Biohacking The Ancestral Way

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Biohacking is trending: it’s the art and science of optimizing the environment inside and outside of you to take control of your biology. This sometimes means using modern tools (or hacks). But this doesn’t mean buying the latest and greatest gadgets, necessarily. Tim Gray is one of the most prominent biohackers of our time and the founder of the Health Optimisation Summit in the U.K.

Today, he explains why the simplest “biohacking,” like a nutrient-dense diet, plenty of sunshine, and sufficient sleep–offer the best foundation for our health. He also shares the serious health crisis that precipitated him to take his health into his own hands. He gets specific about detoxing protocols he used, enumerating those that provided the greatest benefit. Finally, he reminds us why we would do well to remain open-minded about new approaches to healing.

Check out Tim’s website: summit.healthoptimisation.com

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Tim Gray.

When you think of biohacking, do you think of expensive technology like hyperbaric oxygen chambers or neurofeedback machines? Biohacking isn’t necessarily like that and it can overlap with ancestral wisdom. This is episode 424 and our guest is Tim Gray. Tim is the Founder of the Health Optimisation Summit, one of the largest health conferences in the UK. He is a self-described biohacker who aims to optimize his health and help others do the same.

He defines terms. What is a biohacker exactly? He shares his story, the health crisis that precipitated his taking his health into his hands. He gets specific about detoxing protocols that he’s used, which provided the greatest benefit and how simple hacks that our ancestors implemented like a nutrient-dense diet, plenty of sunshine and sufficient sleep offer the best foundation for our health when all is said and biohacked.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to let you know that the Weston A. Price Foundation offers a Free Info Pack to whoever requests one. It gives you background on the foundation along with our most popular brochure, Timeless Principles of Healthy Traditional Diets. You will see pictures that Dr. Weston A. Price took himself and guidelines for living according to the show’s dietary recommendations. To get your Free Info Pack, go to Weston A. Price and click on the Free Info Pack button.

Go to NTI School to take advantage of this exclusive offer and learn more about the school.

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Check out Tim’s website: Health Optimisation Summit

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See our sponsors: NTI School, Upgraded Formulas, Optimal Carnivore

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Welcome, Tim.

Thanks for having me.

You are such a brilliant mind. I love following you on all the social media platforms. Everything you put out seems very profound and important in terms of health. I’ve noticed that some of your posts have to do with the toxins that seem to be omnipresent from the clothing we wear to the parchment paper that we’re baking on. There seem to be toxins everywhere. Do I need to hide in a cave or something to get away from them?

This is a good question because I heard a joke. A guy goes to the doctor and says, “Doctor, I want to live forever.” He said, “Do you drink? Do you smoke? Do you eat lots of fatty foods? Do you go skydiving?” “Nope.” “Why do you want to live forever?” The biggest thing is to pick your poison wisely. The important thing is to know which is the poison, which is why I talk about things such as female products, kitchen products or what things to avoid because then you have the choice of what to avoid or what to include in your life. I drink 3 or 4 times a year. It’s super clean alcohol. It’s usually biodynamic wine or a Negroni. It’s clean alcohol and things like that but I’m not a hermit on a desert island in the middle of nowhere enjoying nothing. I balance things. The answer is to know what to avoid and choose.

We are going to dive into some of the things that we should choose because we love to focus on the positive here at the Weston A. Price Foundation but let’s go back to years ago, maybe around the time you heard that joke. You were the CEO of a marketing firm. You were doing great career-wise but not so much health-wise. Tell us what was going on at that time.

I was what you would call traditionally healthy. I was eating well, thinking well, sleeping well, hydrating well and all the usual stuff but I wasn’t at all. I was waking up at 8:00. I was getting into the office at 9:30. I was working until 6:00 or 7:00 PM, maybe later. I was getting home, sticking the TV on, eating and jumping into bed. Wash, rinse and repeat, getting drunk heavily at the weekend because that’s what you do for stress. I was thinking that I was a traditional person, which is what everyone does. When you look at the statistics of what’s happening to the world in terms of obesity rate, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and all these things, I was average. I was on track for being one of those.

