Joe Cohen — Biohacking And Building A Content Empire

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What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart.

Podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, hey. Welcome back to another episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is Joe Fear. This is Matt Wolfe, and today we're talking with Joe Cohen. He is the CEO, founder, and mastermind behind the Selfhacked.com website, which I don't know if you've heard of this, but you will very soon. This guy is, like, everywhere online. If you ever look up anything related to a supplement, probably a pharmaceutical, any genes, like, if you've done 23andMe or Ancestry or, you know, those kind of things, they're getting more popular. That guy pops up, like, the first everywhere. So we're going to dig into not only biohacking things and ways to improve your performance, your sleep, just the way you live, but we're gonna dig into how the hell is he everywhere on Google, you know, SEO. He's everywhere. And he's not doing paid ads or any of that stuff. He digs into everything. So it's an awesome episode. By the end of it, you're gonna walk away with great content marketing ideas and health tips.

Absolutely.

Very cool stuff.

Dive in.

All right, Joe, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Hey, glad to be here.

Yeah. So it was. I just wanted to tell everyone before we got into the conversation, it was co that I stumbled across your website, selfhacked.com and that's like a treasure trove of anything you want to know about, I guess, your genes, your body, different cool little hacks that you can do.

Optimizing your body and mind and all that stuff.

Yeah. So I was stumbling across some results from 23andMe, and if you haven't done that, it's pretty cool. Just Google it. Or Joe can probably talk a little bit about this whole kind of. I feel like it's a trend right now, but it's very cool to learn about your body. And I was looking up specific genes, saw Joe's site, and it popped up, like, every gene I plugged in Google, and I was like, how the hell is he on, like, number one in Google for every damn thing? And then I dug in deeper. I'm like, holy shit. There's, like, really cool stuff here. Little things, supplements, just different little hacks to do based on your genes so you can feel great, perform better.

Yeah, I know. Joe literally sent me a message on Slack with a link to that website and went, dude, check this out. We got to get this guy on the podcast. His shit is awesome.

That's how it came up. And then, yeah, shot a message to you, Joe, and It was like 30 minutes later. You're like, yeah, sure, I'll do it. Like, damn, that was easy.

So, yeah, man, tell us a little about self hacked and a little bit of your story.

Yeah, so I guess I grew up with certain disadvantages in terms of my health, my education.

Just financial, and just, you know, happiness in general. I feel like we're all trying to improve things like that. And I was a bit more disadvantaged in, you know, the health area. I had some chronic health issues that doctors weren't able to solve. And so I, you know, I went to doctors. I was just trying to figure it out, and I realized that the doctors really didn't know much physiology or what, you know, different diseases actually came from, like, what the biochemistry of it was. And so.

I naturally went to websites and different things like that. And at a certain point, I realized that the websites I was reading knew a lot less than what I knew. So at a certain point, I still didn't start my own website because I was like, I have to fix my own health issues before I start something. And so I fixed my health issues.

I was able to cure my health issues completely. And that's when I decided, okay, let me start this website to kind of talk about first. I started as an informal way to just talk about different kinds of topics that I, you know, things that I knew about. I wasn't actually, like, I didn't really treat it as a business is more of a hobby. And a year later I decided, you know, I saw some interest and I already had, like, I was able to work on it full time. And so I. I jumped on that full time. And it's been a bit over three years now, full time, and it's grown tremendously. So three years ago, we had.

Maybe 50,000 visits, and now we're.

Over 2 million visits a month.

Not bad.

So that has grown tremendously. And, you know, we also have. I started Self Decode because I was doing a lot of consultations, and I did over a thousand consultations, and people would just give me a ton of data. And so I'm like, okay, I need a. I can't, like, spend 80 hours looking at all this data. Especially, you know, here's 600,000 snips that I got to deal with. And I realized, okay, I got. I need some tools for this. So I look around and nothing was good at all. It was actually all terrible. There was just no good companies on one end. There was just companies that with terrible ui. And then there was just most all the rest of the companies had like 10 to 20 or 30 snips. And it was just very limited information. It was just bad stuff. So I decided to start my own, you know, my own genetics app. I thought, like, I'll start something simple. It should be easy to just make something.

That is better than what these guys have. And then slowly it just started growing and growing into its own business. And so that's been going on for about two and a half years and that's been quite successful. So. And you know, as time goes on, we're always interested in improving our products. And this is what we. SelfDecode is the genetics app that we have. And it gives health information to people based on their genetics and recommendations and things like that. And you know, we have 30,000 SNPs in our database and much better content with all these SNPs. SNPs are just essentially genes. The way I was going to ask the common person will think of it, right.

So basically self decoded is like you would get some data from like 23andMe or ancestry.com or something like that, and then you would upload it to your site and then your site will actually extract even more information from the data that you get from one of those sites.

Yeah, exactly. 23andMe. And Ancestry, Ancestry doesn't really extract anything. 23andMe extracts very, very little. Even if you buy their upgraded, you know, health reports plan, it's. It's still very little. We really do a deep dive and we give a lot of information, you know, for people who want to dig deep into their genetics and see, try to figure out their underlying cause. And so the genetics was very helpful for me in figuring out my issues, like the root cause of my issues. And I think they could be helpful for other people. And so as time went on, we were just like building it and you know, recently we, you guys might be familiar with the NPS score.

