Teemu Arina: The Dark Side of Biohacking and Personal Development

Teemu Arina: Creating a Healthy Relationship with Biohacking | Honoring Yourself and Others

00:00.000 Andres Preschel
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04:10.760 Teemu Arina
I appreciate that. Yeah, I can't wait to delve into the darker side of all the beauty that comes out of optimizing your health and performance. The whole personal development industry is a very positive industry in a way. Like you want to find your personal mastery. But, you know, people are often coming into it with all kinds of shadows and things they are not really aware of or are not looking at. And just one thing that led to another that leads into, you know, trying to optimize their health. But it can be also with entrepreneurship. I also see that in entrepreneurial people and entrepreneurial communities, also from the research that is coming out of executives, people who are in power positions and all that. They're never happy. They never feel fulfilled. They never feel 100% perfect in what they do. And it's kind of a very unique character who ends up doing these things and never gave up and is kind of ready to sacrifice themselves in the process in a way. And that's kind of the deeper shadow or dark side of biohacking and personal development in general. And often the gurus that we look at, we look highly up. For advice and guidance, they often are as broken as we are. And we're kind of being led. It's kind of like being in a mental asylum and the inmates are basically the hospitalized patients are running the whole show. That's kind of like how I see it in a caricature at its worst. I mean, people have heard of all kinds of cults and religious communities and all that. There's a lot of cultish behaviors when it comes to not just health and biohacking and spirituality, but also entrepreneurship. I used to go for a decade into startup conferences run by investors and startups. And it has this kind of cultish feel to it in a sense. And there is a lot of trauma that drives this kind of behavior. And it's been very fascinating to kind of dig into it.
06:43.720 Andres Preschel
Yeah. And I mean, these are all topics and themes that I can't wait to dive into with you and explore. And just as a recent reference, I will say that being at the Health Organization conference, I actually noticed a lot of this in some of the people that I looked up to. I'd see them in their flesh. And of course, being a leader in this space and being in an event like this is overwhelming. It is stressful, I'm sure. But the way that they were approaching that was different from what I would have expected, from what I expected, really. And some of these people, honestly, my impression of them after meeting them in person was a bit tainted. Most of them were amazing. And I had the chance to do some podcasts with some amazing, amazing individuals while I was there. I had a chance to meet them and mingle with them and spend some time. But yeah, there certainly was a theme of, you know, they were in a way burnt out. They were just being total perfectionists and getting in their own ways and more. You know, symptoms of just not being who they were, what they stand for and what they were sitting out to be to begin with. So do you think that there's a relationship between, like, I'll put it this way, a lot of the people that have what it takes to be leaders, maybe they have that sort of leadership face value and people look up to them because of what they appear to be. But do you think that by the other side of the token is that in fact, they are not that same person deep down? Do you think that there's a sort of disconnect that gives them the face value that attracts that kind of lifestyle and inspires others, but at the same time, they are neglecting themselves? Do you think that's a very, very common thing? And is there any science to support something like that?
08:32.360 Teemu Arina
Absolutely. If we reverse engineer what's going on there, they're kind of victims of their own success in a sense. Let's start from the beginning. So many of them have a wounding story. So they have some health issues, gut issues, maybe brain fog, maybe metabolic syndrome, health issues, stuff like this. So in Carl Jung's work, it's called the wounded healer. And wounded healer is basically a Greek concept. So immortal Chiron was the master of healing arts, and he was poisoned by the arrow of Heracles. And that arrow turned him from an immortal into a mortal. So we often grow up thinking we are invincible and we'll live forever and all that. And it's often in your 20s, early teens, when you're growing up, your body does kind of forgive you a little bit more. You can stay up late, you have endless energy, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff, eat all kinds of stuff, party late nights, all that. But once you become a bit older, and as symptoms of or pathological behaviors accumulate, maybe you don't sleep enough, maybe you're overstressed all the time, you're pushing yourself too much for your dreams, something breaks up at some point. And that's kind of the wounding story. So many of the leaders in this space have a story like that. And it's kind of their origin story. It's part of their story, and they're kind of it's part of their narrative. We construct our identities through narratives, through our life experiences and events. And this kind of event is pretty drastic. It's all cataclysmic. It's like an earthquake that wipes through everything. And people in those situations, they're kind of like stopped on their tracks, and they have to reevaluate what they do, and why they do, and how they do it. And when they go through a kind of a hero's journey, hero's journey in Joseph Campbell's structure is kind of the classical hero's journey. If you take Lord of the Rings or Star Wars movies, you're basically just Luke Skywalker or just the ring bearer in the beginning. I mean, just your regular guy in the beginning. And then there is a call to adventure in a way. And the call to adventure here is that you want to build your business or career or whatever. And then you meet some extreme challenges in your life. So that's the wounding experience. And when you go through the dark abyss, you often meet mentors, guides, etc. that help you out of it. So you kind of meet your Gandalf in a way. And through that training, through meeting Yoda or whatever, guru, or if it's a health problem, maybe you investigate your problem and you find someone or something or some community or some supplement or whatever. Usually you look for someone who went through what you went through, or what you're going through, who has that origin story. I was inflamed, overweight, my brain was not working, and all kinds of multiple symptoms and issues. And then you want to emulate that person because they have a story of how they got healed. So you start to copy behaviors. Like let's say in this case, you would start from diets or lifestyle or daily routines. When people want to get into shape, they often want diet meal plans. They want to have clear instructions of what they should do in the morning. The most typical question is what is your morning routine? What is your evening routine? All of that. And you become quite fanatic also in it. You want to follow it rule by rule, point by point, because you trust at least that illusion that it's going to work out. And you do your own investigations. And in the end, you emerge. You become Luke Skywalker, you become a hero who has matured, has grown up, has overcome challenges, and you are reborn as this new version, better version of yourself. And the whole story of biohacking is, and one of the definitions of it is also, how do you become a better version of yourself? As if the current version is not good enough. So there is this lack that drives to be better and the fact that you emerge out of that, you have an emotional connection to it because you went through it. It's very touching. There's a lot of deep emotional concepts there that led to the wounding experience in the first place and then the healing experience itself. So there's a lot of emotion connected to it. So you become kind of almost fanatic. You want to spread the message. You want to tell everyone. So many of these people, they find their outlet then on social media. So I see the followers of these gurus becoming gurus themselves. It's kind of like you emulate mastery. You go to Tony Robbins conferences. You want to be like Tony Robbins. So you go to a biohacking conference. You want to be like Dave Asprey or you want to be like Ben Greenfield because at least they portray, they kind of mirror back, they show you aspects of mastery and you want to be like that. So you start to copy different aspects. Maybe you get on a bulletproof diet. You have all these, I call them gang signs. You have blue light blocking glasses. You have kind of cultural elements or icons that you use. There's these certain things like let's say it's a keto diet or you're a carnivore or whatever. So you become quite fanatic on some concepts or maybe you're a vegan even. Maybe you are on a raw diet. Maybe you're juicing. Maybe you're fasting. These behaviors and also the way how you kind of communicate to others that, hey, I'm part of this crew. I'm part of this tribe. It's almost like tribal body paints or signs that tribal communities put on their bodies to communicate to others what they are part of. It's a very instinctive primal feature of being human. You also kind of develop a certain language, but it's like in any profession you develop specific language that you use. So there are certain words that people have, let's say mitochondria or circadian rhythm. There's like these terms that keep on coming out and you kind of feel that you belong into something and it can be very euphoric. So you start to build your own audience. Also there's people who maybe resonate with you more or your friends who see the transformation in you. They also want to be like you. So there's a lot of beauty in it in a way and it's completely normal. I mean all humans, we have mirror cells, we imitate, we learn by observation. I've done quite a lot of martial arts for example and the Japanese styles, they don't speak, they don't tell you what to do. They ask you to observe, like you copy masters and you get punished if you don't do it properly. You try again, you try again until you can imitate the master. But in the end it's all about developing your own art and that's what Bruce Lee did. He developed his own jet, so he integrated different things and brought his own. So ideally that progress leads to a place where you're not just imitating mastery but you develop your own art in a sense. So there are all these influencers who have very specific domains. Like someone is specifically focused on quantum health or someone's very specifically focused on carnivore diets or someone is very specifically focused on circadian rhythms or metabolism in general. Or maybe hormones is all. And on social media these things become amplified. So because we want easily understandable things, we seek masters who are representative of, you could say, an extreme or like a very narrow, easy to understand area. Because health is super complex, you want to simplify it. So maybe you start to believe that keto is the answer to everything, so then you find a keto guru. And of course if you go to social media you find all kinds of keto, Mike, keto, Mary, keto, this and that. It's in the identity, so it becomes an identity. Imagine if