The Sauna Episode

In this special episode, Darren and Pinja take some time away from DevOps to analyze the history and legacy of a critical component of Finnish culture: The sauna.

[Darren] (0:02 - 0:22)

It just makes Finns seem so brutal in that, hey, come to sauna, we'll beat you, you will bleed, and then you'll jump in a lake.

Welcome to the DevOps Sauna, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of DevOps, platform engineering, security, and more as we explore the future of development.

[Pinja] (0:22 - 0:32)

Join us as we dive into the heart of DevOps, one story at a time. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or only starting your DevOps journey, we're happy to welcome you into the DevOps Sauna.

[Darren] (0:38 - 0:43)

Welcome back to the DevOps Sauna. I'm here again with Pinja. How are you doing today, Pinja?

[Pinja] (0:44 - 0:48)

I'm all good. It's a very fine April afternoon here. How about you, Darren?

How are you doing?

[Darren] (0:49 - 1:02)

I'm having a complicated day, and I've decided I don't want to talk about DevOps because DevOps has been stupid today. So let's talk about something else. We're the DevOps Sauna, so let's talk about sauna.

[Pinja] (1:02 - 1:18)

Yeah, when we open our episodes, Darren, you always say “Welcome to the Sauna”. So let's first go through how to pronounce the word sauna and not perhaps sauna. You're not a native Finn, right, Darren?

So was this a difficult thing for you to come across?

[Darren] (1:19 - 1:37)

It wasn't a difficult thing for me, but I do wonder, because when we go through the metrics for this podcast, we do have a surprising amount of listeners from the Anglosphere. Like, we have a number of Americans, some Brits tuning in, and I wonder how many of them are utterly baffled by the way we pronounce sauna.

[Pinja] (1:37 - 2:02)

In the Finnish language, we have this called diphthong, where we have two different vowels, very often in the same syllable, S-A-U-N-A. So the first syllable, sau, has the OU. So it's not souna, as I've heard it many times being pronounced, but it's indeed sauna.

And just for everybody, and just for clarity's sake, saunas come from Finland, not from Sweden.

[Darren] (2:02 - 2:33)

Well, first on the subject of the language, I think the diphthongs are not actually the problem. The problem for me was always rolling the Rs, and then especially when there's like a T right behind the R, but we don't have to use that in the sauna, so I guess it's okay. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding that sauna is in some way Swedish, and there's, I think the evidence of the birth sauna was quite some time ago, we'll get to that, but the first is like the etymological proof, the Swedish word for sauna is bastu, and the Finnish word for sauna is sauna.

[Pinja] (2:33 - 3:03)

Exactly, and we know that the Swedes might not perhaps in the past have accepted the Finnish sauna superiority, sauna over bastu, but I think this year, for the ones who follow the Eurovision Song Contest, and we're now in the phase of all the countries having selected their representatives, and we now have a Finnish group called Kaj representing Sweden with a song called Bara bada bastu, so it's just go to sauna basically.

[Darren] (3:04 - 3:22)

I just watched this right before we started recording, and I'm still not sure what I saw there. This was, I expect weirdness from Eurovision, but I think this was kind of taking us a step further, but I don't know, Sweden has a good history of winning Eurovision, so maybe this will be the year.

[Pinja] (3:23 - 3:31)

Maybe indeed, Finland hasn't had that much luck, we've won once, so maybe a Finnish band representing Sweden might do the trick this year.

[Darren] (3:31 - 3:42)

Yep, you did win Eurovision once, but what a win it was, like I think Lordi coming onto the stage and just that victory was the greatest Eurovision moment of all history.

[Pinja] (3:42 - 3:56)

It was, and as I say, we don't shy away from weird things when it comes to Eurovision, and a group of guys in suits singing about sauna, or a band dressed up in monster costumes, why not, that's the period of Eurovision I guess.

[Darren] (3:57 - 4:04)

It is, let's not forget last year's entry too, that was an interesting choice. So let's talk about how old the sauna is.

[Pinja] (4:04 - 4:35)

Like a sauna stems back like tens of thousands of years, and in the past, in Finland, life has both started and ended in a sauna. So we've been dealing with births and deaths in a sauna. So for example, even my grandparents' generation, for the most parts, were being born in a sauna, because it was the purest place available before the hospitals actually started, created this good network of sterile places for pregnant women to go in and give birth, but also the dead were prepared for the burial in the sauna.

[Darren] (4:36 - 5:28)

It's actually kind of surprising how recently the medical community switched to the idea that they needed to do things like wash their hands, because they could actually be causing the spread of bacteria. I don't remember the exact date, I think the first, like one of the first mentions of it was in the 1700s, and the person who mentioned it was basically laughed out of the discussion. Of course, they were doctors, they knew best.

