Closing Remarks
Biohacker's Handbook
Olli Sovijärvi is a Licensed General Practitioner at Helsinki Antioxidant Clinic and co-author of the Biohacker’s Handbook. He is one of the pioneers in holistic medicine in Finland and the only Finnish medical doctor with a psychologic-philosophical Integral Theory degree from John F. Kennedy University. Sovijärvi graduated 2006 as a licensed physician from University of Helsinki. He has pioneered health podcasts in Finland and consulted many natural health brands and organizations.
Jaakko Halmetoja is a nutrition & wellness expert, author, entrepreneur and public speaker with a pace of around 100 lectures per year. Halmetoja has a passion for making health & wellness cool – by popularizing the disruptive force of new health technologies and abundant opportunities around us. For a past decade, Jaakko has been traveling the world in search of the most interesting food ingredients and health technologies available – working as an advisor for multiple healthcare companies in Finland and abroad.
Teemu Arina has a professional career of two decades as a technology entrepreneur, author and professional speaker. Mr. Arina is one of the forefront figures of the biohacking movement. Mr. Arina has received the Leonardo Award in 2015 (under the patronage of European Parliament and UNESCO), selected as Top 100 most influential people in IT in 2016 (TIVI), and awarded the Speaker of the Year in 2017 (Speakersforum) and Leadership Trainer of the Year (Turku School of Economics, 2018). He is the co-author of the bestselling Biohacker’s Handbook series for optimising what it means to be human with technological and biological tools. Mr. Arina is also curating the Biohacker Summit (world's top conference for biohacking) and co-founder of the Biohacker Center (an independent think tank focused on optimal human performance, health and wellbeing).
The Biohacker's Handbook authors conclude the summit by exploring what truly
We are moving from evolution by natural selection to evolution by intelligent design, where we can influence our future. It is up to you: what do you want to create, and what do you want to become?
Summary
- The tardigrade serves as a model for biohacking, demonstrating extreme resilience and the ability to adapt to harsh environments including space, radiation, and temperature extremes. - Effective biohacking relies on holistic information rather than reductionist logic; isolating single nutrients lacks the complex biological synergy found in whole foods and natural entities. - True health is found in homeostasis and metabolic flexibility, avoiding the trap of rigid dietary dogmas or excessive supplementation that results in unsustainable "borrowed energy." - Spending time in nature remains the most effective way to recover and regulate circadian rhythms, often negating the need for the technological tools used to fix modern environmental stressors. - Humans are shifting from natural selection to evolution by intelligent design, requiring careful consideration of how transhumanist technologies influence the future of the species.
Article
Closing Remarks At Biohacker Summit 2018 Toronto
A Final Call For Balance In An Age Obsessed With Optimization
As the lights dimmed inside the conference hall and the October air outside Toronto carried on without them, the final session of Biohacker Summit 2018 tried to do something rarer than evangelism. It tried to pause.
The presentation, titled **Closing Remarks**, was delivered by the team behind **Biohacker’s Handbook** at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Toronto** on 15 October 2018. On stage were **Teemu Arina**, the technology entrepreneur and founder of the Biohacker Summit, **Jaakko Halmetoja**, the nutrition and wellness expert, and **Dr Olli Sovijärvi**, a licensed general practitioner and one of Finland’s best known advocates for holistic medicine.
After two days of gadgets, protocols, supplements, altered states and promises of human enhancement, their message was unexpectedly restrained. Biohacking, they argued, was not a war against the body. It was a search for equilibrium.
“In the end, it is all about the equilibrium where opposing forces in all physical, chemical, social, and biological systems are in balance,” the speakers said. “That is what biohacking really is; it is not about kicking ass all the time.”
It was less a closing flourish than a correction.
The Tardigrade As Patron Saint Of Resilience
Every movement needs its mascot. Theirs was not a celebrity doctor, nor a Silicon Valley founder, but a microscopic extremophile.
Teemu Arina turned to the tardigrade, the almost mythic water bear, as the ultimate model of resilience. Found in forests, on mountaintops, in deep oceans, and capable of surviving radiation, pressure, heat, cold and long desiccation, the creature became a metaphor for what the biohacking community wanted for itself: not permanent peak performance, but adaptability.
“As a biohacking community, we want to build up resilience and the ability to adapt to different environments and stressful situations,” the speakers said. “Our tools are aimed to build that adaptability into us.”
This was a notable reframing. In popular culture, biohacking has often been sold as intensity: better output, faster cognition, harder training, less sleep, more data. But in Toronto, the closing argument suggested that true sophistication lay not in constant acceleration but in the ability to withstand stress without breaking.
Bruce Lee, Intuition, And The Inner Technology
When asked to name a favourite biohacker, Jaakko Halmetoja chose **Bruce Lee**. It was not an idle reference. Lee represented, for Halmetoja, the union of philosophy, disciplined experimentation and embodied intelligence. Body, mind and spirit were not separate systems to be optimised independently. They were a single field.
That idea returned in one of the presentation’s most striking formulations: that information was not merely external, downloaded through podcasts, studies and products, but also internal, accessible through cultivated intuition.
“You have all the answers inside. If you develop your intuition, then you have no need for intellectual knowledge,” the speakers said. “Information is primary, and it is already inside of yourself.”
In a conference culture devoted to tracking, quantification and external metrics, it was an almost subversive proposition. The quantified self, they implied, could still lose sight of the self.
