Joe Cohen: Biohacking Your DNA, Optimizing Health with AI & Unlocking Peak Performance | Ep30

Joe Cohen is a pioneer in biohacking and precision health, known for his data-driven approach to optimizing the body and mind. Frustrated by the lack of clear health answers, he took matters into his own hands—running thousands of self-experiments to uncover what actually works. His findings led him to create SelfHacked and SelfDecode, groundbreaking platforms that leverage AI-driven genetic analysis to help people take control of their health.

Joe is the author of SelfHacked Secrets and Biohacking Insomnia, where he shares powerful insights from his research. As the host of The Joe Cohen Show, he interviews top health experts and explores cutting-edge strategies for longevity, performance, and wellness. Today, Joe continues to push the boundaries of personal health optimization, helping others unlock the secrets of their DNA.

Joe Cohen shares how his personal health struggles led him to question conventional medicine and take his well-being into his own hands. After years of fatigue, brain fog, and inflammation, he turned to DNA testing and precision health to unlock the root causes of his issues—ultimately transforming his body and mind. This journey led him to create SelfDecode, an AI-driven health optimization platform that helps people personalize their wellness strategies through genetic analysis and data-driven insights.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated with one-size-fits-all health solutions, struggled to find the right diet, supplements, or wellness routine, or simply want to optimize your body and mind, this episode is packed with game-changing insights. Joe shares why personalized health is the future, how AI is revolutionizing medicine, and what steps you can take today to start optimizing your well-being.

Connect with Joe Cohen:

Explore SelfDecode: www.selfdecode.com

Follow Joe on Instagram: @mr.biohacker

Core Themes

• Personalized Health & DNA Testing
• Biohacking for Peak Performance
• The Role of AI in Precision Medicine
• Supplements & Nutritional Optimization
• The Limitations of Conventional Medicine
• Data-Driven Decision Making for Health
• Entrepreneurship & Innovation in Health Tech
• The Future of Health & Longevity

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Transcript

Christian
What is up, beautiful people? This is Christian here from The Successful Spiritualpreneur Podcast. And today I'm super excited to bring you another special guest. His name is Joe Cohen and he transformed his health by ditching conventional medicine and decoding his DNA. Through a personalized approach, he discovered his genetic weaknesses and was able to optimize his health 10x better than ever thought was possible. This success led him to create self decode.

the most advanced DNA and precision health software providing AI driven insights. Today, Self-Code has helped over 200,000 people, thousands of clinics and 75 plus companies which are built on the Self-Code tech to bring personalized health with DNA to the masses. Self-Decode is trailblazing on the cutting edge of AI and genomics. takes 170 supplements a day, fixed 75 health issues and has his optimized 400 lab parameters.

and has one of the lowest rates of aging in the world. On his free time, he's a health coach and to some of the top health influences in the world. Welcome to the show, Joe.

Joe Cohen
Thanks for having me.

Christian
Love it. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into this health biohacking world and how you make it such a magic in your life?

Joe Cohen
Yeah, so I got into it based on necessity, know growing up I just had a lot of health issues. just nothing was working in my body just was tired all the time mental health issues Inflammation all over didn't have a lot of energy You know just there was just like nothing really working right get sick So, you know you go to doctors and then you see that they don't really have

too much to offer, didn't really know what's going on. You go to alternative doctors, either, you know, it didn't seem like they either had too much going on. And so at a certain point I just said, okay, I gotta figure this shit out myself. And so I just, you know, read a lot about the human body, about supplements. I started to experiment with lot of supplements from an early age. And let's see, I was doing it.

Yeah, I've been taking supplements since I was 20. 37 now, almost 38. So yeah, I've been doing it for a while and you know, it's just researching, taking it, just going down that rabbit hole. been my, you know, and then over time you wanna do, you know, it was clear to me like, you know, I wanna be more precise in this stuff. And so that's where genetics came in, lab testing,

and things of that nature and also for other people, like I always had, I did some coaching, a lot of coaching over the years and it was clear to me that everybody's different. Everybody has their own, each person responds differently to things and how do we predict that before giving something to somebody or before recommending something? Because there's too many options of things to try and.

You know, even after 18 years, I still have a lot of experiments that I haven't done on myself that I'd still like to do. It's just too long. Nobody can invest their whole life into this. have lives. And so we need to be able to predict what is the best things for a person. What are the best supplements? What are the best diets, lifestyle approaches? And so we need better information to make better decisions.

Christian
Mm-hmm. And if somebody, if one of the lessons out there, like if somebody's out there just like, you know, having a health issue right now, it's looking to like optimize their health, like what would you say is the best, I guess, three-step approach to make it simple? Or if it's more steps, that's fine, but you know.

Joe Cohen
Well, you know, if somebody has a health issue, think, yeah, I mean, like, it depends what their health issue is, you know, but let's say if we're going to answer it very broadly, it's usually not one thing that's causing it. That's number one. So it's not like, if somebody has a condition or disease, it's not one thing. It's usually multiple mechanisms at play. But in any case, they still need to

I think the foundation is to take a genetic test. really do. That's why I started self decode. Literally because I said, hey, what is the most foundational thing somebody could do? and, you know, we could have, I could have done other things with it. could have made it much more focused on lab testing or whatever. We have lab testing, but I said a DNA test is the most foundational thing. Now,

The problem with the DNA when I got into it, the problem was that there was no companies actually offering legitimate analysis. Even to this day, it's, it's a, most of the companies out there are scams. So buyer beware of DNA companies because basically they're preying on people who don't know. It's a very, you know, it requires very sophisticated technology to work correctly, but you know, companies basically just launch a product with.

you taking a couple variants online and it's really, it's garbage. It's almost like a scam. So you have a lot of these scams going on, but if you have a correct DNA test, a legitimate, a very advanced DNA test, that could tell you information about everything and that could guide the way from there. So number one, it can tell you all your predispositions. What are you predisposed to? And

Some of that could be used in terms of like a differential diagnosis situation because if you have a DNA predisposition for something and you have it, then that means that there's a strong genetic component. You could still fix it and get rid of it. But then what you're going to do is you're going to try to see what are the DNA. You could look at different genes and different things that there's going to be a list of recommendations that you could do based on certain genetic variants.