suddenly one day you're a keto Mike and you realize that keto doesn't work for me anymore or like maybe I should try something else. You have to like, I mean you can't do it. It's deeply engraved in your identity. It's like in the times when Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, the other scientists at the time when he was alive, they didn't accept his theory because they represented their identity, was attached to a theory that was more based on the Newtonian physics. And they didn't accept his theory until they were dead. So they went to grave without accepting his theory. So it required a whole like transition of a whole like generation of people who resonated more and understood more the pioneering work of Einstein for that shift to happen. Now we see that in health and wellness, like we go through different cycles and it's often we have these like caricatures or characters or extremists who believe that one thing, one size fits all. So it used to be things like seed oils were suddenly like the cure for cardiovascular disease. Now it's ridiculated. It's kind of the past generation. It's like the Newtonian science. And now the new thing is that actually saturated fats might be useful. So there's this whole extreme focus on let's say butter and MCT oil combination as an intake of dietary fats. But like I'm sidestepping a little bit, but to come back into this whole topic, how this process kind of unfolds is that you become an expert on something. You want to learn everything about it and you become very knowledgeable about it. You start to post about it online. And what happens is in psychology, there's this concept called the looking glass effect. And what is a looking glass effect? It is the awareness that other people are listening to you and are observing you and are following what you do. And when you produce content and you get likes and you get shares, you get basically feedback, you get positive reinforcement, you get validation that, hey dude, this was awesome, like great stuff. And it's often an echo chamber because you're being followed by people who bought into this whatever thing. So you actually are in a narrow mindset. You don't see outside of the box because everyone who is congratulating you, they can be hundreds or thousands of people. They're actually a small subset of society. And they all tell you, hey, this is the right answer. This is perfect. And so what happens, gurus, they start to believe their own bullshit. So they start to believe it's the only approach. But at the same time, they subconsciously also build up a lot of pressure to be that guy, to be the leader, to be this caricature. So basically what happens, the audience caricaturizes you. So they expect you to be Keto Mike, so Keto everything. For them, their reality would probably shatter to see that you're not on a Keto diet, that you're actually having a burger. So what Keto Mike can't do, he can't have a burger. He needs to be Keto all the time. So that extreme pressure to be something, that can drive you totally crazy. So there becomes a disconnect between your true self, your ambitions. Maybe you lose interest in Keto stuff. You've been doing it for years, but you just rely on it. Your income relies on it. Your audience is expecting you to be like that. And this, I mean, just to give a simple example, musical artists, they go through this kind of cycle. They can feel extreme pressure to be this artist, to represent something to their audience. If you take Mr. Bean, the actor, I don't remember even what his real name is. I have no clue. I'm the worst person to ask. Yeah, but he's still Mr. Bean for everyone, even for me. I don't even remember his real name. Or Luke Skywalker, same thing. He can't even watch his movies. Mr. Bean, if I remember correctly, he can't really even like, he kind of hates to be always Mr. Bean. They want to have new role models in movies. So it's kind of like you're a musical artist, you make one hit. Your audience expects you to produce the same kind of hits, same kind of music. So you start to kind of repeat yourself in a way. And it becomes a big duel. You're not creative. You're not innovating, but it's also, that's what the audience is expecting. If you try something completely different, they might abandon you. Or there is this fear of abandonment. Most likely, they won't, but you have this pressure and you feel like you need to keep up with what people are expecting from you. So this social interaction, it's kind of a mirror and it kind of mirrors back to you who you are. So what you start to build online is an alter ego. So there's a version of you online. And I mean, everyone does it on social media. We create a character and that character, the life it lives, the events it goes through, what it sees, what it does. It's your own creation. It's actually a subset of who you really are. And it actually is almost encouraged. If you go to any branding guru, you don't want to be all these things. You don't want to post. If you want to build a professional channel, you want to narrow things. You want to be a keto Mike. You can't be all these other things simultaneously. You can be the artist Mike, or you can't be this and that Mike. You need to be keto Mike because otherwise your audience, they will be confused. They can't recognize who you are and what you do. So the more extreme you become, the more of a caricature you become, the more followers you will get, the more validation you get, and the more crazy this whole thing goes. And in psychology, there is another term, concept, it's called the proteus effect. It's the tendency for people to become their avatars. So you kind of create an avatar online. It's a made-up character. It kind of has half-truth in it and you try to become it in a sense. And there's intrinsically nothing wrong about it, to create these fantastic characters. And some people even do it deliberately and intentionally. In music, I think Lady Gaga was famous for that, creating these characters intentionally, making it an art form. But some people start to take themselves a little bit too serious in this whole thing. But deep inside, they feel that what if they can't be that character? What if they can't live like, let's say, your circadian rhythm, John, and you can't live perfect circadian rhythm every day? So deep inside, you go into depression, potentially. You have depressive thoughts and all that. You have coping mechanisms that you go into. And people tend to, when people expect them to be in a certain way, they secretly even want to do the opposite sometimes. Let's say you're this healthy person who never drinks. Maybe you just have self-destructive thoughts, even of just getting a bottle of vodka and drinking it. And this is happening, actually. It's almost like a bypass. I remember Ben Greenfield, he actually spoke about this in one podcast. When he went through a healing ceremony, he was just lying on the floor to my memory and just feeling aloud, what if I can't be this superhero to everyone all the time? What if there is a day when I want to take a break from being Ben Greenfield? So even the biggest role models that we have in this whole health optimization biking field, they feel sometimes they don't want to be that guy. And sometimes we see this breakdown publicly. You kind of see in someone that they don't really look that healthy anymore. There's something going on, but they still communicate and portray an image of perfect health. And there's this disconnect. I don't want to give any names, but people can probably come up with who that might be or who those people might be. They talk about health, they're very extremist in their thoughts, and they speak about all the strategies they use, but there's something off. It seems like they're not happy, it seems like they're not really that healthy, it seems like there's something off. And often your intuition is right. They're struggling inside to keep up being that character. Now, what I've been very interested in looking at is what kind of leads into that. And maybe there is a childhood mechanism that almost certain types of people or certain personalities are more likely to end up as these kind of gurus or extremists on whatever. Take Elon Musk in terms of entrepreneurship, for example, he's a role model. Mark Zuckerberg is also a role model for some people. Why do people like him exist? Where do they come from? Elon Musk has like, he's not satisfied to one company or one achievement. When he made an exit from PayPal, he had more ideas to get himself into. And now he's doing Tesla and he's doing Neuralink and he's doing Hyperloop and he's doing this and that, and Twitter, and never happy. And when you look at his family, he has six, seven marriages or whatever, how many children, seems like he's never satisfied. And there's this emptiness that drives, you achieve something and you feel like, okay, I achieved my dream, my goal, now what? And the whole personal development industry is all about dreaming your goal, what I want to manifest in the world, and then all the methods and tools that help you to focus on achieving that goal. Once you achieve that, are you happier? Most often not. You have the next thing that you feel I need to achieve to be happy. And then there's another thing and another thing, it's like this constant chase for something. So in my mind, if you take someone who drives himself to the edge of health breakdown and recovers from it, he's replacing one control mechanism with another one. In this case, the extremist behavior that led into the breakdown of the body in the first place, that led into the wounded experience, is now being replaced by extremist thoughts in terms of health and wellness and driving that thing to the extreme. So you just have one perfectionist approach that led to impossible situations. And then you have another behavior just replacing it. Maybe it's not as toxic, but in the end, in its core, you haven't really dealt with the reason why you got sick in the first place, why you got into this dark place in the first place. And there are certain personality types and certain characteristics that are more likely to do this. And when we look at the studies of people who are, let's say, entrepreneurial, who are pushing the boundaries, the boundary pushers, in a sense, senior executives in companies, founders, there was a study where they took the psychopathy traits, kind of gold standard test to measure psychopathy, psychopathic traits in people. And they looked at senior managers, then they looked at prison inmates, people who committed crimes, and then they looked at mental hospitals and the patients there. And interestingly, they found that senior executives had more psychopathic traits than prison inmates and hospitalized patients in the psychopathic trait scales. And they looked into the differences, why these other people are imprisoned and in hospitals and why these other people are thriving in society and running society. And they discovered that they didn't, what was different to senior managers was that they didn't have sociopathic or antisocial tendencies or self-destructive behaviors. So kind of this pathological behavior didn't lead into dangerous situations to other people or themselves that would end up them being locked up.
33:02.240 Andres Preschel
So sorry to interrupt real quick, but they had the same, they even had more of those... They have more psychopathic traits. Stig Brodersen More psychopathic traits, but they didn't have a certain trait where now they actually engaged in the behavior?