I've heard of it, but explain that if you could.

It's just a measure that tracks how, how happy consumers are with the product. And so we're actually the only product out there essentially that we have a software platform. It's a software company rather than just giving you a PDF or something of 10 SNPs or something like that. And so we have a whole software platform for it. And it's quite complex. So.

We'Re the only product that does that.

And yeah, I mean the NPS score is, it tells you how happy consumers are with the product. And our NPS score has been improving over time. And that's just a, you know, if we're talking about business stuff, I think that's a very good measure of, you know, how your business is doing. So all the big companies use it and if you get over a 50, that means you have an excellent product. So we last month we got a 53. If you go on the site, there's a pop up, you know, after you use it, like, hey, how happy are you that are you with this product from 1 to 10? And you know, the vast majority of people pick 9 and 10, which means that they're very happy with it. And so what the MPS score looks at is it's how many people choose 9 and 10 minus the number of people who. The percentage. It's not the number. It's the percentage of people who choose 9 and 10, minus the percentage of people who choose 6 or less. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And so if you have 53, that means that, you know, it could be something like 70% are picking 9 and 10. 70% of people are, you know, think your product is a 9 or a 10, which is good. And then only, let's say 17% of people think it's, you know, 6 or less. And you know, everyone's. Not every product is suited for every person. So you're some people.

So it's never like 100. The best companies I think are like, you know, 70 around.

Okay.

But you know, these are generally companies that have been working on their product for 30 years or something.

Well, I'm just gonna stop you for a second because that is what I think. I was so impressed with your websites as a whole. Not even just self decode because just on like the sales page or you know, the promo page, landing page, they have. I'm like. Because I've used some of these lesser, you know, I guess they aggregate, you know, like extract all the data gene points. And they're ugly, they're horrible, they're confusing, they give you a lot of stuff, you know, at least the ones I've used. But I looked at yours and I was like, holy crap, this thing is. And now that I know that you've only been doing this for like three and a half years, like, dear God, how do you do? Everything looks beautiful. It's easy to use. Understand? I think that's what immediately got my attention because yeah, it's interesting, you Know.

Just, just to, you know, we're talking about business. Little I'll inject some business, some business philosophy. My philosophy is to launch when you have, when you have something that's, you know, decent, like an mvp, you just launch it, throw it out there. When I started self hacked, it was terrible. It was just so bad. The content was all over the place. Yeah, I was just droning on. Wasn't structured, there was nothing. And my philosophy is just to keep on improving. Same with, you know, you try things, it's not going to work out in the beginning, you just keep on improving it. And so, you know, you look at a post of ours, you look at whatever it is, whatever product we offer, sometimes in the beginning it's not that great, even according to my opinion. I'm just like, we really need to improve this and I think we really need to improve every product until it's perfect. But whatever you see is just a constant improvement. And you know, even just two years ago, a year and a half ago, it was really essentially just me and the company. Now we scaled it and now we have a whole bunch of people. We have like 20 full time people, like 40 different freelancers. And you know, and that allowed me to really just put people on projects, try to develop systems to make everyone efficient. And now we're just constantly improving products and we're launching multiple other products as well. For example, we're launching a blood test analyzer. And.

What we want to do is we want to have the combination of amazing content. And so if someone's trying to improve their physiology in some way, they've got all the content they need. And then we're going to, we want the software side of it to be able to.

Give that the content that's relevant to them, give the advice that's relevant to them so that they don't have to wait through a million pages of information. Sure.

We're constantly improving products and whatever you see, whatever product we have, it's going to improve in six months. And all the posts, we're constantly working on them. We're actually going through old posts and making sure all them are good. Yeah, but we developed a very extensive process. But you know, a year and a half ago it was essentially just me writing.

Yeah, well, that's what I wanted to do.

Now we have a whole team of writers. I actually, I don't even have the time to do the writing myself. I would love to do writing, but I don't even have the time. I'm busy just running the businesses.

So talk about that because I wanted to talk about all the content stuff in a sec. The strategy, because there's a lot to dig in there. But I want to just quickly get your take on the transition from you just running the business by yourself and Turning into what, 20 full time employees in a matter of a year like that transition.

And 40 freelancers. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, because most, none of the 20 people are actually writers. All of our writers are freelancers and we have a lot of writers.

Okay.

Yeah. And so that, you know, it was definitely a process. It was, you know, I had to go from, I'm pretty scientific kind of thinker, very skeptical, and that's, that's very good. And then I had to go from just like delving, like just being deep in the science and writing all the time to putting on a business hat. And that's a very significant change. And the first thing I realized is a business is about systems.

You need to create systems for everything that you do, whether it's hiring. So I didn't. I never read any business books, not a single one. I never read any business articles, not a single one. And I generally, you know, I'm just the type of person who, I mean, I think they're useful sometimes they're very useful. But.