But if it's not a DNA predisposition, then it means that there's something strong, very strong factor in the lifestyle that is causing the issue, right? And so you could get a very good picture of all the DNA predispositions and maybe you might have a high DNA predisposition for depression and anxiety and maybe the mental health aspect is driving the other thing, right?

Christian
Hmm.

Joe Cohen
So the body is like an interconnected web and you could have the strong predispositions in one way or a different way. And that could sometimes one thing is driving something else, right? Combined with some lifestyle factors. So you really like there, and then there's a, the other thing that you could use of course is also for prevention. So there's a huge prevention component to that. Whereas, you know,

looking at which conditions you have a strong genetic predisposition for in the future and then you can prevent those and push those off. So, but if somebody has a health problem right now, you want to understand what is the best approach to solving this. And I think a DNA, you need to do testing. So there's a couple of ways to figure out what you need to do if you have a problem. Number one is first of all,

You want to just look at, what are all your symptoms and conditions? People typically have more than one issue. They might not realize it, but like, for example, if you have, you know, gut problems and acne, you might not, like sometimes, you know, you speak to somebody, they're like, no, I don't have any issues, but like, you'll see like, okay, this person has fungus on their toes. Clearly they have some issue that they're not even thinking about, right?

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
I'm just giving you a random example of something that you know, it's like people like no, I'm perfectly healthy I'm like thinking I don't tell this to the person but I'm just thinking like I'm looking at your fungus on your toe. You're clearly not that healthy Right. And and by the way, it's it's fine. People have a whole bunch of different health issues I had a lot of them. I'm not saying it's a you know, it's negative. What I'm saying is is that People don't even realize what a lot of their health issues are. So one is

I think the person needs to make a, I think everybody should really make a mapping of what are all the issues that they're dealing with. And if you ask somebody, people don't even have a list. They don't know. They're not sure. They're like, hmm. And then you like, and I know that because if I have a client, right. I'll see their DNA predispositions and I'll ask them like, you have allergies. Like, you know, I had this client who's like, no, I don't have any allergies.

Christian
Yeah.

Joe Cohen
And then later on it comes out, I'm like, okay, you have a DNA risk for allergies. He's like, no, but I don't have it. I'm like, but you mentioned your nose was stuffed, right? He's like, yeah. When I'm like, yeah. He's like, yeah, when there's a lot of pollen out there. I'm like, that's an allergy. He's like, He didn't realize like, when pollen is that, it's just, yeah.

Christian
Yeah, I think there's

so much about health in general. Sometimes even when you know you have it, you don't tell it. Sometimes when you go to doctor, you're told, oh, don't cross all that stuff. Because you don't want to be honest even with the doctor because they're just trying to sell you or give you a different prescription or whatever it is. I think what you're doing in the world is so incredibly

Joe Cohen
Exactly.

Christian
powerful because in a subject like health, where we just walk away from our power so easily that you stand here and tell us, claim that power back, you know, I think is so powerful. So yeah, I just want to say, it'd be such an incredible example, you know, because health is ultimately where it's at. You know what mean?

Joe Cohen
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Christian
Billions and trillions of dollars are spent on health, especially when people obviously get older because that's when even more issues come up that are un dealt with. So that's where you really lose your power as a human. You very much surrender to whatever is in your way if you have an health issue.

Joe Cohen
Yeah, I think people don't realize so much that spirituality, everything is connected to health, right? How you feel as a spiritual person or how you experience the world, these are very heavily influenced by biologically related processes. That's why a lot of people will take psychedelics or certain kind of drugs to get into certain spiritual states because you could change

biochemically how your body operates and that creates spiritual experiences, right and so Just like that's the case Yeah, you're tired or awake how much energy do you have all these are biologically there they're chemically derived and You know, it's just like whether you have anxiety or your mood or all these things there is an interaction with the environment there's no question about it, but

They're also all chemically derived. you can, what I found is that I could manipulate these things to an extent that I didn't think was possible. You can manipulate spiritual experiences. You can manipulate your mood to an extent that I didn't think was possible. You could manipulate all these things.

Christian
Your

body is the vessel, it's where everything happens, like the brain and you know the chem- well it's just like you said

Joe Cohen
Correct. And

yeah, I've been doing experiments on my body for many, many years. And it just is amazing that you take something and you're like, this thing gives me anxiety. I take something, this thing takes it away. Like the amount of changes that my body has gone through, if you think about it, I've done an average of one experiment in a day. When I experiment with something, I mega dose it. I take a very large dose of it.

And I know what I'm doing. It's not something I recommend to regular people, but you know, it's kind of like for me, it just, it helps me learn. so I'll every day, every day I do at least one new experiment in the day, trying to learn something new. like, take a new supplement. take a new, you know, I do a new thing and I've been doing that for 18 years. So think about it, how many experiments I've done. Even with all that, I still need guidance from DNA and lab testing.

which have also helped me tremendously. But the idea is that you have data, you have these, like I do these experiments, and what I found is that people don't realize how much you can change. If you understand how the body works and you know what, you know, like there's so many different substances, so many different things out there, modalities, health modalities, that if you know what to do,

you can dramatically change your whole physiology in a very, significant way, which is what I've done. And so that's been my whole life experiences, changing my consciousness, changing my physiology, and often in ways that are like you wouldn't expect it. was, you know, it was just like,

Even yeah, it's kind of constantly pushing the boundaries. I'll give you an example. A lot of my health issues came from food sensitivities. I used to not be able to eat anything. Like if I ate anything, I would just get tired. If you give me food, like every meal, I would just feel like I had a food coma. Right. That was part of my health issues. And it just seemed like a normal part of my existence. Like this is this is it. Like this is what I had. Right. And fast forward to today.