I thought I was healthy. When I started getting super ill, I started eating what I considered to be super healthy, which is eating fruits all day long, salmon and some of the most toxic products because they weren’t organic. They were farmed and all this stuff. I got sicker from it when I thought I was being healthy. A big part of what I do is educate people into finding out what is perceived as healthy or what they think is healthy and isn’t. Years ago, I was a complete layman.

You had urinary tract infections. You had fatigue. You were bloated. It sounds like you had brain fog. You were a mess.

I was chronically fatigued. It started with kidney stones after I went traveling. I won’t get into any of the controversial topics. I had all the injections before I went traveling because I was going to Indonesia and then it started from there. When I got back from Bali, I started getting kidney stones, which they were telling me I would have for the rest of my life. One could get stuck at any time again. It was crazy. I was in the hospital for three days the day after I got back from Bali. No one understood anything.

It was a year of stress. We know what stress does to the digestive system and every process in the body. I was chronically stressed thinking, “Am I going to get a kidney stone stuck in my ureter here again? Am I going to be rushed to the hospital as I was previously?” That stress shut down everything and my body started crumbling. I had chronic fatigue. I was depressed. I was scared to eat.

I started getting urinary tract infections, kidney stones and bowel issues again because of antibiotics for so many months because of the prostate issues I had. I couldn’t digest food. It was coming out pretty similar to how it was going in. It was predominantly plant-based at the time because I heard eating plants were healthy and having meat was the devil. I got worse. I tied in with a medical system and more drugs. There were no solutions such as, “Get natural light. Have clean water. Eat organic and natural foods and raw dairy.” There was none of that.

That’s what amazes me because you are one of the top biohackers. You lead one of the top biohacking conferences in the world. Your mission is to help people navigate an unhealthy world to be healthier. What provoked the U-turn? When did you say, “This is enough. It’s headed in the wrong direction?”

I had been to the doctor many times for many months but one week, I was in the doctor’s every single day. It got to the point where I knew the receptionist’s name on a first-name basis. I could call and get an appointment immediately even though they were booked up for months. I would get straight in. This is the NHS in the UK. It’s not the most premium of services compared to the States but they get me in straightaway.

It got to the point where I couldn’t drive anymore. I was super down. I was falling apart. My mom drove me to the doctor. I said to the doctor, “What’s wrong with me? I’m at the end of the road.” I was. I wouldn’t use the most extreme word for this but I was close to wanting to give up. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I can’t find anything wrong.” That was the epiphany moment in the car on the way back with my mom. Luckily, for some reason, I took a selfie of me and my mom in the hospice at the doctor’s surgery that day pulling funny faces. It’s a good anchor for me to remember that day.

I trusted doctors. When we’re traveling to different countries around the world, one of the things we enjoy about our countries, whether you’re from America, the UK or whatever country, is you are used to the medical system. If there’s an emergency, you can get down to the hospital. Most things like emergency care are pretty good. You don’t have to worry but when you suddenly have the realization that these guys have been trained for how many years can’t help you in something, I have to step up.

Doctors and physicians learn a craft. It’s the same with marketers. They learn a craft so that they can help other people so that those other people don’t have to learn this stuff. It’s heuristic because we can’t learn to be a doctor, a dentist or a marketer. We have to trust people around us for doing this. It got to the point where I couldn’t trust the doctors because they didn’t have the answers.

I got a pack of Post-it notes, wrote out all the different symptoms, stuck them up over on the wall, put them into a cause and effect chart to trace it back to everything and worked out the tests. This was 2011-ish. Forums like Cure Zone were hot. Weston A. Price was a good source of information for me but there wasn’t Instagram with influencers doing what we do. There weren’t functional medicine doctors in the mainstream like Dr. Mark Hyman. Mercola was a good resource but that was pretty much it.

I did all the Post-it notes. I researched all the tests that I should be doing. Everything is traced back to mercury toxicity, seven metal fillings, lifelong teeth issues, root canals, extractions and things partly because of genetics and partly because of a Western diet and lots of salmon. I would eat sushi most days of the week because it was quick and easy. It was farmed, nasty and high in metals.