I think I'm the just the type of guy who. I like to kind of have a blank slate. And just 99.9% of people are benefited by content, business content, things like that. So I'm not saying that I think it's great, but just my personality. It's just I have, I've never gravitated towards it and I just look at a problem and try to solve it as if, you know, if it was just a blank slate, like, what would I do in this situation? And the biggest problem that I ran into was hiring, like, how do I hire good people? You know, I need people forever.

And I want to, you know, I can't pay them that much. I'm not like making trillions of dollars here, especially in the beginning. Like, you know, it's kind of a chicken neck problem. You just have free content. And it's like, I need to hire someone, but that person needs to make money pretty quickly.

Sure.

And so the hiring was the biggest problem that I had to deal with by far, getting good people. And so over the years I just got a lot of experience in figuring people out and also building systems to hire great people. And I think that was probably my biggest success within the business to date, is to build a system that is efficiently able to find and get good smart people. So we look at a bunch of different metrics. First we want to see is someone intelligent? What's their personality like? And we want to, you know, so in the beginning what happened was I would just like, alright, I need some people. I went on upwork, I tried to hire a couple people.

And it was like, okay, this is terrible. This person seems smart, they have an md, but they are terrible. Right. They don't seem very intelligent even with their degrees. So degrees are not valuable to me. Like I, it just wasn't valuable. I realized that if you just work very hard, you could get an MD degree. Sure. You know, you don't really have to be that intelligent. And so I thought, how am I going to figure out if someone is capable? I can't talk to them for 10 minutes and figure it out. And if I'm going to speak to them for a whole day or 20 hours, it's just too much of my time. I'm a one man guy here, you know, I'm a one, one, one man band. I can't do all this myself. And that's what some companies do, you know, when we hire people.

We just hired a developer and the company was, he said they were, they, they were interviewing him for 20 hours. Oh God. And they're just like, you know, he, they flew him down, he spoke to 10 different people and for me it was just a very quick process. We put him through the test, I interviewed him and like two hours later I'm like, all right, time to start the trial.

Right on.

So the hiring was definitely the biggest nut to crack. And the way I did it was I started to think of it in first principles, like, okay.

I took some people and I realized, okay, these people are obviously deficient in some cognitive capacities and there needs to be a way to measure it.

That was a very nice way to say that.

Yeah.

So I started to look at like, all right, what are ways to measure intelligence? What areas of intelligence are these people deficient in? And over time I like, I tested everyone I knew, everyone who was working within the company and everyone I interviewed. And I would see how they, I would give them different tests and I would see how they function. You know, what, how did they perform? Because I would give them a test task and then some people, I'd be like, I'm not hiring this person, but let's just see what they got on these tests.

Yeah.

So you know, I'd give them some cognitive tests and it would be like okay, how is this. What is deficient here? Why is this person terrible at this? Is it a personality factor? Is an intelligence factor? So over time, I was able to break it down in, you know, there's a bunch of different personality factors that are going to predict performance and there's a bunch of different cognitive domains that are going to predict performance. And so one of the, I'd say the most important one is, is logical reasoning.

Logical reasoning.

And we. So just, you know.

I'll go back, but fast forward. We give everyone that applies to a position, a whole battery of cognitive tests. And depending on the position, we give them different cognitive tests, they have different minimum scores. We have a whole system that actually automates that whole process. So we used to have proctors. Now we just have software that, you know, we give them a link, go through it, and we give them a unique link that they can't even. They can't get back to it if they wanted. So.

We do a screen share and so we automatically record their videos so that they can't cheat. And so if we see something funky in one of the tests, we'll just go back to the video and see what happened. People don't realize we know the patterns of cheating behavior. And so we could see that. But essentially, it's amazing that you could measure, you could predict performance, workplace performance, based on these cognitive tests. And there's no other company that I'm aware of that uses them. And so that's kind of an. That's kind of an example of where kind of like Blake Blank slate first principles thinking has benefited the companies tremendously.

Sure.

And so that's how I was able to. That's how we're able to scale the hiring process. And we could go through hundreds and hundreds of applicants and get a good snapshot of what their cognitive abilities are and how well they're likely to perform in a role. And so we look at all these different measures and some people seem really intelligent. They went to great schools, and they get terrible on logical reasoning. It's like, wow, that's amazing.

That didn't waste anyone's time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it looks like, you know, if you think about it, logical reasoning is at the. It really is like, you know, the ability to reason through a problem, even like, come up with, you know, what should I here? Here's 10 different factors at play. What do I need to start working on first? What, what do I need? You know, just life and, and working and everything is, is. Is a problem. And the ability to reason through it is a critical skill that if people don't have it, they're not going to function in most professional capacities unless they're doing things that are more rote. They could do customer service. They could do something that doesn't really require it so much. A designer. It doesn't require logical reasoning, but we happen to have a good designer. And also he happened to do pretty well in logical reasoning. And it turns out he was a great hire because he could also manage projects and he could reason through and come up with priorities and be able to deal with and create solutions. So logical reasoning is the biggest, is definitely the single biggest cognitive capacity that we measure that makes sense.

And just to wrap, put a kind of a bow around this topic here, are there any website specific tests that you'd recommend to have people try?

We don't, we don't have. It really is like a, we have a hodgepodge of tests. There's no, like, one site that.

You know, has, has all the tests that we want. You know, I would say that, you know, a lot of the Cambridge brain Sciences has some tests that are, that are good.

