. style.

And all the information about heritage and disease risk, all of that's interesting, of course.

But I think in the end, the question is, what can I practically do today to prevent all of that?

And you have one of the best platforms out there.

And also, it's very intuitive to use. It's awesome. There's a lot of effort

that has gone into it. So congratulations for that.

People can learn more about that at selfdecode.com.

And we're working with Joe in the future to combine that with the lab testing

that we are offering for people to do at home.

So that's the follow habits that is able to measure the intracellular values,

the bloodstream side of things, and the markers we are looking at are the things

that are relevant for longevity.

Because most labs are looking at illness. So that's why they would look at things

like liver values or kidney values and all that.

So there's a question of, is there like a risk for immediate medical concern.

But if you are optimizing for longevity, you would look at nutritional markers.

You would even look at amino acids.

You would look at micronutrients. You could look at even at NAD.

And those are not something that would immediately signify a life-threatening

condition, just liver value or kidney value would.

The recommendation is to do both.

And SelfDecode has on its platform this lab test analyzer where you can also

upload your traditional additional

test results as well to take those into account, which is awesome.

Preventing immediate concerns and also for long-term benefit.

And the whole testing market is evolving very rapidly.

The test that we are doing, it used to cost basically thousands of dollars and

now it's like just hundreds.

So the cost has come down significantly in the last few years.

The same is with genetic testing and what information you get out.

It's not just the test that it used to cost a lot and now it's cheaper to get more variants.

With SelfDecode, you get a lot more information out of your DNA,

but you're actually getting a lot more information out because of the correlation

with other types of data, because of the platform that they have built that

is able to take into account these contextual variables.

So that's why I think what he's doing is awesome and what the company is doing

is awesome. And I recommend people to check it out.

And if you have done a self-deco test, we will provide integration on our platform,

on the HoloHabits platform in the future to bring in all the data.

So if you do it once, you will get the data in.

But as a tool on its own, it's something really worth paying for a monthly subscription

for because with that software, you are getting all these contextual recommendations

that keep on evolving as you evolve.

If you want to get the kind of results Joe has received and also understand

your blood work and nutrition and supplementation at the level he does.

It's all basically concentrated.

Into that software and the quality of studies they're using behind it.

You started from self-hacked, which was collecting all the information around certain topics.

And then you got into the testing market and building a software.

So you're a pioneer in a lot of this, of assembling and bringing together the

relevant information, tests, perspectives.

And in the end, we don't know everything yet. And this is a evolving market.

You are testing things on yourself.

You're looking if it makes any sense, if the studies make any sense.

And that's the biohacking ethos is like, you shouldn't just believe what you read.

You just shouldn't believe all the marketing that is out there.

And like you said, you shouldn't believe in single variables alone.

You have to look at it from multiple angles and perspectives and your unique variables.

We keep on adding information all the time and the system keeps getting updated.

So it's really a dynamic system.

And I would also recommend you use the, have you used the GPT feature yet?

Essentially, you can ask any question to your genes and lab tests and it'll

give you the answer with a GPT. So it's a very cool feature.

Very cool. Thank you so much, Joe, for this in-depth interview.

A lot of practical things I learned a lot.

And people, if they want to learn more, they can go to selfdecode.com and get the test.

Now, where can they follow you on social media?

Yeah, so they can follow me on social media at MrBiohacker.

And yeah, I really appreciated it, Timo. Always very interesting to talk to

you. You always have good insights.

And thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Thank you so much and have a healthy rest of the week.

Music.