I have the MTHFR gene or several of the SNPs. Not only do I not detox properly. I hold onto it like a magnet. As you can see by piecing it together, it’s all of these different things. The root cause is mercury and genetics side by side. What do I have to do? That’s how I unpacked all of this and understood what root-cause medicine or health and biohacking were before I even knew what biohacking was, which I found in 2015.

The term might not have even been coined too much more before that. Going back to what you were saying about your teeth, did you know that Dr. A. Price says the teeth tell the tale? Of all the travels he took around the world, he would do detailed examinations of the isolated people groups’ mouths because he felt like they were indicators of the health of the rest of the body. The fact that you had cavities, root canals and mercury fillings was leading you down the wrong path because your body was saying, “Help,” in some ways through the mouth.

 

This is one of the things why Weston A. Price resonates with me and why I’m so excited to record with you. It’s a big part of what I do. Dental has been a big part of my journey. It’s a small piece of it but it’s a massive learning. I spent a lot of time discussing with Andy Cutler before he passed with Dr. Christopher Shade who I got to know personally and who’s spoken at my conference in London and he will be again in 2023 and researching mercury, biological dentistry and holistic dentistry.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz who’s probably the leading biological dentist in my opinion because of his all-in-one concept is a personal friend of mine. I’m at his house in his office. He’s my dearest friend. Through being in biohacking and talking at conferences and things, we became very good friends. That’s how deep I am into the whole dental and how health starts in your mouth side of things.

This takes us back to where we started this conversation discussing toxins. Probably a lot of us have more heavy metals in our bodies than we may realize. Do you have any particular detoxing protocols that you would recommend or ways in which we could identify that we do have toxins in our bodies?

I’m trying to be careful to delete all of the extra stuff because you know what it’s like when you know too much about subjects. You can go down rabbit holes and not leave a lot of value for people because they don’t get it. The first thing to do would be to check your genetics and look to see if you have the MTHFR gene variation or one of the SNPs because that determines your detoxification rate in terms of methylation. Methylation in simple terms means to break down or change certain chemicals and toxins so that you can excrete them. Let’s call it that.

Forty percent of us have a variation of it. By understanding which variation of it, you know how to supplement with B12, methyl folate, trimethylglycine or any of the methyls. That’s number one. Why have you accumulated the metals in the first place? It doesn’t matter if you’re having a load because there are some people, for instance, that smoke all their life and do not get sick because they have good methylation genes and various other things but why would someone else have metal fillings and then get sick? That’s the top point.

First of all, if you then regulate those genes correctly, you will naturally detox a little bit without getting hit hard from mercury chelation for the rest of your life, which is great but then there’s chelation therapy such as Andy Cutler’s protocol, which is alpha-lipoic acid based on its half-life. You would take a tablet every three hours around the clock for 3 to 4 days. It picks up the mercury, moves it around and then drops it after 3 or 4 days. That’s Andy Cutler’s protocol.

We have interviewed Cutler on this show. We even reviewed his book with Rebecca Rust Lee. I’m mentioning this as a resource for those who want to do a deeper dive. His protocol is very specific. You can’t do it if you still have amalgam fillings in your mouth. You have to wait until those are removed properly. Thank you for mentioning that because it’s a great protocol.

Andy Cutler is very good. It’s helped a lot of people. The problem is that so many people have trusted the medical system and then realized that they can’t trust the medical system. They find out they have mercury poisoning, which the medical system doesn’t know how to deal with traditionally. They trust Andy Cutler’s protocol and then they don’t want to change from that because they trust in him almost as a God, “He can’t be wrong.” You get people fighting. When you do become mercury-toxic, you can be quite strong with OCD and be quite paranoid. You have loads of different things going on.

I was there. You can see someone when they’re mercury-toxic. The point is my friend Dr. Kathrin Huzelmann who’s a German naturopathic dentist from London told me about Weston A. Price. She told me about a book called The Mercury Diaries with Danny who later became my friend and went through a similar journey with liver flushes and things. She told me about Dr. Christopher Shade. He was an environmental toxicologist who created a brand called Quicksilver Scientific.

