Episode 95 - Biohacking
Transcript
Ellie: 0:12
Hello, and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:15
The podcast where two philosophers hack knowledge.
Ellie: 0:18
Or in this case, show you why hacking is maybe not always the best metaphor.
David: 0:24
I'm your cohost, David Pena Guzman.
Ellie: 0:26
And I'm Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:29
Ellie, in philosophy, there has recently been this movement called transhumanism, which is all about pushing the limits of the human. A central figure in this philosophical movement is the thinker Max More, who defines transhumanism as seeking the continuation and acceleration of human life beyond its current form. And for him, that means using science and technology as ways of promoting intelligent life or rather life as intelligence. Now the thing about transhumanism is that it takes many forms, but one of them is what is known as biohacking.
Ellie: 1:08
So what is biohacking? Dave Asprey, this guy who's known as the father of biohacking, who got famous for promoting bulletproof coffee, which, you put grass fed butter in your coffee and then also coconut oil or coconut oil instead. I don't remember, but I actually did this for a while. Did not really work for me. My body, yeah. We'll talk about this today, but I am not a stranger to some of what I have since discovered, it falls under the umbrella of biohacking. I've tried all the supplements. Yeah, I did this bulletproof coffee for a while, And my body did not like it. But Dave Asprey, the guy who founded this, who's a biohacker, we're gonna talk about a lot today, wrote this book on biohacking which we'll be analyzing. But for now, I wanna mention a definition of biohacking that he gave in a speech.
He described biohacking as: 1:58
A global movement based on the idea that you can change the environment around you and inside of you, so you have full control of your own biology. So that's his take on it. And the control, this full control that he refers to is really about optimizing. Biohacking is about being the best version of yourself.
David: 2:20
I love that we are, like, two minutes into our episode of on biohacking, and it already sounds exactly like what it is. So we're already talking about to two white man tech bros talking about transcending biology and you're being leading figures in the movement. Also, I have to say their names are pretty great. Dave Asprey. But Come on. Max More, could you get a more perfect name for a transhumanist? It's like Max More.
Ellie: 2:49
maximize and do more?
David: 2:52
I am not just a human. I am Max and more.
Ellie: 2:56
Yeah. Because his last name is spelled m o r e. I wonder if it's fake! Always be optimizing, including optimizing your name.
David: 3:06
Yeah. I don't know. But you mentioned we'll return to Dave Asprey's approach to biohacking later, I'm really excited about that. But I have more, lol, to say about Max More for a bit. Not only is this guy a trained philosopher and the founder of this movement known as transhumanism, but he was also for a while the president of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which is an American nonprofit that does cryonics research and performs actual cryopreservations, which is when you freeze under subzero temperatures like the body and the head of people who want to be preserved until the time is ripe for the technology to come to us to allow us to upload them to the cloud.
Ellie: 3:53
Or to unfreeze their body so they can be cured of terminal illnesses and live on.
David: 4:00
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And the idea is that we're not there yet, but we just need to, save you in the freezer for a little bit until that time comes.
Ellie: 4:09
I can never hear stuff like this and not think about the Austin Powers scene where Austin Powers has been cryogenically preserved. Okay. But you said their heads and bodies. The head is part of a body. What is going on? Are they cutting off the head from the bodies and saving them separately? Are they just saying heads and bodies when it should just be bodies?
David: 4:33
So I was wondering the same thing. I don't know, but this article that I read in Smithsonian Magazine talked about it in way, they say two hundred frozen heads and bodies await revival this corporation that is located in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Ellie: 4:48
my god.
David: 4:49
So who knows if they're attached, if they are cut off, but the whole point is that I suspect for them, the head is The most important thing because it does contain the brain.
Ellie: 5:00
Yeah. And this pertains to something that I have talked about in other episodes, I'm sure, which is just how I have a real pet peeve when people treat the head as though it is the same thing as the brain and the brain as the same thing as consciousness. I think those three things get conflated all the time, and that really bugs me. Your head is a part of your body, so is your brain. Let's leave it at that. If you wanna cryonically preserve that whole thing, All Austin Powers, go for it. I also wanna point out, though, you mentioned that this guy is a trained philosopher and also former president of this company, and they say that philosophy is irrelevant. Look at the things you can do with a philosophy degree. You can be at the cutting edge of potentially dystopian cryonic research.
David: 5:43
Of stuffing people in your freezer in a way that doesn't trigger criminal concerns. Today, we're talking about biohacking.