I got rid of all those food sensitivities, almost all of them at least, right? And now I can eat whatever I want. Now I still eat a, you know, a healthy diet and I still don't eat so much grains or whatever. It turned out that like grains were big, grains, beans, but I was allergic to everything, eggs, except for chicken and beef, pretty much. And I wouldn't detox stuff from fish well. So just chicken and beef.

were, were okay. Now I could pretty much eat everything. And, but yeah, it was just my experience was in a certain way, like people go through life with a very specific frame of mind, a certain state of mood or a certain, state of anxiety or, you know, and, and these things are relatively stable for a lot of people. mean, there's, you know, sometimes people are more stressed or less stressed.

They'll have a health condition. Often it's relatively stable. Okay, if they have allergies, they know that when allergy season comes, know, their allergies kick up. What I found is all of these things can be changed. And I've changed it on myself. I've changed on other people. I've seen, I've seen so many situations where like things can dramatically be changed with the, have so many tools at our disposal in terms of

technology to identify how a person's body is ticking, that's one. And a lot of that is genetics, but also lab testing, like blood tests and any kind of scans or whatever. yeah, and so it's technology plus the availability of supplements, foods, pharmaceuticals. Like you can get a food from anywhere in the world, right? You can get a...

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
Like the amount of tools that we have has been greater than ever before. You know, yeah.

Christian
Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about more, like tell us more about self decode. why, you know, cause it's one thing to like do a DNA test for yourself and biohack and optimize, but like, why do you start your own company? That obviously means like there's, there's more to it. There's more passion. There's like, there's more care, right. In that direction for you in that regard. Why, why, why did it have to be like started? Right.

Joe Cohen
So the... the... yeah, there was two reasons.

Christian
and why is it different?

Joe Cohen
So there's two reasons I started self decode, right? I started it because I saw there was a need in the market for it. And there was two different reasons for it. One was I realized pretty early on in 2013 already, the power of genetics. It was just clear to me, there's so much information in your genetic code that we're not even beginning to explore what the hell's going on there. And it seemed like commercially,

companies were doing a very poor job in analyzing and then displaying the information. And they still do, which is unbelievable. So there's like a new company every day claiming to do DNA analysis. Each one is like shittier than the other one typically. you know, it's like the, like legit cutting edge analysis is, is, is a few and far between, right? You that's, and that was really like one of the things like

Okay, we need the most cutting edge analysis so that people could figure out what's going on inside their body. They can decode themselves. So that was the original thing. Okay, like we need the most cutting edge, most comprehensive analysis. And that's what we built. We built the most cutting edge and comprehensive analysis. The second goal I had, and by the way, that's also why we licensed the infrastructure to other companies because

It's clear to me, we spent $20 million on building the tech and these other companies are either spending a few thousand dollars on a dumb PDF with their dinosaur tech and they just spend money on sales marketing team. But I said, you know what, instead of them doing this, they're doing it because they have no choice. Let's give them a platform where they can access our technology, our API, not the user data of course, but just the

the, the, ability to, you know, do the analysis without actually having to spend, you know, a lot of money doing it. They could just pay per patient or whatever per person. So, and then they could use it in however way they want, whether it's customizing supplements or there's a lot of people who have different creative ideas there or just white, you know, white labeling or, know, whatever they want to do, they could use that. And so that's why, in the bio it said, you know, we have

over 75 companies now using our technology, our genomics technology as their core. And the reason they're doing is because that technology is not readily available just randomly on the market. It's not something that you just, you know, you're like, we can build this. I have a developer. Here we go. Right now. You know, some companies are trying to do that, but then that those are the scam companies. That's what I'm saying. You got to be careful about that. So you got to make sure that

It's and I know the market well and I'm telling you that Besides us. There's nobody else that has that technology for the consumer market So either us or somebody who's being powered by us You know, otherwise it's Crap technology so that that's one is I saw that the DNA technology in the market was just really bad and

Christian
Yeah.

Joe Cohen
Number two was I didn't see people really utilizing a bunch of information. In like basically, if you just use DNA technology to predict things, it's not typically going to be enough to know exactly what you need to do. You need to take in other pieces of information. So what kind of other pieces of information do you need to take in? You need to take in your symptoms and conditions, your goals, meaning

You might have a symptom and condition that you don't have a DNA risk for, for whatever reason, right? It could be that you were born prematurely and that causes the condition or you got some infection and it doesn't really have much to do with your DNA. Most often it does, there's both factors at play, but sometimes it could be purely environmental. Sometimes it could be like purely DNA, right? And often it's a mixture of both. But the idea is that,

You can't just know exactly what to do if you only do a DNA test. By in and of itself, it could give you ideas, could give you directions, but you can't know definitively what you need to do. So what I set out is, okay, we need to combine symptoms, conditions, like somebody puts in all their symptoms, conditions and goals. You need to be able to input your lab results. You need to be able to fill out questionnaires and put that in.

And you need to be able to have a, you know, a legitimate, thorough and cutting edge DNA test. And we combine all that information and then you could, based on all those pieces of data, we can predict what you need to do that will have the biggest effect, like which supplements, which lifestyle, which diet. Just taking one piece of data. So people will often like maybe get one blood test. They're checking one marker.

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
you're not gonna know what you need to do based on one marker or whatever, right? So the DNA test could check hundreds of millions of markers in the body. And so you wanna, that's why it's like you're getting so much data from that, right? So it's like a DNA test, but you also wanna put in other information, some lab testing. So we allow you to upload your lab test, fill out questionnaires, and then we give you a recommendation.

And you could see exactly why that recommendation is being made. It shows, goes through all the reasoning, if you will, you know how there's like a chat GPT like, or deep seek or one of these LLMs. It shows you the reasoning why it's giving an answer. We show you the reasoning why we give you a recommendation and, and, and that has to do with your personal data. So the reason why you can't use chat GPT just to get recommendations

Christian
Yeah.