He’s all about mercury chelation. Instead of doing it the Andy Cutler way where you have to do it every three hours around the clock, which can be quite heavy for people and put a heavy strain on the kidneys, Christopher Shade came up with Swedish Bitters, a liposomal with alpha-lipoic acid that you do twice a day. You take activated charcoal with silica twice a day and gently chelate mercury out.

I found that with Andy Cutler’s protocol, I did 96 rounds of mercury chelation. At one point, I was taking alpha-lipoic acid every three hours. The MPS every 6 hours for 4 days a week was very intense. You have to wake up during the night with an alarm to do it. It’s quite disruptive, whereas two years of chelation therapy under the Andy Cutler protocol moved me a little bit, which is great. I was grateful for it but Christopher Shade’s protocol got me in three months further than the Andy Cutler protocol did. It was much lighter. I didn’t get neurological issues, fatigue or anything with the Quicksilver Scientific one.

With Cutler’s protocol, you have to make sure to not go too fast with the levels of alpha-lipoic acid. You’re taking too big of a dosage. You also have to be careful not to go too slow because if you go too slow, it can take forever for years. It sounds like Shade’s ideas are valid but what is the bone that Cutler’s followers have to pick with Shade? Do you remember?

I do. My point was that when I was first introduced to Christopher Shade’s work, I was like, “I don’t want to hear it. Don’t tell me. I love Andy Cutler,” yet I’ve always had a growth mindset and I realized where I was. I was open to it. The thing is that Andy Cutler is so specific about the half-life of alpha-lipoic acid and these chelators and Christopher Shade does care but it’s not so precise in the protocol.

He said, “Do it twice.” The only thing is that Andy Cutler didn’t talk about binders so much during the chelation. It was more about alpha-lipoic acid and taking all the assisting minerals, whereas Christopher Shade says, “Take the alpha-lipoic acid. Pick it up.” The half-life is three hours but you are going to do about 8 to 12 hours between your doses. You’re going to do binders in between. You’re not going to get the redistribution of the mercury, which most people get symptoms from.

I found it to be spot on. I love it and I do it very frequently. The bugbear is the half-life. People say, “You’re going to cause people to be ill.” I had one follower message me once and say, “You’re going to put people in a wheelchair. You’re a killer for recommending Quicksilver.” I’m like, “I’m out to help people. I’ve tested this myself. Otherwise, I wouldn’t talk about it.”

You’re reminding me. I’ve been in some of these circles and I’ve even done some of Cutler’s protocol myself because I understand that most of us have these metals in our systems, whether we realize it or not. It’s the binder bit that people also have a problem with. They’re like, “There is no such thing as binders.” What happens is that when alpha-lipoic acid is escorting the metals out of your body, you take another alpha-lipoic acid dosage so they can share the baton.

This is simplifying the matter but one little alpha-lipoic acid is passing on the metal to the next one that comes to the rescue. Cutler was saying, “There’s not something else that will take the mercury.” If you let it free float around, it’s going to settle in some other part of your body, maybe your internal organs or your brain. Shade says that you don’t have to worry about that because you can get binders. That’s a little bit of the debate here.

I do risk analysis on everything, whether it’s peptide therapy, chelation therapy or how many hours in the sun. We will discuss that in a bit. I had to test it. I went very slowly and I found it to be excellent instead of getting trapped in potential things, what might work or what might not work. It’s my life, my energy and my immune system. I wanted it to be back as quickly and safely as possible.

It was a calculated risk on my part. It paid off. Many people I know have asked me. I’ve recommended they try Quicksilver. It’s worked well for them but there are always going to be people that it does and people that it doesn’t. To fight and not be open-minded about it is the losing point because that’s the way the medical system is. We need to be better.

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Coming up, Tim reviews the fundamentals of health as he sees them and explains why the healthcare system in the UK is as broken as other systems around the world.

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I love that word. I am big on moving forward with a growth mindset and openness. If you’re going to start fighting, you’re the same as everyone else. You’re not going to move forward. You’re spending your energy in a direction that may not be helpful for you. Let’s talk about biohacking. We have had biohackers on this show before but the term might still be unfamiliar to those of us who are more ancestral-minded. Can you tell us what a biohacker is exactly?