33:15.280 Teemu Arina
Stig Brodersen So no, they did engage in psychopathic behaviors and traits. One of those could be being extremely goal-oriented, having lying, selfish behaviors, and taking advantage of people very deliberately. Basically like Stig Brodersen changing reality to their favor constantly. Like basically manipulation, manipulative behaviors. And these manipulative behaviors were more evident actually in senior managers, especially supply chain managers. You can also see Stig Brodersen these high psychopathic traits in doctors, especially surgeons for some reason. Maybe it's just they're super interested in just cutting people open and they have no emotion attached to it. They want to be the best in it. It's also very often in lawyers, priests, politicians. And if you look at average societal numbers, it depends on the test that we use for looking at psychopathic traits, looking at the gold standard. So average American population, 1.2% have a psychopathic trait in these studies. 4.5% is another measure that comes out on another like battery of tests. So let's say it's 1.2 to 4.5%. Now in senior managers, it's 20%. So when you work for a successful company, one in five has psychopathic traits who ends up on the top of the food chain. So if you look at presidents of nation states, and also leaders like monarchists or feudal, like barbaric leaders, whatever, all of them had to have very specific characteristics that they're even able to do stuff like that. Because it's very calculative. One of the psychopathic traits is that you're extremely calculative. And when you're extremely calculative, you're very goal oriented, and you're ready to manipulate things into your favor. And in this case, you're doing it because the country's interest requires it. So if you have leaders of countries, presidents or kings or monarchs or whatever, like the manipulative tendencies that you're doing in favor of your country, that you're doing in favor of your country, the agenda, the interests of different interest groups, your interests, you deeply and genuinely feel that you need to do certain things. And in companies also, there's a great documentary called The Corporation. It's called The Corporation. And it looks at the psychopathic tendencies of organizations. You can say a country can also be diagnosed as a psychopath. I think there are many countries that we can say it's absolutely psychopathic in its behaviors, but organizations also are. Often the people running it, individuals in the organization might not be, but collectively they show psychopathic traits. So if you think of Nazi Germany, for example, many people got involved in this machinery. And people who were guards in prison camps, for example, or concentration camps, they would do horrible things, but they would be able to disassociate out of it because they felt, I mean, this is not my decision, but it's in the interest of the country or it's in the interest of my superiors. So people collectively can stand to show these kind of tendencies. And it's often a copy of its leader. So on the top of the food chain, there is just like a lunatic. And this is how our world is run today, in a sense, if you really look closely into it. If you look at any of the big world superpowers, would you say that that person is someone you would go for personal advice in terms of, you know, what is the best way to advise in terms of, you know, your psychological and spiritual problems? Do you believe they will be able to help you with that? Probably not, because you kind of intuitively feel they are like messed up. And they're probably on medication, all kinds of things, just to be able to, you know, sustain that role. And if you take social media and social media influencers in this whole popularity contest on all these different platforms, to be the top dog, to be on the top of the food chain, to be the biggest YouTuber or whatever, biggest Instagram account in your domain, it requires certain behavior, certain characteristics and focus that enables you to be that guy. And actually, it's it often requires that you are emulating pathological behaviors, for example, pushing others down and lifting yourself up. And like engaging yourself in cognitive dissonance, where you are communicating things to your audience or your followers or your investors or whatever, that reflect a reality that is too good to be true, intuitively. But in fact, you say it's true. If you take Elon Musk, for example, he has always promised more than he has ever delivered to investors and to customers, to marketplace. He does deliver, yes, but not a subset of what he actually paints in terms of the dream. And like, if you are honest, and you actually tell the truth, you're not going to win this game in a sense. You're not going to be the top dog. So it can be argued that these kind of behaviors are actually favorable. Now, what happens is that people who don't have psychopathic or narcissistic tendencies, if they want to succeed in this game, they need to emulate those behaviors. And I did look into a very interesting study on the question, are these traits, psychopathic and narcissistic traits, are these inherited genetically? So is there like an internal mechanism that leads into, you know, this being passed down, that like it's inherited from your parents, it's like a genetic thing that leads to these kind of behaviors. Or is it that environmental, contextual, external factor, driven by childhood, by the parents you were with, the friends you had, the society you were born into, the workplace you went to, the relationships you had. And it turns out it's both. And it can be both independently. So there is definitely a genetic component because there is neural, there's changes in the brain that are observed across people who score very high on narcissism and psychopathy. There is certain changes, especially in emotional control, in the amygdala, there's changes in the prefrontal cortex, there is changes in insula, there's changes in the brain that are similar across the board. Now, this change can also happen through neural feedback, can also happen through life adversaries, stress, all that. So even at birth, if you didn't have any of these things and like abnormalities and all that, you can develop those things. And like childhood, traumatized, you know, life experience, all that. And also like, if you think about like how behaviors are built up, like you have positive reinforcement, you get dopamine, you get positive feedback. So if you engage yourself online into building a persona, an avatar, and you get all these like positive reinforcement, your brain will strengthen those connections. And in the end, you become a caricature, you become like an extreme version. You are no longer yourself, in a sense. And so the same changes can also develop behaviorally by imitating others. There is, of course, generational trauma also. Let's say your parents went through war, or your society was very suppressive against certain behaviors, or was very demanding environment on its own. A whole generation can be traumatized in this way, and they often do like pass on these behaviors to their children. And so what I'm saying here is that, like, this is a normal process. And if you look at the dark triad of personality types, so the dark triad is narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellism, which is basically built around Machiavelli and his doctrines as a leader of a country, which is very sadistic, opportunistic, taking advantage of different situations and all that, being a bit like persuasive, in a sense. So these dark triad behaviors that arguably are damaging and potentially dangerous to other people, we all have capability for this. We all have capability in different times of our lives for psychopathic traits, for narcissism and having Machiavellism in our behaviors, temporarily. Actually, a child in his teen years, so if you're going through puberty, almost all children based on research are actually narcissists when that happens. narcissists when that happens. And there is this very selfish, self-centered behavior. And it's a natural process of growing up. And then they kind of grow as adults and they become adults, but some people never grow up. Like they are basically children, toddlers still in an adult body, in a sense, their behaviors, their emotional control is non-existent, their impulse control is non-existent. And they behave like small children, although they are adults. And that is a classical description of narcissistic behaviors, for example. And of course, you can also go through temporary psychosis, like in different extreme situations in your lives, or you can have these kind of traits or characteristics. If you are facing a dangerous situation that is life threatening, you are more likely to save yourself before you save others. So you're not going to be like an altruistic guy. You can do like pretty drastic things just to try to escape. So many of us are capable of that, even killing another human being if the situation demands that. But in a normal functioning society, those behaviors shouldn't be very dominant. But some people do develop these kinds of stress responses in childhood, or they kind of grow up into never having an understanding of healthy relations. So they subconsciously believe or they act like their way of survival demands of them being pathologically broken and having these kind of malicious, malevolent behaviors. And so that's the dark side. So basically recognizing that we all have these capabilities and tendencies of elevating ourselves, downplaying others or competition, feeling insecure and masking that with grandiosity or greatness. We all have that. The thing is that a healthy person is able to investigate these things in themselves. They're able to honestly speak about it. One of the classical tests to see if someone has narcissistic behaviors is to call them out on their narcissistic behaviors or ask them to investigate or talk about their narcissistic characteristics. And if they are not able to honestly and humbly talk about these behaviors and maybe say that, yeah, maybe I have these tendencies or characteristics, but they would be like, no, no, I don't have those things. But you have. If they mirror it, if they turn it around that you're a narcissist or everyone else is a narcissist, or they start to talk about, yeah, you know, but you know, that person or this, like if they reflect it to something else or someone else, most likely they deep down, you know, they know that, you know, there is something wrong with them and they're not ready to look into it. And the same goes for psychopathic traits. And in the end, like the question is like, is it good or bad? Because if you think of survival, if you just like distance yourself, now when you think about the survival of the species, is this relevant? Are these behaviors relevant for bacteria for their survival? Are these behaviors relevant for humans, just like bacteria, for their survival, that they are like trying to dominate their environment, that they try to conquer new territory, that they try to eat away the competition? Is it relevant for primates to, to like, like, I mean, monkeys even have like leaders. There was actually a very interesting study on cats, that if you do a psychopathic test on cats, like all cats have psych, like basically clinical psychopathy, like all cats have strategies and behaviors that are absolutely psychopathic. Like you can give them all kinds of rewards and all that, and they try to push the boundaries. They're constantly triggering and trying to like cross the boundary, in a sense. In human societies, that is a little bit irritating, right? Like if someone is constantly trying to win all the chips and try to play everyone else down in there and just having fun doing it, that person would probably be locked up at some point. I at least hope. But in the end, um, like in nature, maybe some of these behaviors are actually beneficial. And I believe that throughout centuries, these