It's good news.

It's so proud.

Joe Cohen
You can, and it's probably better than nothing, right? But the problem is they don't have your DNA. They don't have it and they can't analyze it. They don't have your lab tests and they can't analyze it either. You could probably try to upload some things and maybe they'll get half of it or whatever. But again, they don't have the right, it's just not built for that. It's not designed for it. They don't have all your symptoms and conditions. You could probably start playing around with it for 10 hours, but even then they're missing too much data.

Christian
Yeah, I think I think the problem

Joe Cohen
to provide you with

a good advice.

Christian
I think the powerful thing about self decode, because I've done a DNA test before with the DNA company. I'm not sure if you know them. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Joe Cohen
Shit company.

I mean, when I say shit company,

okay, let me clarify that. I don't wanna say shit company, I take that back. What I'm saying is they're measuring 83 variants and we're measuring 200 million variants. When we say measuring, we're actively analyzing, right? So it's not just measuring, they're just measuring and they're analyzing 83. We're measuring and then actively analyzing all of your variants, your whole DNA.

Christian
But before...

Yeah.

Joe Cohen
And that's a huge

difference, right? So basically we recreated all these companies in a few days and made them a lot better. said, because people were like, hey, I did this test from here or whatever. We're like, you know what? Because for us, the technology is so simple. It's like, yeah, of course we'll just recreate this. Very easy.

Christian
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really powerful. And then the other part for self decode where I feel like I was lacking as like a customer of DNA testing was just like, yeah, you get your results and there is videos and explanation, but that additional input of like putting in your health goals or conditions or symptoms and combining that with a recommendation is so much more powerful than just seeing this is what we can see that could be a good lifestyle for you.

Is it? You know what mean? So that's where I felt like I was falling a little short from that side. And then people just stop acting. I guess there's no concrete like, yeah, action steps and recommendations specific to use. I don't know.

Joe Cohen
Yeah.

Well, so the DNA company is a perfect example of the reasons why I started self-decode. First of all, I started before they started the DNA company, but that's a perfect example. They're using 83 variants, right? They're not using any sophisticated technology. They're just literally, you're taking, and they admit this, they're taking 83 variants, they sequence 83 variants, and they're...

making a whole bunch of predictions based on 83 variants. You cannot do that, right? It's too little information. It's like, you know, me telling you what a whole book is about based on 83 letters of a book. Letters, not even words. Right? Like you're just like, hey, there's 83 letters here. What the hell am I going to know from these 83 letters? Right? That's exactly what the DNA is. You know, you have 200 million letters and that makes a book, a huge book.

and you're only taking 83 of them, that's, it's, you know, it's number one is it's not, it's not cutting edge. It's not advanced. They're looking at too little information. And, so that's one of the problems. Like I said, it's, it's, if you get a random DNA test, you're likely not going to get something that is a good quality because like, if, we want to recreate what they did,

Again, all we need to do is take their 83 variants, which we did. We recreated all these companies. We just said, okay, let's take all the genes that they're doing, put them in one report. And we call it the genetics company instead of the DNA company, the 100x genetics company, because we can't obviously take their name. But the idea is that we just use the same genes and that's that.

Now the next thing is the recommendations. The recommendations is too simplistic. They're not looking at your symptoms and conditions. They're not looking at your lab tests. They're not looking at your goals. They're not looking at your history. You're not filling out questionnaires. What they're doing is extremely simplistic in the sense that you have X variant, Y recommendation is being given, right? Which doesn't make any sense. doesn't, like it's literally, it's not even based on

Whole risk as you know like a polygenic risk what we call which you know, let's say you want to have if we want to know Do you have a risk for Alzheimer's right? So we know about APOE but there's actually you could look at a million variants for Alzheimer's and Combine all those variants and it's actually even made way more powerful than APOE. So But what they're doing is they're just looking at like 83 of these variants and they're making very broad conclusions based on that

And so number one, these are the two problems that I mentioned that all these other companies are doing the same issues. They're looking at too few variants. So the actual technology, again, to build a company like this is very cheap. It's just a PDF. They give you a PDF. It's just, you you're doing the genetic test that costs like 30 bucks, maybe 40 bucks from the lab. It's very easy for a company to do that. You could, you yourself could establish a company like that for $5,000.

and then just do some marketing behind it. the problem, you know, and that's where most of the money is spent, of course, is the marketing. the, they have these two problems, which is what I am educating people about. Now I have nothing against the people of the company, right? They might be good people or whatever, but I just think that the company,

Christian
Yeah.

Joe Cohen
is suffers from it's a it's not them alone it's the whole industry has that problem where they're they just it's too superficial yeah

Christian
It's too superficial. Too

superficial, yeah. Yeah, it's incredible. I think it comes back to so many things. On the surface, so many things look good. It's like, oh, I'm going to get my website built on Fiverr. It's looking good, but does it work in the way you need it to work?

Joe Cohen
Literally,

yeah, literally you could get a Fiverr developer and build what these guys have. It's just a PDF. You take 83 variants, you connect it. It's not a big deal. It's really very simple. And the other thing that they do is they give you recommendations. You see the recommendations, right? They don't explain why they're giving the recommendations. So it's a black box. It's how the hell do I know if these guys like...

Christian
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Cohen
First of all, the fact that any company that just is checking 83 variants already don't think is credible. Now, if they're giving me recommendations, I'm not gonna think any of those are credible unless they give me a very detailed explanation of why that is. They don't do that. It's in the back end. But I'm telling you, I know they're only working based on these 83 variants, so it has to be, okay, if you have this variant, then you have this recommendation. And it's just like the whole thing doesn't make sense.

You cannot. It's too limited. just even within the DNA is just way too limited. we don't we don't even feel comfortable like making recommendations solely based on DNA with 200 million variants. You know, it's like it just doesn't make sense.