Let’s be clear. My label is a biohacker but ultimately, I am into health optimization using the latest technologies and advancements as well as ancestral wisdom because we know that what our ancestors did worked and that we made it to this point. We’re not so healthy yet emergency care is amazing. Chronically, we are worse than ever. What our ancestors did worked.

Biohacking is the art and science of optimizing the environment inside of you and outside of you to take control of your biology. That’s the definition by Dave Asprey, the father of biohacking. It’s evolved over the years in my opinion from super expensive technologies like hyperbaric oxygen chambers, cryotherapy units and things like that. This is my opinion. Dave may disagree with me. A hack is to shortcut and it can have a negative connotation to it.

Biohacking is the art and science of optimizing the environment inside and outside of you to take control of your biology.

Let’s say cryotherapy instead of having an ice bath. Let’s say red light therapy or a sauna instead of being in the sun at certain times of the day. You don’t have to use technology to biohack. For instance, I look like I’m sunburnt in this light but I’m not. It’s a healthy tan. I don’t wear sunglasses before people comment. Sunlight, grounding, clean water with minerals like Celtic salt, a great community with no haters and Negative Nancys that draw you back, a growth mindset, movement throughout the day, lymphatic flow, rebounding and all of these natural things that our ancestors would have done, including standing desks, are what I consider to be the fundamentals of health or biohacking.

If you’ve got the money to spend and you want a quick fix because you’re in the office most of the day and you want to jump into a cryotherapy chamber, I’m all for it from time to time but unless you got the basics down, there’s no point doing all of the pills, supplements and technology and spending $150 an hour on a hyperbaric chamber if you’re not doing your breathwork, meditation and inner work.

Biohacking has evolved to be a label that tells you the toolset of using whatever you need to use, whether it be ancestral or advanced. It could be even medicine or any of these things without bias to say, “I want to do what works for me,” and where possible you can track it. For instance, I wear this Oura Ring, which tracks my deep sleep, REM sleep, light sleep, heart rate, variability, resting rate and oxygen saturation. It tracks females’ body temperature, which you can then link to your cycle app. You can know when you are ovulating in the phase of your cycle.

This is what biohacking is. It’s saying, “I don’t need to use contraceptive pills. I can track my cycle. I know when I need to be extremely careful or when not to have sex, for instance.” Technology tells us this. We can track this without needing pharmaceuticals. They are needed at certain points. I’ve been caught out a few times and have been in hospitals and needed medications. I have no complaints about emergency care but for chronic health issues or longevity, all of this fits together. Biohacking is a label for doing everything you need to do to live long, be young and die as late as possible looking young.

Biohacking is a label for doing everything you need to do to live long, be young, and die as late as possible looking young.

Andrew Weil says, “You want rapid morbidity.” You don’t want to die longer. You want to live longer. Live and then you’re gone. This is so encouraging to hear because I’ve been to some biohacking conferences and there are so many gadgets and things beyond hyperbaric oxygen chambers. There are neurofeedback apparatuses and things. It seems so out of reach but what you’re saying is we can take some of those shortcuts or hacks if we like but a lot of it is available for free as it was for our ancestors.

The thing that triggered it for me or the realization was two things. One was a friend of mine who is a very strict vegan and his girlfriend who’s also a strict vegan. He texted me and said, “My girlfriend is having a problem with her digestive system. Which peptide should I use?” I said, “Is she just eating plants? Has she incorporated any meat? Have you done any tests to check to see what’s going on? Has she had thrush lately?” I had a whole lot of questions. He said, “I can’t answer.”

I was like, “Why do you want peptides?” People want the quick fix even though they’re determined to look after their health. They will put the work in because if they’re vegan, let’s be honest, they put the work in to source their food and to avoid a lot of things. I have a massive respect for that but why do you want a peptide if you haven’t even got the rest of the basics down?

The other thing was a friend of mine once said, “A lot of these technologies are mimicking nature.” This is a point. Biohacking is using technology to mimic a natural environment in an unnatural world. That’s what it boils down to. Why would you use technology instead of nature when it’s available? If you’re in a city and you can’t get to nature, use these things.

