The Biohacker's Biohacker - Teemu Arina - #086

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Howdy, friends. My trip to America is coming to a close, and we will be back to two episodes a week as of next Monday. But I'm finishing off my trip with an incredibly interesting guest. Teemu Arina is the author of The Biohacker's Handbook, and is about as close to a cross between Tony Stark, Ben Greenfield, and kind of like a crazy Dr. Frankenstein type guy from Finland that you're ever going to find. He is an unbelievable repository for knowledge about how the human system works, how we can manipulate it using technology, food, diet, sleeping cycles, absolutely everything. I was totally unprepared for his depth and breadth of knowledge. This is one of those episodes that I will be going back to to listen to a number of times myself because I missed it as it was happening. So that tells you what you're in for. Please welcome Teemu Arina.

**Teemu Arina** (1:20)
The way how you pronounce it in correct Finnish is teemu.

**Chris Williamson** (1:24)
I'm not gonna be able to recreate that.

**Teemu Arina** (1:26)
Yeah, but you can do the English version, which is teemu.

**Chris Williamson** (1:29)
Teemu arena.

**Teemu Arina** (1:30)
Yeah, that's good. It's all good. Thank you. Sounds great.

**Chris Williamson** (1:34)
I'm basically Finnish now.

**Teemu Arina** (1:39)
You're working on your way.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
I'm adopted. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Teemu Arina, author of The Biohacker's Handbook, an all-round fascinating guy. Welcome to the show.

**Teemu Arina** (1:52)
Wonderful to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:53)
I am getting big podcast studio envy of the lovely setup that you have in front of you.

**Teemu Arina** (2:01)
Yeah, I mean, I do a lot of things nowadays online, and it was only like a couple of weeks ago, I was presenting to a huge Russian IT technology conference. And I don't like travel nowadays that much because I've been doing 100 talks a year for the last five, six years. So I just like to hang around in my studio and I figured out that, you know, this is the best way to do it. So I can do live streams anyway, and in great audio, great video. So I love it doing this way. And it also helps me to keep my daily routines, which is, I mean, as a biohacker, you want to maximize your productivity and recovery and all that. But if you fly in to a conference for what? Giving a 30-minute or one-hour talk, and you spend time in airplanes and in public transport and eating all kinds of crappy whatever, you know, airport or conference food, I think it's more efficient to just stay here. I might not, you know, make those face-to-face connections, but if I met the people before, that's the way I prefer to do it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:11)
I totally get it, man. Yeah, there's an interesting sort of two camps of people, as far as I can see. There's people who understand that trying to focus on efficiency and marginal gains in the way that you've alluded to there is something which is kind of what everything else emerges from. And if you look after those small things, that everything else comes along as a byproduct. And then there are the people who see that as a byproduct, as a normal part of life. It's like, no, no, well, I've got to get on the plane because I got to go to the thing. And that's the way it's got to be done.

**Teemu Arina** (3:47)
You got it. You got it. It's basically one of the principles of biohacking is the daily decrease. How do you decrease the amount of useless things that you shouldn't be doing? And basically looking for what is the 20% that will give you the 80% of results and output. That was Italian mathematician Mr. Pareto, who actually first devised and outlined the fact that in many things in economy, nature, workplaces everywhere is based on the 20-80 principle. So for example, 20% of people produce 80% of results. If you take any kind of ant nest, actually we think that ants are extremely hardworking, guys and girls, all of them. But actually most of them are slacking. Is that true? Yeah, they did some studies on ant nest and they realized that 80% of them are actually slacking around and not really doing much. So there is a small number who is always doing the work. So what I'm saying is that, it's up to you if you wanna be focusing your time on the 80% that will result in only 20% of the results or if you wanna seek for the 20% that will result in 80% of improvement. So with that, I mean, you can't optimize everything. You can't really predict everything.