Christian
Yeah.

Makes sense. Okay. Yeah. So I want to switch gears a little bit. And since you're a very scientific data driven guy, which is amazing. I'd love to ask you some like non science questions, which is like, like, like when was the last time, for example, you followed your intuition over logic in your business and why, or why not?

Maybe it's enough. Logic clearly makes more sense.

Joe Cohen
It's

a good question. When did I follow my intuition? I don't know. It's hard to differentiate between the two. I guess intuition, I don't know. It depends how you define intuition, but intuition might be having a gut feeling of something that you can't prove. I've made a lot of bad mistakes based on having a very strong intuition about something.

but then not having enough evidence for it and I kind of was more passive about it. like intuition that, sometimes you have this intuition that like let's say somebody's working for your company, let's say. We don't have this problem now, we got rid of like anyone who's not A plus but in the beginning just like we were massively hiring. Okay, I have an intuition that this person is probably not very good. But you can't prove it.

and you don't want to fire somebody if you can't prove it. So you kind of let them stay for a while until it just becomes so clear that like, you're like, no, this person has to go, right? Like this person's dead weight. And so it's just somebody's not performing or whatever. So that's kind of like an, I guess that's like an example, you know, or if we're going to use something or should we buy this service or.

Christian
Yeah.

Joe Cohen
There's a general intuition and I would say, but you just can't prove it. Like, we use this marketing service? It's like, got this general intuition that there's something wrong here, but you know, the marketing team is presenting and they're like, yeah, I think we should go here. And you're like, I can't really disprove this, right? So it's like, you just kind of go with the flow. I'd say those were, you don't, my general is,

If I have an intuition, but I don't have evidence, like proof, and somebody else is very strong for something, or that's against my intuition, often I'll let that person just like, okay, well, I'll be more passive about it. Those were some of the biggest mistakes I've made though, in running a company. The intuition, my intuition, generally is correct.

Christian
Hmm.

Joe Cohen
That means that if I have an intuition about something, typically it ends up being correct. But again, you know, it's like, how do you, how do you operate in that situation? Cause you, you're not sure.

Christian
Maybe you maybe want to

knock down that intuition somewhere like in the back of your mind and then if something, a sign or a symbol proves or supports that intuition, like, okay, score one for the intuition at C. There's a couple more scores, you know what mean? Then you'll know it's time to take action.

Joe Cohen
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question just in general. It's a good thought experiment. But I think probably overall I have to rely on my intuition more. But again, it's sometimes, yeah.

Christian
Well, I think you're already

very logic-based as a person in everything that you do and data-driven. then hence why you say like, maybe can rely on my intuition a little bit more, right? Because you're utilizing so much of your left brain side already that it might be relaxing or it might feel balanced for you to use the other side a little bit more, right? Because I think at least for me, life, a lot of things come back to like,

Joe Cohen
Yeah.

That's true.

Yeah.

Christian
this concept of balance, yin and yang, whatever you want to call it. How much masculine or feminine energy, how much yin and yang energy does this supplement have? How much yin and yang energy does this company have, this person have, this conversation have? Does it feel good for me right now to be super aggressive and masculine, or do I just need to chill and be in my space? You know what mean?

That's how I live life a lot, which is like very diametrically opposite of like a lot of things you do because yours are very like Experiment data experiment data experiment, you know, you know

Joe Cohen
Right.

Yeah, but I think, yeah, I think I do need to operate with more intuition though. And again, how do we define, how would I define intuition? Intuition is you have a feeling about something, but you can't prove it. Can we say that that's definition or you have a different definition?

Christian
Hmm. I think. Yeah. I mean, again, everybody has kind of like, would say their own little bit different, Intuition for me often also comes through a little bit more of a higher guidance in a way. I'm not so sure how would say that. Like, of course, gut feeling, but also. Yeah.

Joe Cohen
I feel like we have to define it strongly first.

But it's a feeling. You could

call it a guidance, but at some point it's what you're feeling, right? Yeah, so it's a feeling. You're drawn to a certain feeling. You just have a certain feeling about something. It's an opinion, like, okay, I have a feeling that this is the better path. This is the worst path. I have a feeling that I just wanna be in a more masculine state right now or more...

Christian
Mm-hmm. Yes, totally. 100%. Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
Whatever yin-yang state whatever, you know you having these feelings and you're you're gonna go with those feelings rather than and those feelings you you can't Rationalize them in the sense of like either you can't prove it or you can't describe it fully like why am I feeling this? I don't know but I just am right? It's like you can't prove it. You can't write you can't describe it fully and you can't understand why you're feeling that way

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
If you did, then it would be more rational. If you were like able to fully understand it, you'd be like, okay, well, A plus B equals C. And therefore if A then, you know, that would be more rational. But it's something just in general that you're not able to describe fully. And so, yeah, so I'd say that I think people in general are better at taking in information and having a general

sense of things without being able to describe it in very, you know, minute detail. You might have a general sense of, this social interaction with a guy or a girl is going a certain way, but you can't fully describe it. Why did I think this is not going the right way? Because, you know, maybe the exact amount of time that they had eye contact was, you know, was

40 sec, you know, it like 30 seconds instead of 40. Like you're not able to describe it always fully, but there's this kind of sense that you get that's based on a lot of pieces of information, but you can't fully compute it.

Christian
Yeah.

Yeah, beautiful. So I'd like to like dive a little bit deeper into your personal regimen, which, you know, you also have a freebie about if people are interested in that, like where, first of all, like where can people find the freebie? Also maybe mention your Instagram handle and then Mr. Byhacker. That's easy. Mr. Byhacker. Okay. And then...

Joe Cohen
Okay. Mr. biohacker. MR. Okay. MR biohacker. Yeah.

Christian
Tell us about your regimen and then how people can apply some of that for themselves.