 

When I’m in London where my main home is, I have to do red light therapy. I have to go out in the garden or use my SAMINA sleep system with a grounding bedsheet and all these things. I do so many biohacks but when I’m in Spain at my home there, I do very little. I take little supplements. I’m eating local meat, local food and seasonal veg. It’s so easy.

This is a cheeky plug. My conference, the Health Optimisation Summit, has been curated with this in mind. Every speaker, author, scientist and brand is selected by me because of their work or what they bring to the world. There are a lot of fun technologies. It’s like a biohacker’s playground. There’s so much amazing information from some incredible people that have been through a lot of this themselves. It’s all in one place.

If you want to go and have a meat bar on its own or a snack instead of having to buy airport food, we’ve got that at the summit. If you want to use a PEMF device that’s $40,000, we’ve got that. If you want to use a grounding bedsheet, we’ve also got that if you want to do a movement class. It’s all of this brought together. It’s the holistic approach as opposed to having to be a millionaire to get into biohacking. I want everyone to be healthy.

That’s super encouraging. When you were talking to your vegan friend about his vegan girlfriend’s health issue, you were like, “The peptides don’t come first. It’s getting a handle on some of these basics.” What do you consider to be the basics for good health? You could mention five. You’ve talked about sunshine and grounding. What else?

Eat well, sleep well, hydrate well, ground well, love well and move well. Let’s be honest. These are the basics. That forms part of a quote that Dr. Ted Achacoso once said at my conference in 2019, “It’s the fundamentals of health. It’s the basics.” You can’t say much more than that. What it boils down to is the macro. I don’t know where to go other than that.

I wanted to ask you about loving well because people understand how to get sunshine, get their feet on the ground and eat well. We recommend eating more natural foods like the foods our grandparents would recognize as food Wise Tradition-style and so forth. All the things you mentioned are pretty basic but how do we love well?

This is a realization for me. I’ve never held a relationship down for very long. I always escape. It’s an interesting mindset but it wasn’t until doing guided ketamine therapy. I’ve done a lot of it. I find it to be fantastic. I’ve done a lot of mushroom journeys and various other things as well over my lifetime but specifically, ketamine therapy was fantastic for me.

It brought me to a realization one day about my father. He’s bipolar and an alcoholic. It was part of the reason I got into psychology years ago. I didn’t know that until recently. My dad always apologizes for how he didn’t bring me up. I always say to him, “Dad, stop it. You’re only apologizing for you, not for me because I’m happy with where I am in life. I’m helping people. I have evolved. I’m happy.” He still keeps on saying it. It used to annoy me.

One day when I was doing ketamine therapy, I reflected. I was like, “If I was my dad and my dad was me or if I had a son and we had gone through that, I would apologize a lot. If my son told me to stop apologizing, that’s very thoughtless of him.” I need to accept my dad. Acceptance was a keyword here that kept on popping up. With ex-partners and things like that, I would always pick little things that they would do and get annoyed by them. I would never quite accept them. For instance, spilling a glass of water on something. I would be like, “Why are you doing that? I have to clean that up.”

One day, I was doing ketamine. There was a mirror in the therapy room. I looked to the left and saw myself while I was semi-high. I looked at myself. Usually, when we’re high or in an altered state, we don’t quite like looking at ourselves. Everyone always says it’s a weird phenomenon. I was like, “I’m going to hold it.” I held it and realized I had been 5 or 6 minutes looking into the mirror. I was like, “I know what I’m doing. I’m making peace with myself. I’m accepting myself. Do I deserve love? No. Why don’t I deserve to be loved? It’s because I don’t accept myself fully for who I am.”

I stayed there looking in this mirror and felt this whole not-accepting-self belief evaporate and almost drain away. At that moment, I went, “I do accept myself. I’ve changed. I have integrity. I’m the type of man I would want my daughter to date. I should accept myself.” At that moment, I understood the acceptance of myself. Therefore, I could accept others. I said to two very good friends of mine, “I accept you. You can say or do pretty much anything to me and I will accept you. I love you for who you are.” At that moment, I understood love well.

That’s so beautiful. It reminds me of what Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Sometimes we overlook that last bit but it’s pretty important. If we don’t love ourselves and accept ourselves, we won’t know how to do it for others.