Ellie: 5:54
What does the desire to control and optimize say about our own relations to our bodies?
David: 5:59
What ethical questions does transcending human limits through technology raise?
Ellie: 6:05
And how might individuals' access to biohacking create or undermine equality? David, I think you pitched this episode, and I didn't know what biohacking was at first. I've heard the term, But I've mostly seen it in the context of feminist Twitter where people make fun of biohacking for just being the tech bro version of dieting. It's The term diet is too feminine coded, and so they need to come up with a new term for the insecure bros in Silicon Valley. There was this great Washington Post article on this in twenty nineteen called the key to glorifying a questionable diet, be a tech bro and call it biohacking.
David: 6:47
Oh my god. Yes.
Ellie: 6:48
For instance, one of the things that article talks about is how Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, spoke about eating only one meal a day and fasting on weekends, but apparently it's not disordered eating if you're a bro.
David: 7:00
Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine if that had been a woman talking about not eating and just fasting at all times as a way of controlling the body? The cultural meanings see that are just so radically different. But so it does sound like you did know what biohacking was before you started looking into it. You had some sense.
Ellie: 7:20
Yeah. But it was mostly from that sort of outsiders, oh, this is cringe And now I do know because I researched it, and I actually
David: 7:28
It is cringe!
Ellie: 7:29
No. No. I actually feel a lot more I don't wanna say positive, but I think there's more to it than I had been led to believe. And it turns out that in a sense, I have been doing some things that are known as biohacking for a very long time, but I thought it was really just that one type of thing, which is this tech bro meal restriction or, cryonic freezing or whatever. But it turns out there's this whole other aspect of biohacking, which involves very invasive procedures and monitoring your own biology during your lifetime. And this is linked with the transhumanist movement, which I think is about transcending our biological human limitations through technology.
David: 8:12
Yeah. I think that's a pretty fair description of transhumanism. And with biohacking, you're right that it actually refers to a whole bunch of things. You can think about cognitive interventions. You can think about neural devices that help you hack your brain. You can think about the implantation of digital devices into the body. And some of these can be quite aggressive and invasive. So for example, I read one example of people squirting chlorine E6, which is a photosensitizer, into their eyeballs, And then they wear black contacts because they want to gain the superhuman power of seeing in the dark.
Ellie: 8:55
Woah. That sounds cool.
David: 8:58
I know it sounds cool, but you're talking about nonexperts. It's a kind of DIY technology inserting liquids, like, squirting liquids into their eyeballs. And I have to say that even a single application of this chlorine E6 can cause retinal hemorrhage and central retinal vein occlusion. I talked about it with my partner who is an ophthalmologist and knows a lot about eyes. And he was like, what the fuck? Why would people do that? And he's are they doing research? And I was like, mhmm. They're like randos doing it in their basement. I guess. It's kinda like research on themselves.
Ellie: 9:34
Oh Oh my god My god. Okay. So maybe I won't be doing that anytime soon.
David: 9:40
Wait. Yeah. No. You can stick with whatever you said you were doing, like the bulletproof coffee
Ellie: 9:44
didn't work for me. I'll come back I'll come back to my bio hacks later in the
David: 9:49
But you did that one, so just stay away from squirting anything into your eyeball.
Ellie: 9:53
Yes.
David: 9:53
But given this vast diversity of practices that fall under this umbrella term of biohacking, there are two main categories that we can differentiate between. There are practices of what is called enhancement, and that is all about peak performance, how to grow stronger, be bigger, be better, so think about superlatives. And then on the other hand, there are maybe the more extreme biohackers and transhumanists whose goal is not just to enhance their powers and capacities, but it's actually to transcend biology itself and achieve immortal status. These are like the hackers who want to live forever.
Ellie: 10:39
Okay. But, I would say that those are ultimately the same goal. If you wanna enhance yourself and be at peak performance. Presumably, you also wanna live longer, if not forever. I'm gonna take a little Spinoza tack on this and say that your desire to persist, your we might call it a will to live, but what Spinoza calls the conatus, This desire to persist in your being to now bastardize the second law of thermodynamics to avoid entropy, yeah. is basically manifesting both in the desire to achieve peak enhancement or peak performance through enhancement and to live forever. I think there's a really important kernel of truth in the self optimization strand of biohacking. And I have to be honest, Since we started researching this episode, I have gotten actually really interested in some of these things.
David: 11:39
Really?
Ellie: 11:40
Yeah.
David: 11:41
Did you drink the juice, Ellie?