Joe Cohen
My regimen was built over a very long time and using a lot of data. I don't think most people it makes sense to do what I'm doing because for different reasons it's just too much, It's really like unless this is your business I wouldn't suggest it. So I take like it's over 170 supplements a day and you know some of them are in powder form some of them are in

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
of them are in pill form. I try to get things in powder form, even vitamin D I take in a powder form so that this way I don't have to take an extra pill. I basically get like 50,000 IU in a powder form and I just put it in like a month worth of powder and then that's how I get my extra vitamin D besides from the sun.

But anyway, yeah, so I'm taking all these supplements. How would I what do you want to know specifically about my regimen like what? To list everything is gonna be too long, right?

Christian
I would say, I think, you know...

Yeah,

I think here, like we want to bring people kind of like the wisdom nodes of like all these experiments and data you've gone through. of course, everything's very personal with health, but like, how can one get started? I think number one, do any DNA tests with self decode, I think is super helpful because they're just the best DNA company out there. Sounds like not that I'm an expert, but like from what you said, like you guys know your stuff and your tests, you know, so that's number one. Number two.

communicate with that tool, what your symptoms, what your preferences or conditions, inclinations are, and then get guided recommendations. And then also, based on that, do you recommend supplements inside of that self-decode DNA test program or?

Joe Cohen
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

would you would you like to see a screen share or?

Christian
Yeah, absolutely. You can screen share here.

Joe Cohen
Okay, so I can show you what that looks like just so, and you'll see the difference when you see that. So yeah, it's definitely, it recommends supplements, diet and lifestyle. I'll share it here. Just so you can see it visually. So there's supplement, diet and lifestyle, right? There's more advanced filters you could filter by your lab, symptoms, conditions and goals alone and not genetics.

Christian
Perfect.

Joe Cohen
You could filter by specific labs, by specific conditions or specific categories. That's more advanced, right? But just let's look at the basics. Let's say I just want to, let's say I'm a supplement junkie. So I'm going to look just at supplements, not diet or lifestyle. And you could see like all the top supplements for me, right? These are the top supplements. And it just goes from top to bottom. So you could see like,

Vitamin D is number one, zinc is number two. And so let's say you're like, hmm, I wonder why, you wonder why which one is recommended for me as an example. As you're looking at the screen, which one are you more curious about?

Christian
Mm-hmm.

For

example, curcumin, like number four.

Joe Cohen
Okay,

so we click on this and you see a whole bunch of information pops up.

And what it's saying is curcumin helps with these symptoms and conditions. So what that means is that I put in symptoms and conditions and some of them that I put in were food allergies, gut inflammation, low energy, and low mood. Those were things that I've dealt with in the past, okay? And what it's saying is that curcumin helps with each one of these things. And if you want to know, you could just click on it and see, for example.

Christian
Hmm.

Joe Cohen
right

and it shows you all the research so for example in this case five you know curcumin for six to eight weeks can improve mood it increases brain levels of serotonin and dopamine and yeah there's there's you know a bunch of clinical trials showing that improves mood i have a certain genetic variant that may make it even more likely for it to help me with mood and that's just

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
looking at one of the things. So any of these kind of conditions or whatever you can click on and get more information, all the research. That's why I'm saying, just as a comparison, I don't tell you take curcumin and trust us. I tell you, we give you all the reasoning here with all the references, like all the logic is here. And so these are the symptoms and conditions. These are my goals that I put in, so it helps with all these goals as well. You see each one's clickable.

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
These are the DNA risks that I have. it helps with all of these DNA risks. And by the way, each of these DNA risks we're using, we could be using a million variants to figure that out. know, it's looking at, you know, we're saying, okay, based on a million variants, you have a high DNA risk of XYZ. So it's helping with how many DNA, 13 DNA risks.

Right? And a lot of these things I've either had or have a family history of, and then it also helps with these lab markers. So the ones that are red are currently suboptimal in the last test. The ones that are green were previously suboptimal. So you can see all of the labs that I've taken and how it helps with them. And again, you could click on each one of these and it'll show you the research, why it's helping with these.

Christian
Hmm.

Joe Cohen
And these are the lifestyle risks. This is based on questionnaires that I filled out. And again, you could click on these and see why you have this lifestyle risk. But essentially what it's doing is it's looking at all this information and it's also looking at specific variants. Like this is a sign for a specific variant. And saying everything together and it's ranking this as number four out of all the supplement recommendations.

Christian
Wow.

Joe Cohen
And so that's what I mean by a very intelligent system that's also using your personalized information. So we have a very large database of clinical... All this is based on clinical trials by the way, like the fact that DNA, that curcumin helps with gum disease or IBS or brain fog or know, lipoprotein A or homocysteine.

Christian
you

Joe Cohen
I didn't know it helps with homocysteine. But according to a study with 22 young obese men, supplementation with curcumin improved and may reduce homocysteine levels. Curcumin may help by increasing the 10 levels. So here's the clinical trial. We have an impact and evidence level. So everything is sorted here and everything is taken into account. And you could see that this is like way...

There's a lot more thought going into here than any nutritionist is ever going to be able to do, right? The way that regular nutritionists or doctor works is you have one condition, let's look at any recommendations for that condition. Mainstream doctors are only going to be looking at drugs. Functional medicine doctors are generally only going to be looking at supplements or natural stuff. So the idea is that

Christian
Absolutely.

Joe Cohen
we needed a system to take all this information into account and you could see that we the DNA risks is a significant part of it, right? If we take that out, we're missing a lot of information. So that's why we think a DNA test is extremely important. It's fundamental. Yeah.

Christian
Yeah, beautiful. Thanks for

saying that. I really appreciate that. That's incredible.

Joe Cohen
Yeah, and what

supplement do you take for example? Just...

Christian
So I take magnesium and zinc and ashwagandha.

Joe Cohen
Okay, so if we were to search Ashwagandha, you could search for any supplement too by the way. So we look at Ashwagandha. This is number 27 for me. So the order is gonna be different for you by the way if you take the test. And it shows all the things that Ashwagandha is gonna help me with, including symptoms and conditions. could, symptoms and conditions, can you see that?