I’ve done more ketamine therapy in a clinic in Austria that I go to for it. I’ve noticed with several of my friends that always have to be doing instead of being. They’re never comfortable sitting still or meditating. When they do journeys, they like to go miles away, indicating that they’re not quite happy with where they are. I’ve asked them, “Do you feel you deserve to be loved?” Each time, it has been either a hesitant yes or a no. I was like, “Until you love yourself, accept yourself and know that you deserve love, you are never going to be quite comfortable with being.”

For me, it was a big learning. Since then, I’ve met my girlfriend. I’ve accepted her like I’ve never done before with anyone. We have a great future together. I understand love and acceptance. This is key learning in biohacking. For instance, a mentor of mine who I will not name speaks very badly of me even though they’re in the biohacking space and have caused me a lot of grief and say a lot of bad things. I accept them. I’ve learned a lot of lessons.

My nan taught me once, “These people were sent here to teach us how not to be.” I’ve learned from them and I can still consider that person a mentor but the problem is it shows the relationship they have for themselves. Even if they say the relationship is the opposite, it shows. I’ve surpassed my mentor as a result. This is a key learning for me. I’m so grateful for it. I love that you’ve picked up on the loving well piece because it’s an important piece for me as a biohacker to let go of the data and get into surrender and acceptance.

It’s a beautiful piece that I too am growing in. From interviews with Bruce Lipton to Bradley Nelson, more people are understanding that we’re not just here to enjoy good health. The end of the journey is love. If we keep that in our sights, it may help resolve some of our health stuff but even if it doesn’t, we have grown in important ways.

Elon Musk and Joe Rogan did a podcast together. I’ve seen this snapshot on Instagram 100 times. It’s like, “Love is the answer.” They were both high at the time but love is the answer. It’s quite a profound thought when you think about it because love and acceptance truly are the answer to everything. If everyone had love and acceptance on this planet, it would be a very different place.

Love and acceptance are keys to learning biohacking. If everyone had love and acceptance on this planet, it’d be a very different place.

I have a couple of questions to pose before we wrap up. I’m so grateful for this conversation. We can be naturally high. Sally Fallon Morell always says, “When you’re well-nourished, you’re naturally high.” All those endocannabinoids are at work. It’s true. I have two questions to pose. You mentioned that like in the US, in the UK, the allopathic care system is great if you have an emergency and you need some attention but the healthcare system as a whole in the US is rather broken. Sally also says it’s a connect-the-dots system, “You have this symptom. We will give you this pill. We will do this surgery.” What’s it like in the UK? How do you see that system?

It’s reductionist medicine here as well for sure, rightly so because of the interests behind the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not a health industry. Health and industry I’m pretty sure don’t go together very well. The thing is that I catch myself, for instance, with a symptom and look at the error where the symptom comes from. The teeth meridians, for instance, of different teeth sockets are linked to different organs in the body. We often forget this.

Even electromedicine isn’t accepted. We are electrical creatures. If something goes wrong with a tire on a car, you’re going to repair the tire or change the tire. The medical system is the same. The top area of the pharmaceutical industry knows a lot of this stuff but it’s not good for profits. That’s number one. I’m not overly a conspiracy theorist. I do think there are financial interests that don’t want stuff to become mainstream like the tobacco industry. Once upon a time, they tried to keep it hidden for a long time. They lost their grip. When the people in power such as the government realized that they haven’t got a grip anymore, then it changed quickly. This will be the way that the world goes at some point.

They know that it’s not working. The more noise that happens and the more people like us talk about how it’s not working, one day, I do see it. Medicine for clearing up issues for emergency and preventative will unite. It will be individualized or personalized via tracking. Medicines will be individualized as well because they do work. It’s just overused. We’re in a calibration period. My answer is the UK is the same. Most of the world is the same except for where they can’t afford all these pharmaceuticals, funnily enough. They have different health issues. I do think it will catch up. In the next ten years, it’s going to look very different but not overnight.