And then we found out in Finland that it has been for 10,000 years, because that's the oldest sauna we could find, like history, that dated back 10,000 years, and it's been used as a place for this kind of thing. So the understanding of sterility was kind of maybe not fully there, but it's kind of interesting that it gravitated towards that, because you had this naturally sterilizing place.

[Pinja] (5:28 - 6:01)

It's true. Sauna has for a long time had this role and place in people's hearts as being something sacred. And yeah, the name of this podcast is DevOps Sauna.

And sure, Eficode is a company that was founded in Finland. We are still headquartered in Finland. And from that angle, sauna is a very natural name for a podcast from this company. But also, a sauna is usually a place where people are equal, and there are no hierarchies, and everybody's opinion matters.

And that's what we also try to achieve with the DevOps Sauna podcast.

[Darren] (6:02 - 6:44)

Yep, I would say there are no hierarchies existing there. And I hope there are no hierarchies existing here. And we have the idea of social distance that is so common in Finland, also seems to disappear in saunas, which is baffling to me.

Like the social distancing in Finland, there's the whole joke during COVID, where everyone was forced to stand two meters apart. And then they lifted the restrictions. And Finns were like, great, now we can go back to standing three meters apart.

So you have this group of people who you will always be separate from each other until they all crowd into this tiny wooden room with a stove in the corner. And like, this is a completely normal phenomenon.

[Pinja] (6:44 - 7:21)

It is. And it might be very baffling for many, many foreigners, especially because it is a place to be very comfortable. There are no rules.

And one thing that really comes as a surprise for many foreigners is that because you're naked in the sauna. So even that is more baffling to some people, like how can you be so introverted outside of the sauna, and just avoid one another and then you go into sauna and you're comfortable sitting next to, sometimes a stranger, and completely naked and just like having that person next to you. But it's, as I said, it's a place for purification.

It has a very separate, distinct role in our culture.

[Darren] (7:21 - 7:49)

Yeah, it's quite interesting. It's one of those things that I'm not sure the Finns have been able to put into words or really explain. It's just kind of a shared understanding that I've experienced when talking to every Finn about sauna.

It's just like, yeah, these are the things you can do in a sauna. These are the things you don't do in a sauna. There's very, I wouldn't say very strict rules, but there's a very clear mentality that's shared across a huge group of people, which is quite rare.

[Pinja] (7:50 - 8:45)

And now we're very happy to hear that there are now studies to back up our very keen interest in going to sauna because it not only, of course, makes the old hierarchies disappear, but it also has now been proved to improve our health and especially the health of our brains. There is a 20-year study that was conducted. They had more than 2,300 participants, and it was conducted by Dr. Jari Laukkonen and his colleagues from the University of Eastern Finland. And this study actually found that if you go to sauna regularly, this means four to seven times per week, quite often more than once every two days. And if you have it at 176 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 80 degrees Celsius, and for 19 minutes, this lowered the patient's risk for both Alzheimer's and Dementia. So yes, you need to be very active.

You need to have a very high temperature as well, but it will be good for your brain in the end.

[Darren] (8:46 - 9:21)

There are so many things to unpack here. So first off, the research, we focused on Alzheimer's and Dementia because it was most interesting, but the research also showed things like cardiovascular diseases were improved, pulmonary diseases, conditions such as arthritis, headaches, these kinds of things were all also part of various studies by Jari Laukkonen. And he basically showed that it's helpful across the board, but these numbers to me are so baffling.

Like for first off, the amount of times they go four to seven times per week, is that a normal thing?

[Pinja] (9:23 - 9:48)

It varies quite a lot. There is a tradition in Finnish families to have the sauna in the evening on Saturdays, but at the same time, I remember from my childhood, it was a no-brainer. My dad would just turn on the stove every single day and we would heat up the sauna seven days a week.

So there's a lot of variation, but it's not uncommon to hear from a Finnish family who heats up their sauna more than once a week.

[Darren] (9:48 - 9:51)

Okay, question, was it an electric sauna or a wooden sauna?

[Pinja] (9:52 - 10:07)

We had an electric sauna. That's a whole debate. I'm not gonna get into that.

That's a political question. That's gonna divide the people. Wooden or electric and don't get me started on infrared saunas.

That's not Finnish. I'm sorry to say that.

[Darren] (10:07 - 10:12)

Do you have no opinion? I'm happy to render an opinion on the sauna stove issue.

[Pinja] (10:12 - 10:13)

Go ahead, Darren.