Ellie: 11:43
I did. You always say drink the juice and you mean drink the Kool-aid.
David: 11:47
Well, in this case, it's literal because they talk about drinking juice from certain vegetables, but not others. So it better have been carrot juice that's one of the good vegetables.
Ellie: 11:56
I'm literally drinking a moon juice electrolyte drink as we speak. I took a fistful of vitamins this morning. Yeah. So I what I'll tell you about I'll tell you about the specific interventions once we're talking about the Dave Asprey book. Short story, we decided to read this book to make fun of it, and then I actually got into it.
David: 12:20
I had the opposite reaction, but we'll talk about that.
Ellie: 12:23
Sorry. I'm getting ahead of us. But for now, what I want to say is that I think that's important kernel of truth into self optimization has to do with the fact that one of the beautiful things about being human is being able to experiment on ourselves. I'm not talking about injecting chlorine E6 into your eye, But I'm talking about the everyday sorts of things that we do, like eating a sweet potato and seeing, hey, how did that make me feel? Did I feel better or worse? Oh, Should I try running? Should I try walking? Should I try swimming? Should I try Pilates? Should I try yoga? And actually Trying a few of those things and then seeing what happens. We are as humans self experimenters, We exist in a very complicated relation to our biology. There are so many aspects of our biological processes that happen underneath the level of our awareness. Some of them we can make ourselves more aware of. Others are really automatic processes that exceed conscious awareness, But we can tinker with ourselves. And in a sense, we are always doing this. I was thinking about the Renaissance philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, who in his essay of experience says there is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try all the ways that can lead us to it. When reason fails, we use experience. And then he goes on to argue for the importance of experimenting on ourselves. Because in French, the word experience is the same as experiment. We've definitely mentioned that before. So the title of experience could also be translated as of experimenting. And Montaigne says that studying himself is the most fascinating object of study for him. And he doesn't mean by that some sort of narcissistic idea of being self obsessed, but more what is my body doing? What opinions do I have? And that inquiry into those elements is related to experimenting on ourselves. Another point on this, I know I'm, I know I'm like on a soapbox now, but I also wanna mention the psychologist who's also trained in philosophy, Alison Gopnik, because she talks about how Human experimentation is something that you can already see from early phases of our lives. Babies are obsessed with counterfactuals. They're tinkering with ways that things could be different in the world. So if they have a little drum set, then they're banging on it with their hand, but then they're also banging it on the floor and doing all of these other things. We're experimenting with altering the world and trying out different ways of being from a very early age. And as we get older, this manifests in imagining how things might be different. And that imaginative process can then lead to us trying out new things to see what possibilities emerge. We're both imagining different ends and trying things out to bring them about in reality. And I think the kernel of truth in the biohacking movement to me is precisely this idea that humans are self experimenters.
David: 15:23
So a couple of thoughts here because you're you covered a good amount of terrain, from Montaigne and to Gopnik, and from this kind of general sense of thinking about experience as experimenting to this developmental perspective. And we could even make an evolutionary version of the two arguments that you just made. Because as human beings, we have been using tools since the stone age. Yes, we have this natural drive to leave a mark on the world, and we do that through various kinds of tech through tools and skills and practices. And sure, it's not that I am a hundred percent against optimization. That's definitely not where my philosophical concerns about biohacking come from. And even just on a personal level, I myself have experimented on myself in various ways. I've had LASIK surgery in my eyes to see better. That's a kind of perceptual sensory enhancement, you could say.
Ellie: 16:19
Biohacker David Pena Guzman has had LASIK.
David: 16:25
Yeah. Especially because that's not medically recommended or required. I didn't do it for medical reasons. I just did it because I wanted to continue to see 20/20 without losing sight.
Ellie: 16:35
Next time you'll get them to change your irises to blue.
David: 16:39
Yeah. That and to add the asset that will allow me to see in the dark with the photosensitizer. But still, I see a qualitative difference between testing and experimenting in this everyday sense of the term, and especially the more extreme forms of biohacking where we are experimenting with our own means of experimenting and experiencing the world. So there's a kind of reflexivity, a turning back of the experiment upon its own conditions of actualization. And let me just say this in slightly different terms. Because in the everyday sense of experimenting, we're using our biology to try to navigate the world in a more intelligent way. I'm trying to see better. I'm trying to think better. That's what children do. That's what Montaigne thinks we're doing all the time. And yes, I'm experimenting with the world. But when it comes to biohacking, what we're making a mark on is no longer the world, But the very biological conditions themselves through which we make a mark on the world. So we become the subjects of our own experiment in ways that are, from the very beginning, designed to make us go beyond what is typical and I would say even normal for human beings, even though I don't love the term normal. So I do think it crosses a certain threshold.