Goals and then DNA risks. See these are all the DNA risks and then the lab risks, lifestyle risks. You see there's seven DNA risks. There's five current lab risks but there's two previous ones and then there's five current, there's five lifestyle risks. So Ashwagandha is helping with all these things and so

Number one, you could either just look at it as scroll down from, okay, let's say you only want to take five supplements, then you're going only take the top five. So in my case it would be vitamin D, zinc, probiotics, curcumin, and fish oil. Now, a lot of these are, you know, curcumin, most of the time people might say magnesium is more fundamental than curcumin, but it depends on the person. In this case, curcumin comes up as more important than magnesium and even fish oil, by the way.

Christian
Yeah, well, it's probably magnesium is more fundamental in general for everybody. think this takes into account your dietary lifestyle and some of them preferences like this are different.

Joe Cohen
So for my specific goals, yeah.

In general, correct.

It

takes everything into account. So yes, you can have a general piece of information if you ask ChachiPT or something like that. What are the top five supplements that people should generally take? I wonder what it would answer, but it's probably going to say fish oil, magnesium, somewhere in there, right? But the idea is that if you're, say, to, sometimes there's vitamin D's probably if you're deficient. The idea is that,

It's very helpful to know specifically what your labs are, your genetics, and be able to actually know what the top five or the top 10, or in my case, the top 170. It just depends on your personal preference, right?

Christian
Yeah.

Yeah,

beautiful. Well, we're coming towards the end of episode. So I wanted to ask a couple more questions before we close out here. One question I'm always really interested about people that have on the show is what are your three words you want people to know you for after you leave this planet?

Joe Cohen
Three words. Huh. So it's just individual words? Or is it like a string together or three independent words?

Christian
Yeah, it can be.

Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. If it's alive, then it's alright.

Joe Cohen
Three words.

I guess maybe...

healthy?

Like, what would I say? Like, I'd want to... Helping?

So I want to know, I've helped people in the world, made the world a better place.

Maybe inspired?

Christian
Yeah, beautiful. Thanks. I think you're on a great path, you know, because you're doing all that already. you know, thanks for thanks for sharing that. then next question I have for you. What like what is your vision of the new earth? Whatever that means for you. But like, what's your vision for humanity?

Joe Cohen
I think we're headed into a very big change that I don't know. Most people don't realize how significant of a change it is. So AI and all these new, the new tech is growing rapidly. And that I think pretty much every part of society is going to change. think, right. There's it's starting with this information piece and yeah, I could see just by running a company, you know, what

We have, let's say, 35 people now, but we're operating at an efficiency as if we had 100 people maybe five years ago, right? Before this revolution, if you will. So I see the AI revolution similar to the internet revolution, it's similar to the smartphone revolution. It's changing a lot of things. And...

Yeah, think it's gonna be like, first it's gonna be informational, but then now the agents are coming along. So now you're able to, it's beginning stages, but you're able to program agents that can do stuff. That's the next stage. Then the other stage is gonna be having robots who do stuff for you. That's kind of like a missing element. Self-driving cars is probably gonna come before that. Again, like probably 10 % of people.

work in some kind of transportation industry where they're driving or doing something. So I see fundamental changes occurring in the next, you know, just one after the other. Like I think it's starting with, you know, we already started with the information, this new LLM that's better than the next one every week, it seems, right? And they're all just racing to, you know, basically take all the world's information.

Organize it make it very easy to ask any question But yeah, and and so that is a big revolution and then there's gonna be more revolutions coming I think the health revolution is also a little Underestimated but I think it's it's gonna be slower and the reason it's gonna be slower is because of regulations And also because it requires people to do something, right?

It requires people to take action. But what I think people don't realize is that we're getting into a stage where we're using all these AI tools to enhance what we're doing. And there's now so many tools available to understand what's going on in the body and how to optimize it. The trick is, you know, like you still have to do the test. You still have to get a DNA test, send it back.

There's no automation for that, right? There's no AI that's gonna do that for you. You still need to go and get a blood draw or at least do an at-home test and send it back. There's things that you still need to do and I think people are going to start relying on software more to make health decisions and that's where we are but we're not seeing it yet. It has to be like a mindset.

change because what's happening now is again, it's people are buying into some marketing scam of a static PDF that's not intelligent, that doesn't really use any AI and they don't understand the difference, right? So I think if people can plug into the right technologies, which is what I've done personally, and so I could see I'm on the cutting edge because this is what we do and you know, I'm testing all these things out first. And so I could see how much

you could know about yourself and how much you could improve. Like my body was such a big mess and the amount I've been able to improve is just like I was the least healthy person I knew. I had the most health problems. Fast forward to now, I'm the healthiest person I know. I have the most stamina. Like I have, I go to the gym once a week. My muscles are very, you know, big.

I'm very muscular, my brain works better than ever, my mood is very good and very stable. So it's like, I just improved all these areas of my life and I think I'm the most improved man in the world in the sense I've done the most where I started from, where I am now, I've done the most and that's based on using technology and using the tools that we have.

There's a lot of great entrepreneurs developing new supplements, new drugs, and new everything. And new tests too, by the way. if somebody, there's a huge disruptional, there's a lot that people can do if they know the right things to do. And I think it's a little slower in health because, you know, it's,

It's one thing, it's like we know if a car is gonna drive itself. If it's not, you're gonna die. You know, it's like, you could see it. You'll have to take the wheel. How do you know if something is giving you the right health recommendation? The technology is better than ever before, but also there's more scams than ever before. Because people, if you think about it, the incentive of a company, why should they spend 20 million, 100 million dollars

when they could just spend $5,000 and spend the rest on marketing? How is somebody like anybody who's not really looking into this deep going to know? Even a guy like Andrew Uberman, does he know about genetics? No, he doesn't. So, he doesn't really know about things. His specialty is not even supplements either, right? His specialty is neuroscience. And so it's very difficult.