[Darren] (10:13 - 10:28)

I think it's wooden. Wooden is the way to go. Of course, it's not possible in a lot of high-rise buildings or apartments, so that's less possible, but if you only have a chance for one sauna experience, I think it should be wooden and you should chop the wood yourself.

[Pinja] (10:28 - 10:59)

It will make the effort worthwhile. I do agree on that. I don't have a huge preference, but then again, we have a thing called savusauna, so the smoke sauna as well, and if you are well-versed in heating up a sauna, you might be able to heat up the smoke sauna as well, because it will take half a day, because you need to, number one, of course, get the heat up, but you need to get the smoke to be on that correct level of not getting toxic for you, but actually being enjoyable.

[Darren] (11:00 - 11:43)

Okay, that does sound more complex, and I have to say, like, I've mostly dealt with electric saunas in apartments, so that's still perfectly serviceable. The second thing I want to talk about these studies is the temperature. Now, I've been going to sauna for some time, but being in Finland, there are some things that I clearly don't handle like a native, and one of them is the massive sheets of ice during the winter, where I watch Finns just running by as if they don't exist while I'm taking one step a second trying not to fall over, and the other is sauna temperature, because I sometimes get it to, like, 65 degrees.

I might push 70, and then it gets way too much for me, and this study is suggesting a casual 80 degrees.

[Pinja] (11:43 - 12:19)

And 80 degrees is, I think that's pretty normal, and if you look at a regular Finnish family, you start bringing your kids to sauna at a very young age, so what you do is that you get a bucket of water that's kind of like a wide wash bucket, and you put the kid in that bucket when you put them into the sauna with you, of course, because we don't want any hazards with the stove, but we get accustomed to that warmth and that heat from a very early on. My personal preference is between 70 and 80, but there are people who prefer that 100 more than anything over that.

[Darren] (12:19 - 12:39)

And that's Celsius. That's like... Celsius, yes.

I'm wrapping my head around the idea that people will sit in a room that could boil water and be comfortable with that fact. I feel like once I got in a sauna that went to 80, and I had to, like, I was like, nope, I just got out of there quite quickly.

[Pinja] (12:39 - 13:07)

There are many peculiarities about our sauna culture, and it will take a while for a person to get accustomed to that. I've heard from other people who come from different countries and different cultures, but then there are people who just move to Finland and say, Oh, wow, okay, 80, 90 degrees Celsius is just fine for me, and they just slip right into the sauna culture. Anything else, Darren, from your perspective, that you found strange about the Finnish sauna?

[Darren] (13:08 - 13:14)

Is it wrong to say that everything about sauna seems like it's supposed to be a joke?

[Pinja] (13:14 - 13:17)

Don't say that in a sauna full of older Finnish people, but go ahead.

[Darren] (13:17 - 13:47)

It's like, yeah, I can see how it might be a troublesome idea, but there's this thing called vihta, which is essentially where you get a load of twigs and sticks from a tree, and you're supposed to beat yourself with them. You're supposed to just hit yourself repeatedly on different parts of your body with this basically a branch, like a bundle of sticks. I don't understand what's the purpose of that.

[Pinja] (13:47 - 13:56)

Let's talk first, is it just sticks and twigs? No, it's taken from a birch tree, and only when there are leaves in there, okay?

[Darren] (13:56 - 13:57)

Okay, leaves.

[Pinja] (13:57 - 14:15)

So you've got the leaves to soften that. Yes, leaves are a must, leaves are a must, and it is said to improve and enhance your blood circulation. Don't, like, of course you can do it with twigs, but I highly recommend taking the twigs and the branches that actually have leaves in them.

[Darren] (14:15 - 14:26)

Okay, so the leaves are the important factor. I feel like I may have been trolled on that one. Let's move on to cupping.

This is something I read about as ceremonial bloodletting. Is that true?

[Pinja] (14:26 - 15:07)

It is not common anymore, but in the old days, yes, there was a profession called the cupper, who had a set of cups, and you would first punch, of course, break the skin on your back, usually, and then press the cup. You'd punch the cup with this tiny hammer and let some so-called bad blood out. And the thing is, like, this was taught to be a purifying thing.

It would heal you in many different ways. It is not a thing anymore, but I think, and I believe, there must be at least a dozen cuppers still in Finland somewhere if you would like to experience this purifying, modern, so-called modern medicine treatment.

[Darren] (15:08 - 15:29)

I think I want to keep most of my blood inside my body, so I think I'll be passing on that one. But the other thing that is confusing to me is the idea of jumping in snow or, like, frozen lakes during winter, coming out of a sauna where it's warm and approaching comfort, and going into the coldest thing you can possibly find.