Ellie: 18:09
Okay. I think the fantasy of control is a problem. And also I would certainly have questions about how experimentation is related to optimization, because I do think experimentation has to do with wanting to do better, but optimization, wanting things to be as optimal as possible is maybe a further degree that could be problematic. And I also take your point that biohacking is what we might call part of this quantified self movement. I think it definitely is actually. But I think the contrast that you're drawing between experimenting on the world and experimenting on ourselves is a bit of a false contrast, because I think that we need to think instead about the self world correlation here. I think about the everyday examples of what we might call biohacking in my own life. So my sister got me into this TikTok trend of eating raw carrot salad, especially to regulate hormonal cycles and also eating a ton of cabbage. A lot of women also do something called seed cycling, which is eating different seeds according to which phase of their cycle they're on. I'm not really sure if any of this is legit. Like I said, my sister got me into it via a TikTok video. But what I'm doing there is I'm intaking carrots or cabbage into my body and seeing if it has a demonstrable impact on my well-being. As it turns out, whether or not I know that it has a demonstrable effect for the better on my menstrual cycle. It certainly is those are healthy things to be eating, so why not? But I think there's also this phenomenon of tricking your body into different time zones so that you don't experience jetlag, those are the kinds of everyday things that I'm talking about. And, sure, it would behoove me to do a little bit more research on the raw carrot salad and the cabbage salad than just listening to what my sister said about a TikTok video. So I'm not saying that's the best example of self experimentation, but I think those are examples where we are treating our bodies in a way that is also related to how we interact with them in the world.
David: 20:26
Yeah. And the seeds and the carrots, those are really benign examples. And when you think about whole spectrum of activities that are included in the biohacking world. Those are at the more mundane end of things. They just start looking like trying to eat well like dieting or trying to reduce the intake of potentially noxious things. And yeah, no problem with that. But as you move to the middle and the end of the spectrum, for me, something changes even though I agree that because it's a spectrum, it's really arbitrary where you draw the line. But I do wanna say that squirting that acid that photosensitizer into your eyeballs because you want to have superhuman vision at night, It actually speaks to an ideology that I find very troubling, and that has to do with this desire of the human being to transcend their humanness and ultimately deny their fundamental mortality. And for me, even the term biohacking kind of alludes to this problem into the, I would say, attending philosophy of mind body dualism that often comes with it in the biohacking world, because biohacking obviously comes from hackers and from the world of hacking.
Ellie: 21:40
Yeah. Yep.
David: 21:41
the idea is that every quote, unquote problem that you face by virtue of being a biological being, an individual with an organic body, A) is a problem, and B) can be solved as soon as you come up with the right formula or the right kind of algorithmic solution to it. And so here are things that are basic features of human existence, like decline, like aging, like fatigue, even like death itself are, again, seen as mathematical problems that we just need to find a solution for if we really put our heads to it. The idea that there might be genuine limits that just surpass us doesn't enter the picture.
Ellie: 22:30
And I think in addition to that, for me, there's a very worrisome conception of the relation between our bodies and our desires. You might say mind and bodies, but I really hate using that dualistic terminology. Although I think most biohackers would be fine with it because the metaphor of hacking encourages a couple of things. For one, it encourages us to treat our bodies as passive, inert things that we are operating on, Which I think is really in contrast to the Montaigne ideal of maybe temporarily treating your body as an object of study or more generally treating yourself as an object of study while also recognizing that's part of a dynamic process of experience. Because there is that, there's a play in Montaigne between experience and experimenting. It's not about reducing your body to a permanently passive object of I think the biohacker starting point is my body is this passive thing that I need to hack. And I think there's a deeper layer of that to me is even more troubling, which is this idea that the body is an enemy, actually, that you need
David: 23:40
Outsmart. Right?
Ellie: 23:42
Yeah. That's the perfect way of putting it, because what do hackers do? They hack other people's shit. hacking, technically speaking, involves exploiting the weaknesses of a computer system to gain unauthorized access to data. And so what what is this metaphor doing for us? It's making us treat our bodies like something we are trying to sneak our way into.