Thank you for being one of those voices out there. It’s neat to see what Sally or Tom called the upwising of the crowd. In other words, people used to go to their experts or the people with the white coats, take their advice and leave. Now, they’re speaking to each other on a bigger scale because of technology. Suddenly, they can say, “I’m not the only one that had this issue after I got my breast implants.” It’s encouraging because you can’t hide the collective experience. I hope you’re right about where we’re headed. I want to pose to you the question I like to pose at the end of the program. If the audiences could do one thing or take one step in the direction of taking hold of their health, what would you recommend that they do?

Respect your sleep. It’s not just something you have to do. I’m sure a lot of the people that follow Weston A. Price’s work are already going to understand the importance of it but I want to highlight that we sleep to reverse the damage that we have done to our bodies during the day and for vital processes. If you jump into bed at 10:00, 11:00 or 12:00 and wake up with the sunrise, you are not getting enough sleep.

Respect your sleep. It’s not just something you have to do.

Your body is getting past it because it’s exhausted. You are not doing critical functions. You will age faster. It’s a very well-known fact. Parents, especially new parents, have a lot less sleep. They age faster. As the kids get older, their aging slows down if they respect their sleep. There’s so much research out there about how sleep is so vital for every process in the body. Respect your sleep.

If there’s one biohack that I would ever do if I was on a desert island, it would be wearing blue-blocking glasses after sunset because then I am secreting my natural melatonin. I sleep when I need to sleep, not when I’m exhausted. I wake up at sunrise and get the right amount of sleep. That is what I would do. It ties into that natural light exposure. It doesn’t have to be heavy sun exposure. You should stop before you burn. I’m tanned but I’m not burnt.

Natural light exposure helps us produce our melatonin. Wearing blue-blocking sunglasses after sunset helps us secrete our melatonin. If you don’t have blue-blocking glasses, live by firelight or candlelight instead and don’t use devices after sunset. You will find that your sleep increases massively. You feel much better. Your aging slows down. You’re healthier as a result. That’s where I would start.

 

That’s such a great word to end on. Thank you so much, Tim. This conversation has been a pleasure.

No worries. Thanks for having me.

—

Our guest was Tim Gray. Check out his website, Health Optimisation Summit, to learn more. You can find me and my resources at Holistic Hilda. For a recent review from Apple Podcasts. This one starts simply with, “Thank you. I love listening to your show. I love all of the different subjects you bring in and the different professionals you interview. I also love how easily digestible all the information is but more than anything, I love and appreciate your energy. I look forward to every episode. Thank you for all you do.” This is a review from Gissella Davis.

Gissella, thank you. These words are so kind and encouraging. We do our best here. Please leave us a rating or review also on Apple Podcasts. Go to Apple Podcasts on the app, click on ratings and reviews, leave us as many stars as you like and tell the world why the show is worth following. Honestly, we read as many of these as we can and it always warms our hearts. Thank you also for reading. I appreciate you so much. Stay well. Remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

About Tim Gray

Tim is the UK’s Leading Biohacker, and Founder of the Health Optimisation Summit. As a psychology specialist and a successful businessman, Tim founded and invested in multiple 6-figure businesses, including digital marketing agencies, and London’s first private Hyperbaric Oxygen Clinic. Tim is known for his detailed tracking of more than 35+ biomarkers per day, is frequently in the mainstream media regarding practical, trackable, and immediately applicable hacks, and is featured on over 30 podcasts a year. After years spent self-healing his body from chronic health conditions through biohacking alone, Tim embarked on a mission to educate and empower the masses. As such, he created The Health Optimisation Summit, Europe’s largest health conference, which aims to provide people with the knowledge, tools and resources to take their own health and performance to the next level. The Health Optimisation Summit showcases the best speakers from the health, biohacking, fitness, longevity, nutrition, and function and preventative medicine spaces.

 

Important Links

• Health Optimisation Summit
• Get the FREE WAPF info pack
• NTI School
• Upgraded Formulas
• Optimal Carnivore
• Andy Cutler – Previous episode
• Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
• Rebecca Rust Lee – Book review
• Dr. Kathrin Huzelmann
• The Mercury Diaries
• Quicksilver Scientific
• Bruce Lipton – Previous episode
• Bradley Nelson – Previous episode
• Holistic Hilda
• Apple Podcasts – Wise Traditions

 

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