behaviors were actually very beneficial. Like in a feudal society, having a psychopathic leader was actually beneficial. It actually probably increased your safety. It brought in resources and, and money and gold and all that, like, because you had this like crazy, ruthless leader. Usually these crazy, ruthless leaders were replaced by other crazy, ruthless leaders, so they didn't last long. Someone else took the helm. But in that kind of barbaric world, like those behaviors were beneficial. And to feel safe was actually to be led by a crazy person like that, who had like no emotional control and could like do all kinds of crazy stuff. Now in today's society, that's no longer tolerated. But what is tolerated is narcissism. So basically it's actually beneficial to be a politician and lie constantly. And like, I mean, you kind of, there is a limit to it and some countries are more tolerant than others. But arguably, if you look into Russia or U.S. like, you can kind of see the cultural, like underpinnings, kind of the typical characteristics of that society. If you think of U.S., U.S. that was built on opportunists, people who came from Europe and elsewhere to seek riches. They were explorers. They were conquering new land. They came in there, they took the land away from the indigenous people. Americans are basically at the top of an endless graveyard. It's basically an endless graveyard on the top of which they are. And the American dream is to be a self-made man, to rise to the top, to have nothing. You come in as a, let's say, an immigrant from Yugoslavia, and then you become like a super important rich person on Wall Street. That is the American dream. That's the story. And that is cherished. It's celebrated. And celebrities, like it's being celebrated. We celebrate celebrities who make that happen. They are self-made men or women. Now, it's a very typical characteristics of that society. In China, what is favorable is to be a highly connected society where everyone agrees with the same principles. Everyone's favorite color is the same color in a sense. So being very communal, very united. In Asia, that is very typical. You don't show your real emotions. You fake smile to everyone about everything. And you have this facade which is always agreeing with family, always agreeing with society. And behind the mask, there is a version of you that actually has different beliefs, but you are afraid to express those behaviors. In the US, it's actually favorable to be expressing yourself, to have different opinions, to dress differently, to walk differently, to have different things where you are the best in the world. And I think Europe is somewhere in the middle in a sense. I'm from Finland. We don't show emotions easily. We don't small talk. But we are very direct. If something is in a certain way, we say it and it is like that. We don't kiss asses in a sense. And it can be intimidating and a bit weird also for if you ask someone, how are you doing? And that's a Finnish person. That person can be like, yeah, it's been a bit hard day, man. I woke up a little bit. I didn't sleep that well. It's like, dude, you're supposed to say, I'm good. How are you doing? It's kind of like in the American way of being, it's kind of everyone knows everyone is lying all the time in a sense, in terms of their body language. But then in some cultures, it's more direct. I would say more like the Slavic style is not to smile to strangers. It's smile to friends in a sense. In the US, everyone smiles to everyone else. It's kind of like, who is my friend here? That guy seemed nice and he wanted to collaborate. And there's all these things like people would say, yeah, it would be cool to hang out at some point. And yeah, let's get together and do stuff. If you say something like that to a Finnish person, they're like, okay, let's pick up the calendar now and look when we can meet. And it can be a bit disorienting for an American. So I see there's a lot of cultural things that also play into psychopathic and narcissistic characteristics, which are actually coming from centuries ago of what was beneficial for survival on a collective level and what kind of behaviors were beneficial and copied. So the deeper you go into this, of course, there is then physiological adaptations that you're almost born with the DNA in a way. But it's super fascinating to me that we have these masks and personas. Persona, which is Latin, it actually means mask. So when you build your personality, what is that? It's a construct. What is the true self? Who is like behind the mask? That's a good question. And we can have multiple personalities. We can have multiple versions of ourselves that manifest in different situations. And sometimes it can be super disorienting to have all these different versions of you. And I think that's kind of where it really comes into play when we look at these gurus that are building illusions in your mind. So you have all these online celebrities that are building illusions in your mind of mastery and favorable characteristics. And also they are projecting that outwards and they become kind of cage animals. They become like circus animals. I like to call them circus animals. I like to call myself a circus animal. So then the question is like, who's behind the mask? Who's there? And often in the most grandiose, the most fantastic, the most goal carrier driven people, there's a lot of insecurity behind the masks, what drives their behavior. And so there's nothing bad about it. I mean, you can live a long life, but unfortunately, from health perspective, what happens is that people who have narcissistic traits, they're more likely to become alcoholics. They're also more likely to have drug dependency problems. So it actually shortens their lifespan. Also because of the narcissism, they're also hyper vigilant. Their nervous systems are overactive. They're very responsive. They lack impulse control. It's a very stressful life to have. Perfectionism, trying to build this perfect image of you, it's a very stressful life. I don't have any data, but I believe these people will actually end up living less and shorter, pushing themselves too much, dying the moment they retire. Then you have psychopathic tendencies. These people are more likely to have, when they're characterized by antisocial behaviors and all that, imagine a person like that having cocaine. They probably feel superior even more. It's kind of like, how I really feel the power in my veins. It's kind of like that. If you use nootropics and you're a psychopath, it's probably making you even more dangerous in a sense. You will enjoy doing it because it will make you even more capable of being so driven and callous and having all these selfish interests and traits in a sense. Then you have that's deeply connected with Machiavellism. One thing that is interesting also is that in terms of substance abuse and use, I spoke about Elon Musk recently. A news article came out which spoke about him that he's actually using ketamine. He's using ketamine. It's a disassociative drug. The reason why he speaks about it is because it helps him with depression. He actually doesn't say that it helps him. He says that, I've heard about people who benefit from it in terms of depression. Of course, he's talking about himself. What is the depression connected to? It's the deep insecurity inside him of seeing himself for what he is. So disassociating from that version of him that he's afraid to look at, it feels like you have a moment of relief. Ketamine is amazing. It's a good reason why it's now becoming legalized and popularized in therapy because it does help with depression. It does help with neuroplasticity to break down obsessive, compulsive behaviors and getting you out of loops. So there's that beautiful side of it, but it can also become abusive, the relationship with it. So the question with a lot of these medicines in a sense is like with every treatment with keto diet or ketamine or psychedelics or fasting or whatever, it can be a powerful tool of healing, but it can also turn against you. It can become an abusive relationship. You can fast too much. You can be too calorie restricted. Ketamine use, it can become so bad, this need to be in a disassociated space that you end up bleeding your lungs. Peeing blood because that's what it does to the urinary tract in the end. So something that is beneficial in small amounts and in moderation then turns against you in a sense. And like nothing, there is no single silver bullet in health and well-being. There is no supplement. There's no single thing. People have done high dose vitamin C. They believe one molecule might cure everything. Maybe it's vitamins or maybe it's certain amino acid or it's this and that, but it turns out that anything in excess is going to turn against you. And this is especially true with health and well-being. There's all these studies on longevity. If you take now NAD and you take NAD supplements, NMN, NR, all these things, we know that NAD levels drop as you age, but there are serious concerns coming out from academic research that if you overdo it, it's actually cancer promoting just like vitamins where like specific vitamins that your body is not able to regulate properly. It's also true to what would be a good example, telomeres. So telomere shortening was known to be one of the things that are related to aging, that your telomeres get shorter, your DNA replication, like something breaks down, like it increases risk of DNA damage over time. Now there are drugs that do increase telomere length. You can take a reductionist approach and believe that that's going to be the silver bullet, but it turns out that that's also cancer promoting in excess. So in health, in well-being, what is key is regulation of the homeostatic environment, basically the balance of things in terms of your nervous system, in terms of your metabolic system, in terms of your relationship to your environment, your friends, to nature, the bacterial diversity in your gut also requires to be in balance so that nothing is in excess. There are no opportunistic ones that are taking over. So what I see now when I spoke about the dark triad, narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism, we all have those tendencies and capabilities where it becomes detrimental to your health when it's not in balance, when it's over the board, like it's out of control in a sense. And that is a nervous system regulation issue often. And that can lead into changes in the brain that are not beneficial, for example. Those can lead into high blood pressure, can lead into things like autoimmune diseases. There are very interesting studies on the links. If you think about yourself and you face a stressful situation or something, are you more likely to act it out, basically show your emotions, or are you more likely to suck it in? Are you more likely to suppress your emotions and act like it's nothing, like it's easy? Which way would you more likely lean towards?
01:05:03.280 Andres Preschel
I am a person that is mostly driven by logic when it comes to difficult scenarios. I've had a chance to explore more of my emotional response and my emotional needs, spending time with my girlfriend. Honestly, I think she's helped me figure out and put into words how these emotions might be influencing me and my decision making and allowing myself to be in the vulnerable position where I can discuss them and then receive the guidance and the wisdom that I need to make the best decision. So, to make a long story short, I'm someone that can just very quickly shake things off and just go right into what logically makes sense to me. But as of recent, because that has quite literally bitten me in the ass, as you can imagine, I have certainly been more in touch with my emotions and I've allowed myself to be more vulnerable with my emotions, especially when I'm dealing with other people. And oftentimes, if not all the time, that's the case. So, I'm a recovering, not emotional responder to difficult decisions.