You know, people, how do they get their information? They listen to influencers, which again, if you're listening to an influencer who's not a subject matter expert, and they're also influenced by whoever's paying them the most, right? you know, AG1 is not, by far not the best all-in-one formula, right? It's just not. But they pay him the most, I assume, because they have the best marketing and sales. And so, you know, the way people make decisions on their health,

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
is not the correct ways. They make a decision based on an influencer. How did you decide to get the DNA company? You saw it at a conference, Dave Asprey recommended it. Some influencer told you that you followed it and you're just like, I'm not a geneticist. I don't know. And that's legitimate, Even the founders of these companies don't have an idea of what they're doing. the way I see it is, that's why I think it's gonna be slower.

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Joe Cohen
I think the technology is going to be quicker, but the adoption is going to be a lot slower because of the problem of, you know, being able to identify what is good and what's not. Like, yeah, so think, that's actually a real question. How did you know, what made you buy the DNA company?

Christian
Beautiful.

Just friend recommendation.

Joe Cohen
friend recommend who doesn't know genetics right he doesn't know right where did he get it from right yeah

Christian
Yeah, I didn't know.

He's like a health nut, right? But he doesn't know genetics.

Joe Cohen
He's not right.

He's not an expert in genetics or precision health. He's just he's he likes he likes being healthy looks at different biohacks. Okay, fine. But unless you really like have a PhD in this area, how do you know what the correct thing is? Right. So that's where it gets very tricky where yeah, that's why I think the adoption is going to be slower. But I think I think that's going to be like the last thing.

because everything else, the technology's gonna be there, because I already see it moving at lightning pace. The problem is the adoption. It's fighting for the recognition because there's just so many other voices out there that can easily drown out the good ones, right?

Christian
Yeah.

Hmm,

beautiful. with that being said, we're super happy to have you Team Humanity, you know, because it takes people like you that start companies with integrity, you know, and carry us forward into the new age and not others that just care about making money, right? So thanks for doing that. And then as kind of a close of the episode, I always like to give it over to, you know, our guests of just like, what is their

Like what are their future goals for their company and brand? Like what are you looking to call in for you and your companies in the years to come? And then where can people find you?

Joe Cohen
Just in general, our direction as a company, because of the problem, the consumer problem, where how do you win over a consumer when there's a hundred other companies with absolute crap telling you they're the best, right? So how does a consumer know what the difference is between, especially they're not seeing the product before, generally, right? You didn't see the DNA company product before you bought it, probably, right? Exactly. So most people are not looking at the product before.

Even if you look at it, how do you know what is there on the back end and how sophisticated it is, how legitimate it is, right? And by the way, we've actually done the testing. We published papers on it showing that it's the most advanced. the idea is that regular consumers not reading those papers, they don't understand how to read those papers. So we have a consumer site, selfdecode.com, but we're looking more towards

you know, powering businesses and practitioners because it's easier to educate them at least. Now, sometimes if they already built shit technology, sometimes they just bury their head in the sand. But we find it's just way easier to educate businesses and practitioners. And by the way, even the practitioners are slow moving. They don't, they're so busy, they're taking in so many patients, they don't have time to learn new technologies. And so that's...

I think the practitioners who, know, the way I see practitioners is the way that I see software developers going in. There's a chart that shows software developers are almost going extinct because AI is able to do a lot of what software developers can do now. And so, and we see it internally too. Like you can pump out twice as much code with

you know, the same amount of software developers. And so what companies are looking for now is those people who are going to adopt these AI tools and leverage them, right? Because you have one amazing developer, he can function now like 10 developers. Whereas if you have 10 mediocre ones, you know, it's just like you're going to have even worse code, but you have one amazing one, they can leverage the shit out of all these AI tools. And so that is, I think that's a similar power law as practitioners.

You have a lot of practitioners that are kind of on the same level. They're not leveling up, right? They're not trying to learn new things. They're doing the same thing. They're using dinosaur tech. It's they're not taking, and I see this and then I see practitioners who are proactive. They always want to learn new things. They want to learn how to use new tech to improve their practice. Those people are the types of people you want to go to. Okay. and the power law is.

these mediocre people, you're probably not going anywhere with them now. Getting a great practitioner or a good one is gonna be 10 times better than getting a mediocre one, because garbage in, garbage out. They're using this outdated tech, outdated information, and yeah, it's a similar situation. One great practitioner can really, with the right tools, figure out so much about you.

Whereas if you go to a hundred bad ones or okay ones, you're not going to learn anything. You're just going in circles.

Christian
Yeah, so true. Thanks for sharing that. I really appreciate it. And where can people find you? Where can they find your websites? You have multiple ones. We're going to list them in description, but also mention them here in the episode.

Joe Cohen
They could, my personal Instagram, sometimes I put my experiments there, my antics, that's Mr. Biohacker, MR Biohacker, and then they could go to self decode if they want to purchase. If you're a practitioner, there's a practitioner section. If you want to start a genetics company, we allow anybody to do that. And if you want to combine it with other things,

Like we're very agnostic. We want society to succeed, that people have the best tech. so, yeah, whatever your goal is, think there's yeah, there's different paths here. I think the, yeah, for most of the people, I think they're probably gonna just be regular consumers. They wanna figure out, if you wanna know, hey, what supplement should I do?

It'll even tell you what lab tests you should do based on your DNA predisposition. you could figure out a lot. What are you going to be at risk for? What lab tests you should do? What supplements you should take? And then you'll be able to upload your lab tests as well.

Christian
Beautiful so guys check out check out Joe Joe Cohen on Instagram and our bio hacker and the website self decode comm

Thanks for being here. Thanks for sharing all your wisdom. yeah, it's an honor to have you on.

Joe Cohen
Alright, awesome.

My pleasure, thanks for having me.