David: 24:07
Yeah. The metaphor of entrance and penetration is weird. The kind of like David Goliath narrative of the smart, small guy who is going to outsmart a big kind of dumb opponent, and then the reduction of the body to this passive system that has a bunch of Achilles heels hidden throughout its surface and throughout its mass that we cannot discover because we are not it. So the possibility that the limits of the body or let's say, the blind spots or the crevices of the body might also be blind spots of or crevices of ourselves. Again, there is a kind of, I'll say, mind body dualism here that surpasses by leaps and bounds, the dualism that you find in Descartes. Many of these thinkers would find Descartes himself to be not dualistic enough just based on the way in which they talk about the body and biology.
Ellie: 24:58
Because their dualism is also antagonistic.
David: 25:01
Yeah. It's antagonistic, and it hinges on fantasies of domination and penetration and submission where you bring the body into line through an act of force that is rooted in reason in the intellect. So it's like the intellect finally keeping the body on a leash. And again, when thinking about the spectrum for me, I don't want to lose sight of those more extreme forms of biohacking because I think those are the ones that most magnetize the desire of a lot of biohackers. Yeah, many of them will talk about dieting, but when push comes to shove, the things that they really want are the ones that are more on the cutting edge of science, and that includes also genetic biohacking. There was a news story that made major waves across the world a couple of years ago when it was revealed that a group of Chinese researchers modified these twins genetically using CRISPR Cas-9 technology. They biohacked these twins. And the idea was that they would edit their genes in order to make them immune to HIV. And so they would say oh, now we are producing HIV resistant humans. And they did a bunch of studies to try to figure out what kind of excision to make with CRISPR Cas-9. But then it turns out, of course, that genetics is so complicated and so dynamic, and there are so many layers to it that the specific modification that they ended up making also made the twins, at a higher risk from early death from other conditions like West Nile and influenza viruses. And for me, this example underlines something that is often elided in discussions about biohacking. And that is the possibility, on the one hand, that there might be some things that are just beyond human control and human mastery, and that we just don't have the technology to manipulate and bring into line with our ends and objectives. And on the other hand, that even if they might be within the realm of human control and human intervention, They also come with a significant price tag. So for everything that you enhance, you might also be taking something away. So every optimization in one regard could also be a deoptimization in another one. So the notion of trade offs, I think doesn't get the kind of discussion that it should get, especially when you're talking about really cutting edge technology that place on the limits of what we deem acceptable in the present.
Ellie: 27:52
Enjoying Overthink? Please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent self supporting show. As a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to extended episodes and other bonus content, as well as joining our community of listeners on Discord. For more, check out Overthink on patreon dot com. David, for this part of the episode, we were inspired by another beloved podcast of mine, If Books Could Kill.
David: 28:21
And of mine, not just yours.
Ellie: 28:23
You love that podcast too? Okay. I didn't actually know that. Alright. Yeah. So if Books to Kill is a podcast where a journalist and a lawyer pick a particular book that is has been really popular at airports and stuff like that a pop culture friendly book, bestseller that actually has had a really bad impact on public life and or is really problematic, and then they make fun of it. So we're gonna do a little bit of that today. Although, I will say, I actually enjoyed this book more than I thought I was going to. So I was reading it with my critical hat on, and I was also reading it with my, let's go for this hat on, and that's in general, I think, pretty true to who I am. I find it really easy to just kinda drink the Kool-Aid on something while also having a critical hat on in another part of my psyche. So this book is called Smarter, Not Harder, The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want, and it is written by Dave Asprey, who we mentioned before is he actually says in this book that he coined the term biohacking. He used to be a hacker, and then he had all of these health problems and decided to figure his shit out, and now he's sharing his results with us. And now that he is a successful CEO of the bulletproof company and various other things.
David: 29:46
Yeah. And various other things being a key thing, because one thing that I have to say before we get into the content about this book is how often he turns this into an advertisement for his various capitalist endeavors.
Ellie: 29:58
I know.
David: 29:59
It reads like an ad. He'll be talking about oh, there are bad vegetables and good vegetables. Luckily for you, I'm launching my new line of juices. There are, like, many places where he plugs in his, like he has a line of gyms. He has juices. He has supplements. God, he has, retreats for spiritual...
Ellie: 30:18
I'm, like, buying them, subscribing to the gym getting the gym membership.
David: 30:21
To be honest with you, I'm mad at you, Ellie, because you made me literally buy this book. We're giving this guy more money in having purchased his book. And unlike you, I read it with an open mind, and it just increasingly closed. I said as I made it into the book.