01:06:14.480 Teemu Arina
So, you've been basically not showing your emotions strongly, you've been just explaining yourself out of it, just suppressing maybe those emotions.
01:06:22.640 Andres Preschel
Yeah. And if I can quickly jump in here, a lot of what you've described resonates closely with me, specifically the hero's journey. And maybe I can return to this point when I want to allow you to continue your flow, but so much of this resonates with me and I would love the chance to describe my experience to kind of bridge the gap between previous conversations that I've had on the show and this one. So, I'm just planting the seed here for that conversation, but if you can please continue.
01:06:54.720 Teemu Arina
Yeah. So, let's get into it in a minute. But if you think of toxic masculinity, toxic masculinity being that being very aggressive, persuasive, hyper vigilant, like really acting out, these people are more likely to have hypertension and they're more likely to die of heart attacks. Now, people who are more likely to just deal with it, just suck it in, not show their emotions, be submissive, it's kind of almost like toxic femininity where you are like this mother who is almost turned cynical. That, yeah, I'm always working for other people and it's basically like sacrificing herself all the time. These people are more likely to build autoimmune disease. So, if you are someone who just submits, never draws boundaries, never shows emotions, you're more likely to have autoimmune problems, gut issues, etc. Skin rashes, basically immune system dysregulation problems. If you're someone who is aggressively setting boundaries and being super selfish, you're more likely to have hypertension. So, what is the solution here? You have healthy boundaries, you're able to show your emotions, but you're also able to have empathy and you can be like maybe it's unconditional love, that your love is not conditional. So, you understand differences and you're okay with it. You're ready to give up also, but you're also ready to fight to a certain limit. So, when you grow up, a healthy separation, individuation in your life as you grow up, when you're on your teen years, before the teen years, parents are the greatest thing ever. What mom and papa do, it's the greatest thing in the universe. You are completely dependent, you're in a symbiosis with your parents. You're in a symbiosis with your parents. You're utterly dependent on them. Then you grow into puberty. That's when you start to rebel, you start to test the boundaries, you start to fight the boundaries. You become hypervigilant and narcissistic and all that. As you violently separate from the symbiotic relationship, ideally you develop a personality, you develop your individual needs, your own style. You kind of return into the middle in an ideal scenario. So, then that process is kind of complete. You become an individual, you become a unique individual. For some people, they continue being dependent people. They depend on their happiness. Everything depends on other people. So, they're afraid of losing people. So, they're more likely to submit. Then there are people who violently fight the boundaries for the rest of their lives. They're super selfish. That whole mode keeps on going. They don't trust people easily because they don't trust themselves either. Deep inside there is this fear, anxiousness. You kind of want to trust people, but you don't. Both of those are a bit unbalanced spectrums. So, ideally, what do you really have? What choice do you have? You need to trust something. People around you will do all kinds of things, but you need to set your boundaries also. It can also be extremely toxic in the way how you set your boundaries. There is this glorification of setting boundaries that you need to set boundaries in a lot of spiritual communities. It can be very toxic also, the way you set those boundaries, which can be very selfish and self-interest driven. So, when we grow up, we kind of learn to do that in a way. But for some people, that process doesn't complete. It can be the result of a parent that doesn't allow that to happen. For example, a strong mother or strong father who doesn't allow the child to test the boundaries, it's just not allowing that to happen. So, narcissism can develop in two different scenarios. One of them is hyper-idealization by the parents. So, the parents are expecting you to be the perfect extension of them, always successful, always achieving things. And any moment when you are not mirroring that idealized version in their minds, you get punished. And basically, that hyper-idealization leads into insecurity inside. You feel never enough. Now, the other way how it can happen is that you're completely neglected, that you don't get loved, you're not loved, you're always a failure from birth. That's another way how you devalue yourself. So, in both scenarios, you devalue yourself. You're not enough or you are always a failure. Both of them can lead to narcissistic defense mechanisms where you build a facade which is not you. And actually, what happens when you get into relationships, you relive that. So, you first idealize your parents. So, that can be the significant other, your loved one. That loved one becomes your mother or father who is idealized as the perfect, never wrong, nothing. But after a while, you need to separate, you need to individuate. So, you start to set boundaries, you start to rebel, you start to test the boundaries, you start to devalue. And then comes the separation. Something happens, you leave, you want to find another person, whatever, you can't deal with it anymore. But then there's insecurity inside of you. What if I did something wrong? What if that was the perfect person for me? Whatever. And you go back and you go into this yo-yoing thing where you kind of get into a relationship and you get out of it and you get back into it and you get out of it, you get back into it. Or it can happen between people and you can never get into a trusted relationship because in the end you don't trust yourself and you are insecure inside, dependent or insecure. And you can't build healthy relationships in a way. All of them are dysfunctional because your childhood, your relationship, the way you related to others was dysfunctional. Awareness of this is important because people who follow gurus, they often seek a father figure. They need someone from the outside to tell them how to behave, what to eat, how to dress, how to be this and that. And that's how cults form. There's a strong figure, often psychopathic, who is extremely goal-oriented. He absolutely knows what he's doing or narcissistic and is just amplifying all these characteristics that these people want. And it's broken people following broken people in a sense. And you see this in some communities where people don't seem to have any kind of agency. They don't think for themselves, they don't criticize, they take things as they are. They just take it as a truth. They don't have critical thinking skills at all. So understanding how these processes develop on an individual level and how they develop on a collective level, in a societal level, is important if you want to start the process of healing. The process of healing yourself so that you are actually a nice person to be around with and you don't take advantage of people for your own personal gain or damage others because you're damaged. Or in terms of family and ancestral dynamics and group dynamics, you understand that certain behaviors are copied from others and are characteristics of the community. And it's your responsibility to recognize those characteristics that are pathological and toxic and make sure that you don't pass on those programs into your children or offspring. And the third thing is on a societal level, understanding that maybe we have developed a society that can't go really forward with these characteristics to survive in the future, but we need to elevate our collective consciousness to be aware of these kind of things. And the question is then how do we together build a more fair society that is more aware, more conscious in a sense of its actions and its consequences and less short-sighted because we don't have much time. We're going to destroy this planet if this continues. So we are in this bifurcation point. We can't go into the future with the same strategies that God does here. So personally, when I look at it, this whole personal development, striving for perfection and performance, it is a key process of evolution. It's a key process of developing anything. And this has led to great inventions. And Elon Musk is going to take us to Mars for sure. It's part of his ego. He's probably going into Mars in a coffin, which is the shape of a Tesla. That's the end game for him. We can choose to join him or not in that crusade. We probably need to spread into the universe in a way. We are too dependent on this planet. It makes total sense that we shouldn't be so dependent on the resources that are available here. Well, humanity has achieved things through two different mechanisms. One of them is through competition and the other one is through cooperation. And competition was key to get us here, in a sense. And I understand territorialism. In feudal times and in dark ages and past times, resources were scarce. You had to capture territory. The enemy was behind the fence all the time. And you had to rely only on the people you trusted around you and on your territory, in a sense, who were part of you, who were similar to you, dressed the same way you did, looked the same. But we are now in a point where cooperation is taking over, where we can potentially cooperate, share resources, and we can achieve great things as humanity without fighting each other. We can understand we are on the same boat. We can share resources and get things done in a more effective way than trying to compete for those resources. And I think that's what's needed. And we have the systems in place. And I see in world politics and the world today that there is still aspects that were beneficial strategies in the past, but are not really beneficial for humanity collectively as we go forward. And that's what I'm philosophically interested in, why I feel it's important for me to share these things that in the end, where does that start from is to investigate yourself, go deep into aspects of you and ask, are these behaviors from the past, which are genetic or behavioral, that have been copied through centuries, either biologically or through behavioral genes in a way? Are those aspects beneficial to your growth? Are those aspects beneficial for your family, your friends, your company, and to society at large? And if the answer is no, it's your responsibility to change that. And what is responsibility? Responsibility is the ability to respond. And how do you respond into anything if you're not aware? So the first step is to become aware, to investigate, to unravel, to reverse engineer, to bring into light the aspects and behaviors of you that are not serving you anymore. And then finding ways to change those behaviors. And I believe biohacking has a lot of tools for that, because in the end, you're more likely to have narcissistic OCD behaviors. It's actually very, very much manifested in alcoholics, for example. They're so insecure. And it's also very much manifested in people who have all kinds of health issues and pain and chronic psychological or physiological pain, that they are in survival mode. And they practice behaviors that are detrimental, not just to themselves, but to people around them. And the way how I see it is that first step is to take care of your health. Basically, wealth is health. The most important wealth is health. If you fix your physiological state, that opens up the possibility for a change in the mind. Now, how does the change in the mind happen? There's all kinds of tools to activate neuroplasticity and changes in the nervous system that will have lasting impact. Anything from meditation to different ways of positive reinforcement. Basically, it's about creating positive feedback loops. There are many ways. It can be done with drugs. It can be done, psychedelics is, of course, one of those things that is now promoted as a tool for neuroplasticity. There is trans-cranial electro stimulation. There are certain substances that activate certain receptor systems. Even exercise and movement has shown to increase neuro growth factors and induce neuroplasticity, especially cardio, but also strength training. Now, the question is then, if you have these amazing tools, what are you using those for? Are you using those to strengthen your immune system? And then, the next step is to use these tools to strengthen your nervous system. Are you using these tools to strengthen the networks that turn you into a self-induced narcissist? Even more so, basically, are you using these positive reinforcement loops to turn yourself into your worst nightmare? Or are you using those to induce beneficial changes? The key is to be self-aware that now that you have induced the physiological state in which beneficial changes can be