[Pinja] (15:29 - 15:31)

Obviously. Isn't that a no-brainer?

[Darren] (15:31 - 15:37)

Yeah, just yes. There's no more to it. This is exactly what needs to happen.

[Pinja] (15:37 - 16:32)

Like, going to a sauna, if you do it once every single day, of course, it's not a big ceremonial thing so much, but if you do it, like, once a week, or if you get together with your friends and you go to somebody's cottage, for example, it is nice to spend maybe an hour with the sauna. It's not like you're gonna sit there for the whole hour, you're gonna go back and forth. You first go in, you wash yourself a little bit, and then you perhaps, if it's the wintertime, you go and maybe roll in the snow.

If you got a chance to have the lake and you've been able to cut a hole into the ice, you might dip in, because that, again, getting that temperature variation enhances the circulation of your blood. And again, we say that we have the saying in Finnish, and that Finnish language, that if the booze, the tar, and the sauna do not help, you're probably going to die from this disease. So everything that has to do with the sauna is gonna treat you anyway.

[Darren] (16:32 - 17:00)

I mean, that seems fair, but from my perspective as an outsider, it's like, I mean, I can see some advantage in the cold. It's always nice to, like, stand on the balcony after a sauna in the middle of winter and get, like, the cool air going through. So I can see that the snow and lake seem a bit extreme, but it just makes Finns seem so kind of brutal in that, hey, come to sauna, we'll beat you, you will bleed, and then you'll jump in a lake.

[Pinja] (17:00 - 17:41)

Yeah, and, like, we also have had the sauna, World Sauna Championships. They were held in Finland from 1999 to 2010. And, well, the basic concept is really simple, who can last the longest in the highest temperature.

And, like, if you take your group of friends and you go to a sauna, it might turn into this impromptu sauna sitting competition, because even this, the official World Sauna Championships originated from an unofficial sauna sitting competition from a swimming hall in Heinola that actually resulted in a ban from that swimming hall. But that's kind of the competitiveness we have in our blood as well.

[Darren] (17:41 - 18:05)

I can see that, too, because one thing I don't think anyone talks about is the consumption of beverages in saunas, which is actually quite a common thing. So anyone who's not been to Finland won't be familiar with the idea of lonkero, which is, it's basically this drink made of grapefruit and gin, I guess. And it's, I would say, kind of a common sauna libation.

[Pinja] (18:05 - 18:05)

Yeah.

[Darren] (18:06 - 18:09)

So, I can see the competitiveness building up from that.

[Pinja] (18:09 - 19:02)

Yeah. And as I mentioned before, if the booze and the tar in the sauna do not help, you're probably going to die. So, again, the saying combines the sauna and the booze together as an experience.

But if we really think of the history of sauna, we cannot ignore the 1900s. We had a president called Urho Kekkonen. He was president of Finland from 1956 to 1982.

So for 26 years, this was before we introduced limits for any term lengths, for example. But he used to do diplomacy from the sauna. As you might guess from the years that he was in office, we had perhaps a difficult relationship with a neighboring country at the time.

And he introduced a concept called sauna diplomacy, and he would invite diplomatic guests into the sauna with him.

[Darren] (19:03 - 19:41)

Yep, diplomatic guests. But just as proof that I can drag any topic back to cybersecurity, there were suggestions that the sauna had actually been tapped by the CIA and MI6. So there was this sauna diplomacy going on where Kekkonen was inviting these diplomats.

They ran such strange times. The guests would arrive, from what we've been able to find out, around five in the afternoon. They'd have dinner at six.

And then this diplomatic night sauna would happen from 11.30 until five in the morning. So this is a longer than average sauna session.

[Pinja] (19:41 - 20:12)

It is definitely longer than an average sauna session. And it has been said that they indeed enjoyed some beverages. And a sauna is this place to be on the same level and a place where we lose all the hierarchies.

It was easy to have casual conversations. But yes, indeed, the word in the street is indeed that MI6 and CIA had tapped the sauna in the 70s. I don't know what this says about the native English speakers, to be honest.

Maybe they were interested in or baffled by the sauna culture, as you are, Darren.

[Darren] (20:13 - 20:28)

Yeah, it might have been pure disbelief. We can't believe that all these diplomats are getting together in saunas. But yeah, I feel like there's a history of mistrust with those organizations.

So yeah, I would say not trusting those is a good plan.

[Pinja] (20:29 - 21:12)

And many times still, in the present times, what I hear from, for example, my own grandfather, and my partner's grandfather, who've been previously going to the swimming halls, because they also have public saunas. So there might be a group of elderly people who come together, not in an organized manner, per se, but they usually have the same schedule to go swimming in the morning, because they might not have anything else to do that morning. And then they go to the sauna, and it's called the sauna parliament.