Okay.

And, but you know, there's a lot of, you know, you could find a bunch of tests everywhere. It's right. We're testing things like working memory. And you know, someone has good working memory, they can juggle more things at one shot. We're testing a bunch of different areas of reasoning, fluid intelligence. And obviously we also give technical tests like. So, for example, for hiring a writer, I designed my own technical test to see how much science they know. So we have some of our own tests that we give for different positions.

Smart.

Cool. Well, staying on this topic of business, I do want to eventually circle back around and actually talk about some of your biohacking advice for entrepreneurs and that sort of thing. But staying on this business topic for a couple minutes here, we wanted to talk about the traffic and your content marketing strategy and your SEO and how you've managed to grow your site so big. Was that a methodical process or was that something that just kind of happened?

So in the beginning it just kind of happened. I mean, it was just me cranking out content. The more content you crank out and happen to be a fast writer. So it's just, I actually was for the first couple years. For the first few years, we really only started with SEO about six months ago. So before that it was just like, what do first it was like, what do I want to write about? What do I think is valuable for people? And that Worked a bit. It worked a fair amount. And the problem is you can't scale that because I can't just clone me and make, you know, 10 of me. And then it's like, okay, great. The problem is you need. I needed, like, people who. You're not going to get someone who's. Who's an amazing scientist and also a very experienced biohacker and who knows about nutrition and everything else that matters that we want them to know about. So the challenge came from.

Breaking up. We had to, especially if we wanted someone to be affordable. We had to get the science people and put them in one place and then get the people who understand our industry, build systems around it so that.

We can make sure that the content is usable to people. And so we built a lot of different systems around that.

Number one is we have. We're able to get a lot of writers through our hiring process. That's number one. So getting a volume. And then we can see who's the best out of these writers. And then number two, we have an editing process now where we have two editors. The first editor gives grades to the writer on a bunch of different metrics. Like, how concise is this? We want to, you know, I broke it down to, okay, what. What do we need these people. What kind of posts do we need? People like concise posts, they don't want to read a million words, right? They want. They want the bottom line most of the time. And they want, you know, this writing quality, English quality. There's how. How, you know, informative is, how entertaining is it in regards to health and things like that, because that's what our user base is interested in. So we, we broke these things down into a bunch of metrics. How good is the person's science? You know, if they got a reference wrong, then that's a big red flag. So the first editor, who's a scientist, will grade the writers in all these metrics, and then they'll give them a final grade. We actually pay the writer based on the grade that they get. And so there's. If they get like a C, they get one pay. If they get a B, they get a different pay grade. And so that incentivizes the writers to write the best quality. That's cool. We have a second editor look over the first editor stuff, and they give grades to the first editor because the first editor's job is to try to get the post.

The writer needs feedback, right? They don't always understand the industry that well. They don't understand.

They might be writing about a certain topic and they don't understand our style that well. So the writer needs a lot of feedback. And so the first editor gives them feedback. They make sure that it's right. Second editor make sure that the post is ready to be published. It's ready to our standards. And so if the first editor doesn't do a good enough job, then they're not going to get a great rating. So no matter what post they get, they have to make it great by the time the second editor gets it. And, and then, you know, we have so. And then we take all these metrics. We have a system that we would like to evaluate every writer and editor's performance. So we evaluate them. We built our own internal tool to get all the data in terms of time on site. So time on site is probably the best metric. Time on page is the best metric to how the post is doing. If someone wrote a really compelling post, people are going to be on it for longer views. Is a good metric. Not always is it up to the writer. It also depends on topic, but also stars. How many stars. We have a star rating system. So how many stars the post gets and things like that.

We have a system where every writer and editor is and we have their average grades as well for each post. So I can just look at our system and be like, all right, this, this writer has an average of a B or whatever it is. And so I think the key is to build an efficient system that tracks performance and forces the end product to be good.

And we have our own, I designed our own process.

In coming up with headings and things like that. So as time goes on we keep on getting more efficient with the content process. And it's not an easy thing. Which is why there's no other website that does what we do. It's more like just producing crappy content and trying to hope it sells. We really produce very in depth content that has. Each post can have over 100 references and it's pretty vetted. It's solid content. It is. And it's not easy to do, but that's why. So there's no secret sauces like oh wow, we're just, you know, we're getting a bunch of views. It's really, we're doing it in a way that it's by building systems and making a process efficient, more efficient than anyone else. And through that we just release more content, better content and it gets indexed better.

Now have you found there's a certain sort of frequency of content that works Best, like how often you post.

You know, I haven't noticed any big difference with that. What I have noticed is just the more content you produce, the better. And we produce a post every day now and that's not easy because we're producing on average 3,000 words. Each post is very, very concise and well referenced.

And it's very scientific. So it's very hard to produce a post a day. We put some resources to that, but the key is that we have a process that makes it more efficient. And so you have to make sure that if you're going to be performing better than the competition, you need a more efficient process. Yeah. And we're the fastest growing health website. We're now the biggest biohacking website.

For a while. Bulletproof was the biggest in the biohacking space. I don't know if you heard of him.

Oh yeah.