The Case Against Reductionism
Much of the talk turned on a critique of modern nutritional thinking. The speakers argued that health had been fractured by reductionism: one vitamin isolated from its food matrix, one compound extracted from a wider ecology, one mechanism elevated into doctrine.
An orange, they reminded the audience, was not vitamin C. A plant was not a single active ingredient. Whole foods, wild botanicals and traditional preparations contained layered chemistries science had only partially mapped.
This mattered because biohacking, in its cruder forms, risked reproducing the same mistake as industrial nutrition. It could turn complexity into a shopping list.
The answer offered in Toronto was not anti-science. It was anti-simplification. Health, they said, depended on context, synergy and dose. Too much oxidative stress was harmful. Too many antioxidants could also be harmful. Too much coffee, too much supplementation, too much fasting, too much anything, could become a new pathology disguised as discipline.
Beyond Keto Tribalism
The ketogenic diet, unsurprisingly, hovered over the room. By 2018, keto had become both a metabolic protocol and an identity badge. The speakers acknowledged its value, but resisted its absolutism.
The point, they argued, was not to pledge allegiance to one dietary camp. It was to develop **metabolic flexibility**, the capacity to move between fuel sources and eating patterns according to season, environment, workload and biology.
Humans had not evolved eating the same menu every day, under the same artificial lights, at the same hours, all year round. Ancestral diets, they said, were marked by diversity, scarcity, variation and local adaptation. Foraging populations often consumed a wide range of plants, especially bitter wild species now largely absent from modern life.
The plea was not nostalgic but ecological. Diversity in food meant diversity in chemistry, and diversity in chemistry fed diversity in the microbiome.
Mushrooms, Chaga, And The Return Of Old Medicines
One of the more grounded passages in the presentation focused on medicinal mushrooms. Their rising popularity in scientific literature, the speakers suggested, reflected not novelty but rediscovery.
Halmetoja and Sovijärvi discussed **chaga**, long used in Finland, including during wartime when coffee and black tea were scarce. They noted its antioxidant properties and its role in resilience and immune modulation. The point was practical as much as theoretical: old substances could be reintroduced into modern routines without fanfare.
Mushrooms also served a larger symbolic function. They sat between worlds, between food and medicine, tradition and innovation, subtlety and hype. In the biohacking imagination, they represented a kind of intelligence not easily reduced to stimulant logic.
Nature As The Original Biohack
The most devastating critique of the industry came in a simple confession. For all the devices, protocols and interventions celebrated at the summit, the speakers admitted that many became unnecessary in nature.
A lake, a sauna, daylight, cold water, movement outdoors, nights free of urban electromagnetic clutter and artificial illumination: these, they suggested, restored systems more effectively than many expensive tools designed to repair the damage of modern life.
“The most simple biohack is to get some sunlight or sun gaze,” they said. “It is basically regulating all your systems and your circadian rhythms through the eyes with natural light.”
Here was the paradox at the heart of the movement. Technology often stepped in to solve problems technology had created. Blue light blockers answered electric light. Sleep trackers answered sleeplessness. Nervous system tools answered overstimulation. The urban body, severed from older cues, needed prosthetics for patterns once given freely by the world.
Borrowed Energy And The Cost Of Performance
Perhaps the talk’s most humane idea was also its least glamorous: **borrowed energy**.
“We have a certain capacity for energy, and there is always a price to pay for borrowed energy,” the speakers said. “You want to recover whenever you can to ensure your system remains optimized.”
It was an indictment of the burnout aesthetic that often shadows wellness culture. Stimulants, sleep restriction, relentless productivity and stacked cognitive enhancers may create the sensation of mastery. But they can also become debt instruments against the nervous system.
Adaptogens, by contrast, were offered as a slower philosophy of resilience. Herbs such as rhodiola and schisandra did not deliver the theatrical rise of stimulants. They trained the organism more quietly, nudging stress response systems toward greater competence rather than demanding emergency output.
The argument was ancient in spirit, even if modern in branding. The strongest body was not the one endlessly excited. It was the one that could return to baseline.
Evolution, Transhumanism, And The Split Ahead
If the presentation began with the tiny biology of the tardigrade, it ended with the vast metaphysics of human destiny. The speakers moved from circadian rhythms and mushrooms to brain uploading, artificial intelligence, cryonics and transhumanist futures.
Humanity, they argued, was entering a threshold where evolution by natural selection might give way to something more self-conscious, more engineered, more dangerous. The species was beginning to shape itself.
On one side stood the prospect of biological refinement: better stress adaptation, more intelligent use of food, light, herbs, environment and technology. On the other stood the dream of mechanistic transcendence: digital immortality, simulated consciousness, machine merger.
The final tension was not merely technological. It was philosophical. What did it mean to improve the human being? To become more resilient, or less dependent on biology altogether?
A Closing That Refused Easy Salvation
The event’s last remarks did not offer resolution. They offered a line of caution in a culture more accustomed to salesmanship.
At **Biohacker Summit 2018 Toronto**, **Teemu Arina**, **Jaakko Halmetoja**, and **Dr Olli Sovijärvi** tried to gather the movement’s many ambitions into a single principle: adaptation without arrogance.
For all the summit’s appetite for enhancement, the most enduring takeaway was almost modest. Eat with more complexity. Trust whole systems over isolated fixes. Respect stress, but also recovery. Step into sunlight. Go to the forest. Learn from the body before trying to outsmart it.
And if humanity was indeed moving toward a future of intelligent design, their closing message implied that the first intelligence required was restraint.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Toronto