So everybody has their own seat to take. Everybody's sitting in the same place every single morning when they come there. And then they might talk about politics, they might talk about the current events of the world, but it's its own form of sauna diplomacy.

[Darren] (21:13 - 21:39)

You actually touched on that, on something here that we haven't discussed, or maybe kind of also indicated a little bit, but that's the prevalence of sauna in Finland. And that's another thing that's shocking to people when they come to Finland, and they ask about saunas, and people just, yeah, I have one in my apartment. And that's an extremely common thing.

I think when we looked into it, there were like 2.5 million saunas in Finland for five million people.

[Pinja] (21:39 - 21:54)

Yes, exactly. It is common. Not every single apartment in an apartment building has a sauna nowadays, but basically, a regular house has a sauna, either in a yard separately, or built inside the house as well.

[Darren] (21:55 - 22:10)

Yep. And while it's not every apartment, I've never... I think I've lived in one apartment that had a shared sauna, but otherwise, they've all had saunas.

And so while it's not every apartment, it is extremely common.

[Pinja] (22:10 - 22:30)

It is indeed. And as you said, if the apartment itself doesn't have a sauna, the apartment building for sure has to be shared with the tenants. And for example, then you might have that one weekly sauna booking for yourself.

You pay maybe 20 euros a month in addition to your rent to get that. But that's how dedicated we are in this business.

[Darren] (22:31 - 22:48)

Now, when we were researching this episode, we... because we do actually research these episodes. I don't know if it comes across that way all of the time, but when doing the research, we actually came across some extremely weird saunas that, or maybe not weird saunas themselves, but weirdly located saunas.

[Pinja] (22:48 - 23:28)

Yeah. So it is not just the house, your summer cottage, the apartment building that might have a sauna. But I think our top five that we wanted to mention here was a phone booth.

I actually do not know how this would work. Number two, a Ferris wheel. I know for sure that it exists in Helsinki.

It is open for reservations. We know of gondolas at ski resorts. Why not?

Because you can just jump into the snow, obviously. A sauna boat. So a floating boat that you can just travel from one place to another with.

And well, since we're kind of biased here, we need to mention our own sauna at the Eficode offices, both in Helsinki and Tampere.

[Darren] (23:29 - 23:58)

Yep. That's just the kind of country this is, where you have a business that has a sauna on the top floor. It's, again, not an uncommon thing to happen.

I actually walked by this sauna festival that was happening in Tampere last summer, where people had built these mobile saunas, and one of them was just in the smallest kind of trailer for a car you could fit. It was like a one-person sauna. So I guess the phone booth idea is not that uncommon.

[Pinja] (23:59 - 24:23)

Considering all these things here, no, it's just one location with the others here. But I think let's give one honorary mention on a weirdly located sauna, or weird or weird, we can debate about that. But when the international fast food chain Burger King entered Finland in the 2010s, our Helsinki biggest Burger King in Finland had also a sauna in there.

[Darren] (24:24 - 24:55)

Yeah, that's unfortunately not open anymore, because it turned out no one really wanted to eat fast food in a sauna. But it was a weirdly well-done sauna. It was fully branded.

It was the typical saunas of these dark wood things which you go into, and they're kind of calm and mellow. And this was like white with red and blue benches and Burger King branded towels. So I think that the ambience also didn't really fit, but it's kind of entertaining that they made an effort.

[Pinja] (24:56 - 25:17)

Yeah, because this was located at the very city center of Helsinki, and why not have this as an attraction? So it's one more thing. But hey, Darren, you said in the beginning that you had gotten really annoyed with DevOps today.

But then again, during this episode, you did mention cybersecurity. So I think we might have some hope for having a DevOps topic here the next time.

[Darren] (25:17 - 25:30)

Yeah, we're probably going to talk about DevOps again. We don't actually dislike DevOps. I guess we just needed to blow off some steam.

And with that, we'll say goodbye. And we hope you join us next time. Thank you for joining me again, Pinja.

[Pinja] (25:31 - 25:38)

Thank you. It was fun. We'll now tell you a little bit about who we are.

[Darren] (25:39 - 25:41)

I'm Darren Richardson, Security consultant at Eficode.

[Pinja] (25:42 - 25:46)

I'm Pinja Kujala. I specialize in Agile and portfolio management topics at Eficode.

[Darren] (25:47 - 25:49)

Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you next time.

[Pinja] (25:49 - 25:57)

And remember, if you like what you hear, please like, rate, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. 

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