And we just, we overtook him.

Nice. See, that's cool. A lot of the audience that you're listening or that's listening to us right now, they are most likely aware of Bulletproof. So it's cool you bring them up because, I mean. Yeah. In our space. And I know they're kind of niched in. I feel like they've kind of gone after the marketing space, entrepreneur space.

So. Yeah. I mean, the way. I don't know if. Do you have a target market or are you just kind of going after. Because I know specific genes or keywords and just. Do you have kind of an approach to what you're writing about and who you're talking to?

We're talking to. I mean, we're talking to people who want to improve their health in some way, essentially. That's what it is. But you know anyone who's curious about any topic. I think you know anyone who's let's say, going to do a search on glutamate. Right. Or any science topic. That's another thing that we're different in. We post on a much broader range of topics. Normally websites will focus in on one area. It's like there'll be a website just on keto, there'll be a website just on low carb, just on nutrition topics, just on whatever topics. I don't think that's. I think you know everybody. People who are searching, most people want to be healthy and if they're searching for a topic like let's say glutamate, which is a neurotransmitter, they want to know how there's a good chance they're curious about how to reduce it how they can improve their health with regard to it. And so I think, like, one place that we're differentiated in is creating scientific, you know, creating posts on scientific topics that are very in depth and that aren't necessarily targeting a very specific niche. So if we do a post on bdnf, we have two posts on bdnf. You know, a lot of people in the nootropic space are going to be searching for BDNF because it's one way to improve your cognitive function. So we have like, you know, a whole list of 50 different ways to increase BDNF. And instead of just writing a post on what BDNF does, we'll say how to increase it, which conditions, you know, is lower or higher associated with things like that. And so we apply it to what people are concerned about. And yeah, I think that broadens our reach.

Got it. Yeah. Because, I mean, I'm just. I'm trying to actually pull up the first post that I found you on, but I want to get into how I. So I found you by actually looking up a specific gene. I think glutamate is one of them. I'm taking based off of your website, actually based on the genes as well. But let's kind of transition now into maybe some simple biohacking or just ways to improve cognitive functioning, maybe sleep, just better performance, maybe a simple process people can take. And then obviously use your resources too.

Right. I mean, so what. I mean, the quick fix, if you want. If we're talking about a quick fix, my favorite is nicotine. I found that nicotine also in people who work for me, like, conscientiousness is one of the biggest metrics and that can predict workplace performance. That's like how dutiful, how organized, how orderly someone is if their life is together. Those kinds of people are generally going to be better workers and they're going to perform better. So I found that.

Most of the countries on stimulants of one kind or another, they're either on coffee, they're on. You know, some people in this podcast might be on modafinil nicotine. So a lot of people are on stimulants. I do think stimulants, they do have a role in increasing conscientiousness and making you work more. So I think that's something. But for me personally, my favorite is nicotine. And I don't take that much of it, but I take it when I need it, if I'm sleep deprived or anything like that. So in terms of quick fixes, I'd say nicotine. In terms of long term solutions, something that I think is under recognized is just getting outside and getting a lot of light. I think that's very important. So I think like I have a post, I have a couple posts on dopamine and one post is like, you know, 12 ways that dopamine can make you more successful. It turns out that having more dopamine does a lot of things for success. And what people don't realize is the natural way to get dopamine, also BDNF and a bunch of other things are actually just getting some sunlight and getting outside. So I think like that's something that's underutilized where a lot of your listeners are probably in an office all day and hacking away at their computer late at night. And I think getting their light cycles.

Normalized I think is a good thing, like getting a lot of light in the daytime and then cutting down that light at night with different programs or maybe blue blocking glasses, things like that. So I think that's an underutilized hack for improving success and different things. And I think a lot of that is through dopamine. So nicotine and a lot of these stimulants will also increase dopamine like Modafinil. And so I definitely think in terms of biohacking success, I think increasing dopamine is going to be a big factor. And things like getting enough sleep is gonna do that as well. And so obviously people should try to get good sleep and exercise. I found that interval exercise, like weightlifting, really increase my dopamine. Nicotine is good, getting outside a lot. So things like that I think is some basic stuff. And then you can get into the supplements. My favorite supplement for improving productivity is pregnenolone.

Say that one more time.

Or maybe pregnenolone.

Pregnenolone. Okay.

So if you search for it on Google, I think self hack comes up number one.

Absolutely.

It's a hormone, actually. It's an over the counter hormone.

Okay, yeah, we'll have to look that up because that's the stuff you explained about dopamine right there. That was one of the articles I read as well. And I was able to zero in on my gene and. And then that's where modafinil came up, which I've already tried numerous times, as has Matt.

And how are you guys doing it?

I'm currently on it right now, so I assume. Well, okay, yeah, well, we've noticed just in ourselves, just from experimenting, I can take a Very low dose. I mean, even a quarter of it. I took a half.

What's a quarter? Like what's the milligrams?

What is it? Is it 200?

200 is not a low dose.

Okay.

So no, 200 milligrams is the pill that he's taking a quarter of.

So he's taking 50 milligrams.

I got it. So I believe it's 50. Yeah, for the quarter.