Ellie: 30:38
Okay. No, David. I read this book over the weekend. Now it's a Tuesday that we're recording. I have been talking a lot about biohacking since, and I have already made at least one material change since reading the book, which is that I bought a dental guard at Dave Asprey's recommendation.
David: 30:56
Oh my gosh. Okay. We'll get into this. So talk to me, Ellie, about what you think about his theory, and maybe that can be linked to why it convinced you to suddenly start making changes to your everyday life.
Ellie: 31:13
Okay. Okay. Okay No. I think the theory needs to come after because I feel like listeners are probably like, why the hell did you buy a dental guard. How is dental guard biohacking? So I feel like I need to say a little something about that. I'm not sure if you read that chapter, David, or not, but I jumped straight to the brain and neuro fitness chapter, which is where I read about this. I have struggled for a long time with brain fog. I often feel really sluggish. I feel like there's a veil over my front of my head a lot of times, And I've talked with doctors about this, whatever, tried to figure things out, and nothing has really improved it not diet, not exercise. And so he said something in this book about how that can be caused by poor sleep. And I sleep really well, but I do my dentist told me earlier this year that he thinks I'm clenching my jaw when I sleep, which I had never realized before, but I have a ton of jaw tension. And so I now have this working hypothesis that I clench my jaw at night, which is damaging to my teeth over time. But Dave Asprey made me realize maybe actually clenching my jaw at night is also linked to not getting enough oxygen at night. And so I need to not clench my jaw so much at night because then I will wake up feel more feeling more refreshed and have less brain fog. And so I bought a dental guard at his recommendation. I tried it last night for the first time. No change at all. So I'm gonna try it a little bit more.
David: 32:33
It sounds like a typical result for one of these recommendations. No change at all. But at least you get the satisfaction of thinking that you hacked your biology.
Ellie: 32:42
Well I do actually take a lot of the supplements that he talks about. But so, theoretically speaking, David, let's talk about this. The basic premise of the book is that you don't need to willpower your way through into a better life. You need to hack your biology so that a better life will emerge naturally. Is that fair to say, David?
David: 32:59
Yeah. You need to David your Goliath. You need to Dave Asprey your Goliath.
Ellie: 33:04
DavId, tell us what you think about this theoretical framework. Let's dive in.
David: 33:09
Well, so So the theoretical framework, to be honest, surprised me because I thought he was just gonna talk about the importance of dominating your body, but he doesn't. His basic theory is that our bodies are fundamentally lazy because of the principle of the conservation of energy. Our bodies have been chosen over eons of evolution in order to not spend energy. But in order for us to get the results that we want out of our body, we need to spend energy. If I want a six pack, I need to do a lot of ab work. And that goes against the natural tendencies of my body, which doesn't wanna do that. And so he says, what you need to do is figure out ways to get your body to perform at that peak performance level without it being pissed at you and without you suffering this sort of after effects, like the soreness and all of that. So a lot of this is about how to get the results that you want from your body without paying the price. Hence the title, Smarter Not Harder.
Ellie: 34:10
Absolutely. And he has this very strange, to my mind, narrative about the hero's journey. He says, do you ever feel as though you're on a hero's journey? And he says the hero's journey is really hard. To go through your life trying to figure out the best way to live, willpowering your way through all of these desired changes is very difficult. So he says, I have a dirty secret. The hero's journey is a pain in the ass. David, I see you looking for the page. This is page fifty nine.
David: 34:40
Thank you. Thank you.
Ellie: 34:41
he says, I wanna save you from feeling that your life goals require painful hard won victories. And the ultimate conclusion that he draws here is, look, I did the hero's journey for you. You can just trust my results, which is why you're reading this book, and that's your way of hacking the hero's journey. But I have to say most of the book sounds pretty hero's journey like to me, because it's not as though after reading this book, all you need to do is make a few small changes and then your life is ultimately better. Many of the recommendations that he ends up implementing are extraordinarily expensive, complicated and manifold. And so if you're trying out ten different supplements and then seeing which one works for you, That's not only really expensive, but it's also very time consuming.
David: 35:30
A waste of time and energy. Yes. It's funny how after reading the book, I was like, girl, this lifestyle seems harder, not smarter. And Just let me give you a couple of examples from his own life because he makes a huge he often makes appeals to his own personal experience, and he's braggadocious throughout the book
Ellie: 35:49
Definitely.