done, where you have the resources and capability of changing your mind. When you change your mind, you change your relationships to everything. The question is, how do you use that window of opportunity? Do you use that to implement new addictions and neurotic loops? Are you using those to gain more power over others? Or are you using that to serve, to be more of service, to change yourself in such a way that is beneficial for the collective? To be less self-centered. That is what many of the Eastern philosophies and religious philosophies in the end point to. They try to achieve this by reducing stimulation, going into meditation, living in a very simple way, going into a cave, having only a few things. Basically, minimalism is often one of the recipes. Ritualistic minimalism and practice, if you look at what they do in monasteries, seems to point to a place where when you take away a lot of the external stimulation, you start to see what is real, is the present moment. All the suffering comes from delusions of future expectations or anxiousness about the past, of being afraid to let go of some things or still looping some stuff from the past. Both of those moments of suffering come from your mind. Those are not real. What is real is this very present moment. This awareness that every moment there is beauty in it. These are very basic, simple concepts that many of the... If you think of consciousness and if you think of conscious people and awakened people, it's often you hear similar things. They speak about what is the process of awakening is just to become aware of this game we're in, almost like this simulation we are in, this illusion you are in, this Maya we're in. And how a lot of the problems are arising in our minds, in a sense that are related to things that are not real, that are in the future or in the past, and holding on to those things. Exactly that is what our society is training us for. It's training us to work for our goals, to be very goal-oriented, to have dreams, to manifest things, to go into a certain direction. But what if once you achieve those things, did anything change really? You probably had the journey in the process and what was most important was not the destination, but what was happening while you were getting into the destination. Basically, change doesn't happen when you achieve something. Change happens on this very moment. You have the power to change things right now. You can start investigating yourself and the aspects of you that are not beneficial or serving and you can snap out of it. What I'm very interested in right now is that awareness. I speak about that we are not human beings, but we are human becoming. I speak about responsibility. How do you respond? I speak about habits and behaviors and how do you change them. Also understanding that certain habits and behaviors are just addictions and repetitive neurotic patterns that are not serving you. And this kind of all comes back to understanding the dark side and the light side of personal development and bi-acting.
01:28:11.840 Andres Preschel
There's so much beauty in it, but there is also almost an aspect that we are not aware of if we are not careful. I'm very humbled by your ability to stay focused as you describe something that most people feel, but don't yet have the words to describe and really take me through the motions of why this may be the case and why we have these patterns. One of my first questions for you here, and I have many, one of my first questions for you here is how do you think, let's say, this social media algorithm is influencing us? In my opinion, if I may, it exacerbates some of the things that you've described because if you niche down online, if you maintain this consistent personality, then you're rewarded because more people that present themselves in this echo chamber with you will arrive in a way. So it's like the algorithm itself exacerbates and motivates this. So do you think that this is intentional? Do you think that we can see a shift, let's say, in social media algorithms so they are conducive to a healthy relationship with ourselves and with our society? What are some of your thoughts there?
01:29:32.960 Teemu Arina
Yeah, the way how I think about technology and algorithms in general is that you have to become aware that you are not just the product of your, I guess, like the way we're grown up, in a sense. You are now a product also of the media that you consume and the algorithms as well. So in a way, who is you? You're not separate from the algorithms. You are kind of becoming with the algorithms also. So what you pay attention to is of course one thing, but also what the algorithms decide to show you. So they are kind of schooling you into a certain direction. Now, then the question is like, are you aware of this process or not? And I don't say that technology is bad and all algorithms are bad and that social media algorithms are bad. I'm saying that there are aspects of them that are not beneficial. So they tend to maximize addictive behaviors and attention and you could call it doom-scrolling. It doesn't bring you information that makes you learn new things and be more aware, but it tends to feed you things that you already know and want to know and what kind of releases the dopamine in your brain. And sometimes the most difficult things are the things that are taking you out of your comfort zone in a sense to show your information that is not that is aligning with your consumption patterns or your interests, but to show you something different. And in this case, I believe that you can already today choose algorithms that will turn you into a better person in a sense, or can help you grow and learn new things and learn new things instead of just being in a consumption mode. I believe that we will be able to consciously choose algorithms in the future and put our money into algorithms that are actually doing this process in a beneficial way. And I believe also many of these tech companies are now becoming aware what monsters they created and they're trying to turn those into more beneficial systems. And this is where AI is of course quite useful, but also dangerous because what is an AI is those are just algorithms at their best. And what are those algorithms? They are mirroring us, so they are showing you the collective average of the human species in a sense. Like if you talk to an AI, it can tell you only what is available to it in terms of its data sets. I mean, it can be a little bit creative, but in the end, the way it connects information is dependent of what we already know. And being aware of that process that it's just mirroring the average, then the question is like how do you push the boundary? And do you even have to? Like maybe it's helping you to be more in tune, more in line with what is like the collective consciousness by being able to tap into algorithms that are reflective of our average state of being. And we are training these systems also with our questions and the way we input things and what we produce and what kind of things we click. So I'm very aware of many of these algorithms. I'm probably unaware of some, but if you think of your Instagram algorithm, like you get stuff there and you have like a response, an arousal, maybe you see like something you want, maybe you see a beautiful girl, maybe there is like a funny video or something. You make a conscious decision there to click on it. You make a conscious decision on liking or sharing it. Being more conscious, having a little bit more like separation or distance between, having a little bit more separation or distance between the stimulus and the response is key. And this is actually what meditation can teach you, is that you are mindfully observing something but you're not attaching to it. That's basically mindfulness. Like you're looking at it, you're not trying to avoid it, you're looking at it, you're observing it but you're not reacting to it. And this is kind of what we need to do, eyes open now with algorithms. We need to mindfully meditate when we go to social media almost. Like you have to be self-aware. You have to be like, okay, there's all the stimulation coming in. Now the question is like, what rapid holes do I really want to follow? Like really, what are the things I want to train in myself? So maybe you want to be more artistic. So then you start to consciously click on things that reflect those characteristics or tendencies you want to build in yourself. But if you are operating subconsciously and from your limbic system, you end up with cat videos or you end up with just beautiful girls on your feet. Like you are training these systems so you are not separate from them. So having a little bit more conscious awareness, how you interact with them, you can actually turn them into an empowering tool because technology is a really bad master but they're very beneficial servants. So as long as that relationship stays that, okay, this tool is serving me, this algorithm is serving me, how do I want to interact with it so that I stay in control in a way of where it's taking me? So I don't see that it's basically like Democles' word. It has two edges. It's two sides of the coin. Technology on its own is not evil. It's the way we use it. Media on its own is not evil. It's the way you use it. It's what you pay attention to, what you decide to put your money into, what you want to encourage these systems to grow into. And that's kind of like in the end what your insignificant role in this whole can be. It's like to be a bit more aware that there are all these systems that are not extensions of me and part of me. So my role and my responsibility is also how I respond to it. How do I feed that? How I train it? How I react to it? And I believe that's kind of the future in a sense. What is happening is that if in religions like Christianity, God created man in his own image, now man is creating God in his own image. That's AI. So we are basically creating this ghost in the machine that we are interacting with and we are step-by-step giving control to it. We're giving different behaviors to it. We're giving different tasks to it. We are working with it. It becomes part of us and step-by-step it becomes even more and more part of us until we are in the same point like in all religions in the past where we hope that the gods are favorable. Now in this case, AI gods, we hope that AI gods will be favorable. And you might have thoughts like in religions where you might think that, yeah, God has decided things for me already. God has already chosen things for me. My life is just a premeditated thing. Now I think people will start to have these beliefs also about these algorithms. It's kind of like you hope that they will serve you. You hope that things will turn into your favor as you interact with them. So I see this whole thing in the end as a huge, massive recursive loop. And in the end, it's a good question if this reality we are living in is not another simulation and we are within that simulation that is creating another simulation. And maybe when you snap out of this dream, the more advanced alien intelligences that is you, they're just laughing at you and they're like, hey, did you like that funny narrative I created for you? Did you enjoy that game you were getting yourself into and were becoming a little bit too serious about? That's another level of awareness also is that you are in a simulation. This whole thing is like a huge complex computer system, potentially. I don't have any proof, but if it is, if this is just a system that is a self-organizing, self-similar complex system that is going through different steps of evolution, you have every moment some agency. You have some agency of like, it doesn't need to be like it was in the past. I can change it a little bit. It doesn't need to be the same. It will look similar, but a little bit different. And that's your input into it. Our lives are very insignificant. You can become the greatest Kido master, the Kido Mike, Kido guru, but what does it matter? Maybe it served its role of transforming us from the old paradigm into the new one, having a little bit extreme thoughts. I think every generation goes through some form of extremism that later generations are just laughing at. They're just looking at that whole time of frozen foods was stupid, but it was the thing that got us out from agricultural society that was driven by labor. Now you had all that free time that created the creative industries because of frozen foods and like mass production of food. Now we are ridiculing it because we understand that it's toxic also, and it's not useful. We can build a more smarter system as we go forward. So I see there is, as a futurist in me, I see we go through cycles and those cycles are needed. And these kind of extreme behaviors are needed. And we need these leaders that take us to the future with their extreme behaviors. We need Elon Musk's who are taking us to Mars in a sense, in whatever way possible in a way. We will later look at it. It was a bit rudimentary and stupid the way we did it, but we did it. And that's the human story of survival in the end.