And it's enough. I mean, it's very even keel. It's like you had a coffee, but without the jitters, at least for myself. And it allows me to kind of just hone in on a task list and just hammer through it. Yeah, yeah.

That's increasing dopamine. And.

Like I said, there's the quick fixes and then there's the long term fixes, but sure, sure. It's harder to change your life around.

Yeah, no, it's interesting because I'm not currently on modafinil right now, but I have, you know, experimented with it. And for me, I can take a 200 milligram pill and really have no effects from it. So for me, it hasn't had a. You know, I kind of stopped taking it. I don't know if I just built up a tolerance and had to take more and more and more what happened. But for me, it wasi had to take it at a very high dosage to even feel much effect from it at all.

You probably just don't notice effects from any medications that you take.

I don't get effects from pretty much. If I take ibuprofen, I don't feel effects from it. It doesn't do anything for me. I can drink caffeine and I can go to bed 15 minutes later. Caffeine is not enough.

See, that's the thing. That's what I'm saying. If you're not feeling anything on 200 milligrams of modafinil, you're just not feeling anything on. On most of the supplements you take. Doesn't mean that you don't have an effect. I would just say that you're less aware of the effects that it has.

Yeah, that might be true. Now, I'm curious. I wanna jump back to what you said a couple minutes ago about nicotine. Cause I think most people, they think of nicotine and they think of smoking and bad habits and nicotine equals bad. Can you talk about nicotine for a second? What it does to your body and sort of dispel some of that stuff?

Yeah, well, you know, if you're smoking nicotine or tobacco products, then, yeah, it is. It is very bad because you're creating a bunch of carcinogens if you take just nicotine without the carcinogens. And yeah, in. In like, let's say a packet, and you could put it on your lips. So there's different kinds. They have like, there's a Swedishness and there's also just regular nicotine packets that you can sometimes buying different smoke shops. So I, I like to use that form. I don't like the gum that much. I don't like the. I don't like. I mean, in cigarettes, it's not healthy. And so in terms of nicotine, it's not the healthiest thing in the world, but it's not. It's not going to, like, cause all these problems that are associated with nicotine. There's actually some benefits and there's some cons. It's kind of like caffeine. You know, it really. It depends on the individual. Caffeine will show some health benefits for some people. So, like, nicotine is actually good for ulcerative colitis. It reduces some kinds of inflammation, and so there's definitely benefits to nicotine. And then there's still drawbacks. They're not sure of all the drawbacks or what exactly they are because they haven't differentiated them from smoking yet. It's hard to, like, do studies just on nicotine.

Right.

But. But I think it definitely. What we do know is that it's a lot less than just smoking. Is it zero? You know, it's hard to say. We do have a post on nicotine. If you Google nicotine benefits, it'll come up.

Okay.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, because that's. I've heard a few other people talk about nicotine.

Well, Dave Asprey's talked about it before. I've heard him talk about it on his podcast.

Some other friends of ours have experimented. I mean, even my stepdad, for somehow, like, heard about this and he's like, yeah, I want to try that for golfing. Focus my game.

So is that what nicotine does? Is nicotine something that helps with focus and cognitive function?

Definitely.

Is it something that could potentially replace caffeine? If you're addicted to coffee, that would have a similar effect.

Well, I like nicotine better because I just don't like caffeine. Right. So it all depends on the individual. If you want to be, you know, somewhat like, look at, you know, Dave Asprey takes nicotine, caffeine, and Modafinil. So you know, he's taking all three. But in terms of like just me, I don't like caffeine.

It actually makes me a bit tired. I get a paradoxical reaction. It makes me tired but wired, which is weird.

Oh yeah. I've definitely felt that sensation where.

You'Re tired, you want to sleep, but your body won't let you sleep.

Yeah, exactly. So I don't like caffeine. Nicotine is more short term. I could take it and then a few hours later I could go to sleep. Not a problem. That's one benefit to nicotine. Another benefit is it just. It has a different. It does different things. It'll increase dopamine more, but it increases it in different areas. It's definitely, it's a very powerful cholinergic. So it'll increase the. It'll activate the acetylcholine receptors, the nicotinic receptors named after nicotine. And so those receptors just work way better for me rather than caffeine, which has a very different mechanism. And I don't actually do well with most dopaminergics or things that increase dopamine like Modafinil, because I actually have high dopamine in certain ways. And so if something like amphetamines or modafinil, I'll actually perform worse. And so if you already have high dopamine in certain ways, you could perform worse on amphetamines and modafinil. But nicotine actually makes me perform better because it much more activates. It has some serotonin and dopamine boosting properties, but it also activates those nicotinic receptors which will improve working memory and cognitive function in general. That makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

And it increases wakefulness, of course, through Orexin.

Now when you say you have high dopamine, is this something that you can actually determine through some of these tests that you can run through self decode?

So we actually had a symptoms analyzer. We're going to relaunch it just because we want to make it much better. And so you just put in some symptoms and then you could see if you're low dopamine or you can look at genes, there's many genes that have, that have to do with dopamine. So we have a gene pack. We have like a gene pack that will show you all the genes that have to do with dopamine. You could see if any of them are flagged or if any of them show that you have lower dopamine. And the main thing. Or you can read our posts and See if you have symptoms of low dopamine. So the best way is through symptoms. Then you could try out things that increase dopamine and see if you feel better. And then you can see if you have genes that are low in dopamine with self decode.