David: 35:50
Look at me. I ended up in the cover of Men's Health magazine after having been a bigger kid. And just rhetorically and the way in which he positions himself is really off putting to me. For example, some of the things that he does in his life that I was like, this sounds awful. He says himself that he takes about a hundred pills a day because he has to optimize his diet, and there are many things that you can't eat. By the way, the first few chapters of the book are all about why you shouldn't eat most vegetables. It like, I read that, and I was just like, what is going on with this dietary advice? It sounded to me like a little boy not wanting to eat his veggies being like, but mom!
Ellie: 36:37
There are actually, there are actually complicated conversations around this in nutrition about the role of phytic acid and stuff like that. And I have to say, I've had this internalized I this is definitely one of the things that's been living in my mind rent free since I read the book this weekend because he says that grains are not to be eaten, and I'm like, oh, shoot. Should I not have my daily oatmeal? So I actually ate an egg for breakfast instead of oatmeal yesterday because I felt weird about it. Then when I was ordering takeout, I ordered carrots and cucumbers for my salads for my protein plate because he says that carrots and cucumbers are okay. Although I did eat the outside of the cucumber... which he says is not
David: 37:13
Oh, huge no. Oh, no. Yeah. No. And he actually says at one point, if You want to eat a salad? Make it romaine lettuce and peeled cucumbers and carrots. And I'm like, fuck that salad. I don't want romaine lettuce!
Ellie: 37:25
I found that a really interesting part because he says, make, Have it look like your grandmother's salad, skip the kale and have it be iceberg lettuce. And that to me is like A really that's a classic symbol of how this is written by a white American man for white American men, although, presumably, not ones who are second generation American whose families are from Italy because they might have been eating kale salads. But it's yeah. I yeah. I just found that to be a funny point, but you're right that his specific examples from his personal life are so hilarious. Also had some really funny examples from his kids. He's talking about mouth taping. This is related to the dental guard thing, because he says that breathing through your mouth at night prevents you from getting oxygen. And he says, I have been doing it for years. My daughter started doing it when she was thirteen and saw immediate sleep improvements. And so Dave Astrey just has this daughter who's been biohacking since age thirteen. And there's something about the son too that now I'm forgetting, but it was, like, really funny too.
David: 38:27
Oh my god. Yeah. No. There are so many things. And also, at some point, he gives himself away because one of his claims, And this is this ties into the masculinist orientations of a lot of biohacking discourse. He's oh, a lot of this is to improve not just like your cognitive and spiritual health. We'll come back to the spiritual thing in a minute, but also your sexual health. And there was actually a passage where he indirectly revealed that he has to take Viagra. And I was
Ellie: 38:54
Wait I didn't see that!
David: 38:55
I will have to find it, but he talks about taking supplements for health and sex. And he's talking about some kind of aid for sexual performance. And I'm like, you haven't hacked anything. You haven't improved anything. You're just
Ellie: 39:10
You're just taking viagra!
David: 39:12
You just have an erection for more than four hours. Please call your doctor!
Ellie: 39:16
Oh god. The feminist Twitter teasing about biohacking would have a field day with this. It's like no longer Are they just calling dieting biohacking? Taking Viagra is now considered biohacking.
David: 39:29
He doesn't say diagram.
Ellie: 39:30
I feel like it's probably ashwagandha. That's my bet as somebody who knows a lot about the supplement world, who has spent way too much money on supplements, who in fact had a glass of trace minerals this morning before I had a glass of my natural electrolytes, which have even more trace minerals. So there's that. Okay. David we gotta talk about the fact that Dave Asprey's buzzword in this whole book is the meat OS.
David: 39:56
Oh my god, yes.
Ellie: 39:58
This is this actually my favorite part of the book to make fun of. I know we're like, the point of a philosophy podcast is not to make fun of a book. Like I said, I did like some parts of it, but I wanted...
David: 40:07
Philosophy is also humor. It can be.
Ellie: 40:09
Yes. And I actually think the Meat OS is philosophically rich. So let's say we're also considering it for that purpose. So your Meat OS is a play on the idea of having a computer operating system. OS stands for operating system. And he says that you should think of the programming of all the cells in your body as part of your Meat operating system or your Meat OS. And he says the computer analogy makes more sense than you might think."Obviously, your fleshy body doesn't run exactly like a chips and wires computer, but it must have something like a hidden operating system. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to do things such as take a shot of tequila and break down the alcohol even if you don't know what your liver is. Your body breathes even without your instruction. Your eyes blink on autopilot when you're not paying attention. The Meat OS works in the background all the time, and it remains entirely invisible to you, at least until it breaks." Okay, Heidegger. So so I think this is a hilarious leap in logic. This idea that The computer analogy must work...