01:40:32.560 Andres Preschel
I appreciate the depth of awareness that you have with these systems that tend to go over the top of our heads. I think a lot of people will unconsciously consume these mediums and as a result, they get in a way, well, seemingly positive reinforcement for their unconscious thoughts, but in a way it's a very negative, it's a detriment to them.
01:41:16.560 Teemu Arina
So what do you think we can do before we go on social media for the average person tuning in right now? What do you think they can do before they approach something like Instagram or YouTube or TikTok, so that they can start to enable this algorithm that is in line with what they really want and what they need? Right. So first you have to understand that you don't link to information directly, but use filters. You have to be very careful who are your filters, right? So those are the influencers in a sense. It saves you a lot of time that there are people who are doing all that work on a narrow area. So I give a lot of credit to experts and influencers, however extreme they are. And it's kind of like it's important to find gurus. It's important to find and follow gurus, but don't take anyone as the God. Don't take anyone as the only source or the one and only expert who knows it all. That's not true. Everyone is biased. Every expert and guru is biased. So you are responsible as a media consumer to select your sources and who are your informants? Who are you following? Being conscious about who do you follow? What are you giving to the algorithm? What kind of information you want to come into your feed? What are you clicking follow on? Then the next step is that as time goes by you prune. It's like tending a garden. You are maybe in the beginning when you didn't know anything. You just followed everything. And then when you find your taste, your filters, you kind of start to cut down on it. You take out the things that are no longer serving, kind of like your more evolved taste, so to say, or thought. Then what I find important is to synthesize your own view. And if you spend time consuming content, you spend as much time producing it as well. So I think that as much as you spend time on taking narratives in, you also spend time on repurposing and reevaluating and reconnecting those. The way I've done it is by writing books like the Bikers Handbook and the Resilient Being book now. I do the research and I do that with an audience in mind. So I do then personally, it just makes me produce better work, do more research, like check my sources because if I come to a conclusion and I have someone else to share that with, I want to make sure it's right. And that process where I'm not just doing the research for my own needs, but there's also an audience where I feel responsibility towards, that's a beneficial process. So I think in life, it's reciprocality and it's this communal work almost where you understand that you're not just the consumer and you're not just the producer. You have to take in order to give and you give in order to take. And in the end, that needs to be in balance. And it really boils down to the lesson on learning from masters in martial arts is that first you imitate, you kind of like study, you learn, then maybe you get into another school of martial arts and you learn that thing. And then you start to synthesize things and you start to teach. So we all go through that process. And I believe also the faster the feedback loops, the faster the learning and the faster you get from just consuming things into producing and teaching others and also refining your ways of looking at it, the faster your evolution will be. So it doesn't happen in isolation. It always happens in interaction. So I'm a big believer in interaction. The most effective way to learn is not to read a book. It's not to listen to a podcast. It's not to watch a YouTube video. It is actually to teach. And when you teach something, then you have to really reevaluate what are you saying and what are you doing. And then being aware that what you teach is not you. The thing that you grew up believing in is not you. That's kind of it. Because people often then start to get confused and they start to think, often then start to take themselves a little bit too serious. They start to believe that they are the identity which is attached to the information or their achievements or whatever around a certain topic. So basically your schooling, your education, your offspring. And that's also where a lot of these pathological things actually develop also. In a sense, you start to take yourself too seriously. You develop a strong ego that is attached to your identity, which is often related to the labels you attach to yourself, your schooling, the books you read, the masters you studied with, you trained with. And it's all good. But it's also like that's not you. 01:46:38.640 Andres Preschel
That's an illusion on its own. And I guess that's how you can kind of summarize a little bit what I've said. Always evolve, always be learning, but not take yourself too seriously. Yeah. And so the creation and the being an author demands a level of awareness that is relatively therapeutic in that sense. And that you get to really sift through the information that really speaks to you so that you can really bring to life something that is serving you while serving the collective. And if everyone can maybe take the opportunity to create as much as they consume, they can also be more aware of what they're consuming in general. They can sift through the good and the bad and honor themselves while honoring everybody else.
01:47:31.280 Teemu Arina
Yeah. And the thing is that there is a lot of stuff like that, which is very much driven by greed, which is like doing things a little bit half-assed way, like creating a half-assed product just to make a lot of profit, connecting information and cutting corners just to build an audience, stealing stuff from others and showing it as your own, because you're lazy, you don't want to do the research. There's a lot of behaviors around information where you're not really doing your best work, where you're not really pushing yourself to evolve the material. And I think that's what I see a lot. There's a lot of biased thinking and the way sometimes people use academic references to make a point, for example, they don't really read the studies, for example. I've seen that a lot in different biohackers, like they don't really look into what they're spreading out there and they don't look for second opinions.
01:48:46.160 Andres Preschel
Are they looking at the rodent study here or on a meta study or is it a human study and understand the difference? So many often say that biohackers treat themselves drosophilia, the scientific name for fruit flies, because they're looking at these studies that are so novel, so new that they haven't even been done in placebo-controlled double-blind studies. So they're treating themselves like a fruit fly.
01:49:07.120 Teemu Arina
Yeah. So I think there is pioneers that are needed. Some of them will die in the process, some of them will turn into fruit flies or be eaten by fruit flies by going a little bit to the extreme with whatever biohacks they do or things like. If you think of the invention of x-ray, the invention of x-ray, Maria Curie, she died of cancer. So she basically exposed herself to the technologies he invented. And I think that's also happening potentially to a lot of people. This whole thing as we evolve, as we figure out things, as we do trial and error, we do mistakes and we learn from those. But there is a difference between doing a stupid mistake and then doing a conscious calculated mistake. So doing your research is very important, not taking what gurus say for granted, but doing your own research, going into the nitty-gritty details and figuring out things before trying it in yourself. I think it is a smarter way, in a way. But in the end, what I appreciate about biohackers is that they're ready to test things on themselves. They just don't have opinions because most people have just opinions. They have opinions about diets, they have opinions about drugs, they have opinions about this and that, but they never tried any of it. They never went on to different diets. They might have very extreme opinions about, let's say, keto diet or vegan diet or calorie restricted diets or one meal a day or whatnot, but they never tried any of it. They might read some paper and you can find all kinds of papers and research that are supporting your point of view. So a lot of information in terms of scientific material that existed, let's say, just 10 years ago, but 20, 30, 40 years ago is already outdated. So there's constant evolution. So we can be pretty sure that the information constellation we are in right now, based on which we make our decisions, is biased in some way. And we will laugh at those decisions later on. But what choice do we have? You just have to make a bet and the more educated you are in doing it, the better. And unfortunately, a lot of people are making not very calculated bets. They don't do the testing, for example. They don't do the blood work, the DNA test, the urine tests, but they have a lot of opinions about nutrition because they read this and that article. So people take all kinds of supplements without testing, without understanding what the consequences might be. But of course, you can do a lot of things in a safe way by relying on the proven methods and tools. And there is a benefit for having also the crazy people who do the crazy stuff that have not been investigated and studied testing different novel compounds on themselves because many of those things can turn out to be beneficial. Some of them not at all, and I think a good example is Viagra. So that was actually originally studied for cardiovascular as a cardiovascular treatment because it affects the cardiovascular system. But eventually, people using it, they discovered it's actually useful for something else. So we might even think about some things. Let's take painkillers, for example, Paracetamol. Paracetamol is the most used over-the-counter drug, one of the most overused also for pain medication. It turns out that just recently they discovered it also dampens your emotions, which is like, oh, whoa, it's just not taking the pain away. It just makes things more dull, in a sense, and it also affects your behavior through that mechanism. And it's so subtle that we didn't notice it until now. So there's a lot of things that we seemingly think is safe, turns out to be not so like in excess. There's a lot of things that we think is detrimental, turns out to be safe and actually beneficial in the end. A good example is Satchar. So we have saturated fats in moderation. We want simple solutions to complex problems, but complex things often require complex solutions, so it's not so simple, clear cut. So the lesson of this is that we're all going to die anyway, and you can try to die more slowly, be more beneficial to others in this whole process. You can contribute to things as you learn, as you grow up, you can leave a trace that others can pick up things from, leave some breadcrumbs from your own lessons learned in a way. I appreciate people who are ready to do the work, but I also appreciate the people who are ready to share what they learned. And what is good about all these extreme biohackers is that they're very visible also of sharing what they believe in. But you have to be a bit careful because one person's subjective experience is not objective truth. And even objective truth is a moving target.