And that's exactly how that was the topic. I think mine was a warrior gene. I don't know the specific name of the gene, but that's how I pulled from one of these third party sites, googled it, found you, then realized my dopamine levels are lower than normal.

And then I saw a whole bunch of things you could do kind of, you know, as an everyday thing or if you want to get more aggressive with like a modafinil. I did end up buying some kind of powder, purines, something or other. But yeah, mix it in there withwith water, smoothies, coffee, it works great.

Yeah. So you're referring to MAOA and comt. Comt is moreit's an enzyme that let's say breaks down dopamine and when you inhibit that enzyme you have more dopamine in certain areas of the brain. Sometimes dopamine in certain areas of the brain can have negative effects like anxiety. But dopamine is actually quite a complex system. There's like, there's five different receptors for it, there's transporters that can be inhibited or not, and then there's a whole bunch of different enzymes that could break down. So when you talk about increasing dopamine, it could really be in different parts of the brain, different, different enzymes, different receptors. So it is a bit complex just to say high or low dopamine. But there's definitely people. Most people I'd say are low in dopamine for sure.

Gotcha. Interesting.

Got it now. So I'm still waiting on my 23andMe results. I ordered them. I don't know, it's probably been three weeks now and I haven't gotten my data back yet. But I'm curious if I was to take the data that I get from those results and I plug it into your site. What sort of things am I going to get back from it? What sort of data is the self decoding code site going to tell me?

So we have a couple different things that you could do, but you know, we have some health reports that you could look up and we give you grades in different areas and then we have like a recommendation engine that you know, could suggest some substances that you may or may not want to try. It's something to just look more into. And then we have, you could do a deep dive. You could just look through a bunch of different SNPs and see or genes and see which ones are flagged or which ones may be problematic. And then now we're actually going to be releasing also PDFs just to make it more like we want to make it a better flow. So someone comes in the site, they just have something to start with. So we're going to be offering PDFs as well on different topics that you might be interested in. But yeah, essentially like it's kind of. Right now it's kind of like a playground. You can, you can just look through a bunch of different things. But we're trying to make it a much better flow. And so by the time you get it, we probably will have launched our PDFs and.

You can choose on which topics you are most interested in and you'll just get a nice format to start with and then you can dive deeper with the program.

Very cool. Now I have sort of one final biohack type question, then we can sort of ask our final wrap up questions. But. So one of the issues that I personally have is I have a really, really hard time at night falling asleep. I'll go lie down in bed and it'll take me an hour and a half to finally fall asleep. Do you have any advice? And I'm totally asking this question selfishly, but do you have any advice for people who have a hard time like hitting the pillow and falling asleep? I do take one specific supplement that helps, but it's not the easiest thing in the world to get. And I'm not sure I want to name it on this podcast, but I'm curious what your advice is.

Yeah, we shall not name GHB or anything like that.

Well, mine is a three letter acronym.

I don't know what you're taking.

No, no, I take thc.

Oh, thc. Okay.

Yeah, no. So in terms of sleep.

We actually have a book that we released on biohacking insomnia. So that's one thing. But if you just want.

The biggest problem people have is related to the circadian rhythm.

And that actually has a very big impact on physiology. Massive impact on physiology. And so if you're at night and you're awake, it's probably also the case that you're tired during the day. That's just the way these things work. And what that means is your circadian rhythm is delayed. So.

You know, and the biggest reason that your circadian rhythm is delayed is because you don't live a evolutionary kind of lifestyle where that problem never really existed in the past. The reason is because, you know, when things got dark, we just turned off the lights and then there was really nothing to do. You couldn't really work. There's a whole bunch of different things that can kind of activate your circadian rhythm and delay it, such as if you're stressed out at night or if you have a bright screen on, if you're looking at your phone, your computer, the TV's on, the lights are on. It kind of mimics daytime. And especially certain spectrums you're getting, like just the. They give you just the blue spectrum so that you could see it better, but it's actually the most harmful part of the spectrum and especially with the onset of LEDs. So it's more efficient, but it's actually worse for you. So we have all these devices now that. And there's a scientific term for it, which is called light pollution, and it's just all around us. So there's that and there's also not getting enough light in the daytime to set your rhythm. So what happens is, people, if you're susceptible genetically, your rhythm is going to be delayed and then you're just going to be more awake at night and tired in the day.

And.

Again, there's many things that could do that. The circadian rhythm basically feeds in with a. It's a whole network of things and anything that, you know. So for me, I actually. So if I keep to certain things, I used to have that insomnia at night and that was actually from different things. So let's say if I was getting inflammation in the day. Inflammation is capable of delaying your rhythm. Right. And so I would, my rhythm would get delayed because of that. And then when I did certain things like just cut off, cut out lighter or cut out the blue spectrum at night, made the lights more mellow, was able to tone my nervous system better. I would find that I naturally start getting tired at 8 or 9 o'. Clock. And the other problem now that I have, or it's not necessarily a problem as long as I keep to my protocol, which is I'll automatically wake up at five or six or seven or whatever it is, depending on what time I go to sleep. But I'll wake up early because my circadian rhythm has shifted in that way. But the problem with that is, you know, like, let's say last night I was on Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan and I had to be there at 12:00am So I, you know, I went to sleep at 3, I still woke up at 7.