01:54:51.520 Andres Preschel
It's just the best understanding we have at a given moment. And a question that I have for you, considering that you stand for so many of these things and you use social media as a tool to share what you know, what you've studied, what your beliefs are, and of course, to carry your brand and your mission forward. How do you find the balance between being established in your niche and being a human being that is dynamic and that is more than just your niche? How do you personally find that blend as a, let's say, biohacker, which is the way that I know and perceive you based on  the substance that I've consumed?
01:55:28.720 Teemu Arina
I don't take myself too seriously. I guess that's kind of like I try to stay a curious and like a childlike person, even though I'm an adult. And I value that in people who are a bit more relaxed and playful and curious. And I guess one of my favorite quotes is that I never let schooling interfere with my education. Or you could like, I never let indoctrination influence the way I see things. So I may be gifted in the mind of others, but there is nothing special about me. The choices that I made created some unique characteristics. For example, the fact that I've always been like learning things from different schools of thought and keeping, simultaneously, a hypothesis and antithesis in mind. So what I'm doing right now, as I spoke to you, is to hold simultaneously a hypothesis and an antithesis of it by speaking about both sides of the coin of personal development in a way. It's a great thing. It's very beneficial, but it's also, it has its own other side. And this is also what, I don't say I'm intelligent, but what Einstein said intelligence eventually is, is the ability to hold simultaneously a very strong theory of whatever, of society, of what you do, the food you eat in mind, and then being able to argument against it. And being very convincing in proving yourself wrong, basically. So that's also what I mean by not taking yourself too seriously. Yes, you need to be super serious. You have to be very, I guess, like, what word would it be? Hocus obsessive. Hocus obsessive, uncompromising, extremely uncompromising in whatever you do, ideally, but at the same time, not taking it as the only truth, but also to be able to see the blind spots of it, like not being afraid to change that also. So one way I see myself is that I would be worried if you knew me as a biohacker 10 years from now. So like, my evolution, ideally, is that I'm not getting stuck into this role. My evolution, ideally, is evolving. And if you look at my life's work, you know, I've done that in the field of education, in the field of organizational theory and management and work and leadership and future of technology. And now I'm kind of like in the field of health and wellness and all that. I don't know what I'm going to go into next. Maybe that's more on the consciousness studies that is intriguing to me right now in different forms of it. But to me, like, life is short, in a way, relatively speaking. So why not have fun, you know, and study different systems and look into different things and learn different skills and also be able to unlearn and also relearn and reevaluate what you're doing? Does that make any sense? Often people seek safety in routines, in careers, in protocols, in daily routines, like whatever, you know, things. They want to get one education in place, you know, build family, career, boom, retire. Personally, that's not my dream. Like, I want to keep on changing like a river and see where that takes me. But like, do it in a way that benefits others. That's just how I want to go forward. But I don't say that that's the only way or everyone should do it. I think we need all kinds of different types of people. We need the pioneers who push the boundaries and test all kinds of things. We need people who are able to see the big picture, but we need also people who are just very narrow-minded and look at one thing and they're very good at it. Like, you can't actually arguably become an ultimate master in anything without, like, lifelong focus on it. So, like, we need people who are absolutely obsessed on one thing and do only that thing and, you know, that's good. And we also need people probably who are, who don't need to be, you know, they don't need to be this and that. Like, they can just enjoy the ride or they find meaning in other areas or are happy just serving, you know, or supporting or helping the crazy pioneers or, you know, so and then we have unprivileged people, you know, who just, you know, because of different circumstances are in where they are and they also need to be supported. So, I think, you know, we need all kinds of characters here. And when we live in this high-performance bubble where everyone seems to be a master in something and, like, striving to be a master in the next thing, like, it can be a bit of an echo chamber and we don't see, you know, the big picture. But yeah, like, I hope people have found this conversation useful and this monologue on its own. My flow, as you say, hopefully it has been useful.
02:01:48.400 Andres Preschel
I think overwhelmingly that the way I see you, in a way, a biohacker, but I think about everything else as an artist. And so, I want to just say that I appreciate the way that you can see both sides, the way that you can distinguish them, but also help them find a common ground and standing and, in a way, really making it accessible for folks. This idea that, in fact, we are dynamic beings and that we shouldn't attach ourselves to the modern convenience of thinking that all we are is a niche or an expert in a particular field. And so, my man, thank you so much. You're amazing, man. Thank you. This is absolutely incredible.
02:02:45.120 Teemu Arina
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, saying that I'm an artist is the highest compliment. So, thank you very much for the narcissistic supply. Because biohacking is not just a science, it's also an art. Healing, not just a science, it's also an art. Because if you only focus on the science of it, which you have to, you have to like be very methodological and all that. There is some wisdom that comes only by practice and by putting time into it, like this tacit knowledge or understanding or intuition, like great healers or great artists, they can't even explain how they did it. It's just like they just had a feeling that this is what it is. They've seen a lot of things and they somehow kind of tap into that vast database of sensory experience and they can connect dots in novel ways. And that's what great artists are able to do. They are very well educated on many things and they're able to kind of put things together in a novel, unique way that is beneficial for others. And the role of an artist is actually always to push boundaries. When you go to a gallery, like many artists through generations, they have shown us aspects of reality or what is going on. Maybe it's a critique, maybe it's a very accurate description, maybe it's showing a way out. They've been able to play with that. And so that's what enjoying great art is. It's kind of provoking that realization that maybe things are not like they look or seem. And that's kind of like how I want to build my books and my conferences and events and whatnot I do. Those are ultimately actually art pieces. They are installations. They are objects that have had a lot of attention and craft and uncompromised attention to quality that went into it.
02:05:07.120 Andres Preschel
And I want to keep on doing that until I die. Everything you just described is exactly what you just did. And I know that it served in its own way as a training ground for you to continue to refine this incredible ability. And I like to consider this podcast, my art gallery, to bring individuals like yourself who can connect the dots in a way that is novel and that can really motivate change in the people that are tuning in. And so I thank you again for being an artist and for being one of the most distinguished individuals that I've had here in this gallery because your ability to connect the dots is absolutely incredible. So I can't thank you enough.
02:05:54.880 Teemu Arina
Thank you, Andres. And I wish you continue doing it and bring your own unique perspective and your own unique kind of flair and the way you conduct and reconnect the dots. What kind of people you want to interview. In the end, you are the one who creates that.
02:06:15.920 Andres Preschel
Thank you very much for this and I'm looking forward to what you're going to build next. Thanks, man. All right. Thanks. So that's all for today's show. Thank you so much for tuning in today. For all the show notes, including clickable links to anything and everything that we discussed today, everything from discount codes to videos to research articles, books, tips, tricks, techniques, and of course, to learn more about the guest on today's episode. All you have to do is head to my website on dresspreshell.com. That's A N D R E S P R E S C H E L .com and go to podcasts. You can also leave your feedback, questions and suggestions for future episodes, future guests, so on and so forth. Thanks again for tuning in and I'll see you on the next one. Have a lovely rest of your day.
02:06:50.880 Teemu Arina