Some people, I noticed that they wake up, they go to sleep at three, they automatically wake up eight hours later or something. And honestly, when I was not taking care of my circadian rhythm for a while, because I was traveling a lot, I was just not being healthy.

And I was just eating at random times.

Being unhealthy, not keeping to any kind of rhythm, not getting enough light, getting too much light at night, I found my rhythm was much flatter and so my cognitive performance actually went down. But what I did notice was I was better at like going to sleep at like random times and waking up eight hours later. Because when your rhythm is more flat, there's, you know, your body starts to tune just more into how much sleep you need in some ways rather than the rhythm because it's not robust enough. Whereas when I have a robust rhythm, I'll just be wide awake at 6:00 clock or 7:00 clock and. And then at night I just have this wave of fatigue. And the problem is, is that, you know, if I wanna, if I'm like in middle of something, I'm like, I gotta just finish this and I power through it, then I can't go to sleep until like 2 in the morning and I still wake up at 6 or 7. So there's negatives to that as well. But I think just being diligent about it and having, when I do have my rhythm going and, you know, I, I get very deep and restful sleep, I wake up very refreshed and when I go to sleep, I just pop right into sleep. So it definitely, if you have a sleep problem, it's definitely a circadian rhythm problem as well. And you have to figure out what are the details about that that's doing it.

Perfect question. Because a lot of people struggle with that.

Yeah, yeah. And the reason a lot of people are struggling with it is because if you just look at the way society is built, people come home, their lights are on at night, they got computer screens, they don't get a lot of light in the daytime. They might exercise at night, they might eat at random times. And people just don't have like proper times of doing things. You're really supposed to eat a lot more in the daytime.

People just, they'll take stimulants at night, they'll just do things at random times. Whereas you're really supposed to do all the, like a whole bunch of activities in the daytime. Nighttime is really supposed to be just chill mode. You could do work, but you can't. Like, it's got to be light. You can't be stressful. You got to have your glasses on and make sure the lights are very dim and just be ready to relax. And if you feel that way of fatigue, you just stop everything and go to sleep.

Cool. That's hell of advice. That's great for all of us. Let's wrap this thing up. This is a packed session. I feel like we could do another one. We'll talk about it later.

Definitely.

Awesome man. So where. Well, we like to always ask if there's a book or some. Maybe some kind of resource. I know you don't read a lot of business books and doesn't have to be even business related. Is there something that you kind of go to often that maybe keeps your head straight or keeps you focused or you just enjoy reading or digesting?

Huh, That's a good question. That's a hard question for me.

That's okay if you don't have any.

If I have time to read stuff, I'll honestly, if just the honest answer, I'll just read self hack.

No, that's cool. I mean I actually, I totally respect. Because I think you're the only guest that doesn't really digest a lot of information. But I like the whole blank slate thing. I think that's. I mean, it's a different take, but.

I could see it's definitely a different take. Very few people are like that. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I mean, there's definitely something to be said about reading information and gaining experience from other people. I don't, I don't think, I think that's. That could be very helpful. Yeah, I just think that it's not my style. Like even if I get information from other people, I still don't trust anything. And I'm just gonna be like, I have to just test all these things anyway. Yeah, I like to just make mistakes and learn from them.

That's.

That's amazing. And it makes sense to read self hacked. I mean, it's not like you're writing all this stuff anymore. It's all new content to you anyway.

So you're like, yeah, it's true.

It makes sense. So where can people go find you? Obviously self hacked. We mentioned that a million times.

Yeah. So self hacked.com selfdecode.com is genetics website. We have.

A book on biohacking insomnia on just self hack. Like we have a general self hack book that guides you through the biggest things to be healthy. And then we have a cookbook for Lectin of avoidance cookbook that I call. And that's just kind of a paleo autoimmune paleo kind of.

So what are the names of each of your books? We'll make sure we link to them in the show notes.

Yeah. And so essentially, yeah, I don't have. I don't really give out my personal email address so much. It's just that's where people could find me. I get way too many emails.

Oh yeah, no worries about that. And most people wouldn't.

No. Yeah, we're not doing that.

So what were the names of those books? We'll make sure to link those up.

So we have one called Biohacking Insomnia and then we have the self hack book. We're also releasing a diet course in. We're re releasing it. We did a pre release and then we just wanted to see what people were, you know, interested in and what. Just get some feedback. And so we're releasing that in January. That's the self hack protocol with it's. It's more of a diet related protocol.

Mm, perfect. Cool. And yeah. And you can find it all on self hack, so. Awesome.

Joe.

Well, it's been, it's been amazing and yeah, we will do a round two soon but you need to get some rest and go get some stuff released, you know. Yeah, exactly. Cool man. Well, thanks for the time and. And we'll definitely forward any biohacking related people your direction.

Awesome. It was great speaking to you guys.

All right, man, you too. See ya.

Have a great day.

Bye.

Bye.

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