David: 41:13
Because there are things that happen.
Ellie: 41:16
Because you otherwise wouldn't be able to do things like take a shot of tequila and break down the alcohol.
David: 41:22
I and aside from that, Ellie, just the disdain of the body that is packed into the word meat, like your meat OS. It's not even your body OS. It's not even like The flesh OS, it's like meat. It's like a chunk of dead flesh that has been cut and put through some kind of ringer.
Ellie: 41:42
Ironic because it's he says it's about the programming of your cells, so it's not even I don't know.
David: 41:47
Yeah. Honestly the use of the computational metaphors, Then later, his introduction of spirituality back into the picture at the end of the book left me with the conviction that this book is not just confusing in terms of its own internal logic about the relationship between mind and body. It is confused because he sometimes talks about Oh, look. We need to transcend the body. But then in the chapter on spirituality and the emotions, and we'll come back to that in a minute, He has this road to Damascus conversion narrative where he's trying to make himself seem relatable to the reader by being like, my whole life since I was a kid, I thought people were robots. But then I pay a lot of money to go to a retreat somewhere in California, and I realized that I have emotions too. And then he reveals that he had this epiphany after he was divorced. So he's like a full blown adult when he's having the realization...
Ellie: 42:43
how much hermeneutic labor his wife was performing.
David: 42:46
Well, Yeah. He He didn't even think he had emotions. It's oh, your marriage didn't work? Okay. Surprising. But, anyways, there's a lot here that changes on this combination of disdain for the body, but this also, I would say, almost unfettered faith in our ability to penetrate it and to make it do the things that we wanna do at no cost.
Ellie: 43:12
Yeah. Yeah. And so he says here, with respect to that, on page thirteen, that you owe it to yourself as a good, self aware, modern human being to start taking control of your meat OS. The old programming deep in our bones doesn't work adequately. You face a fundamental choice. Either you can be run by your programming or you can run it. So there's that dualism. He's associating your programming with your body and you, we don't know who you is, but presumably, it is your consciousness, he says, self aware, modern human being. If you wanna live fully and freely, there really is only one path."Welcome to being a biohacker," literal quote from the book. So one of the things that I think is related to that, in addition to this bizarre disdain for the body that's related to a pretty traditional mind body dualism that we see in philosophy for hundreds of years, and that has been...
David: 44:06
no. I don't think we see that. I don't see we don't see it that bad anywhere in philosophy. This is the worst version of I want to protect philosophy from associations with this.
Ellie: 44:15
Okay. We could talk about that, I but we'll we'll move on for now because there's another aspect to this that I found really strange, which was simultaneous nostalgia for what we might call a paleolithic lifestyle that's free from the ills of modern society. He has a lot of stuff about how bad a lot of the pesticides that we use are etcetera, and how our body, we should naturally trust because it knows what it needs, and modern society has taken us away from that. And then on the other hand, this notion that only now do we have the scientific tools to actually live properly. And I find that to be a common and also incoherent move to say, on the one hand, we need to go back to the land. He talks about how he has a regenerative farm and grows all the stuff without pesticides, whatever. Okay. Honestly, that sounds pretty great. But then on the other hand, there's simultaneously this idea that your body is set up for optimal conditions if you just hack into them. And this idea that we need to hack into them in order to be able to live optimally. And although that formulation of the claim is not incoherent, what is incoherent is certain appeals to wanting a more traditional way of life with, on the other hand, a complete valorization of science and the idea that you need to take control over your natural life through scientific interventions.
David: 45:43
Yeah. Yes. Great point, Ellie. And I actually think this is where you really get an appreciation of the deification of technology that is at work in biohacking circles. Because it's not just that oh, now we have technology and that's great, but rather it's that finally, we have the technology that allows us to be human in the way that we were meant to always have been.
Ellie: 46:07
Perfect way of putting it. That is exactly it.
David: 46:09
It's almost as if we become human only after having passed a certain threshold that allows us to transcend the bad humanity or the bad humanness that we have had up until this point. And so you're right that there's both a backwards looking like melancholic position, but also this push into this future where we're gonna be more than human, where we're gonna be transhuman. And so It's incoherent because the very notion of the human ceases to mean anything. It's what's the human if we're trying to transcend it, But, also, we have never been it until we transcend it with technology. almost as if the human is just a fleeting moment that comes into view only in the act being overcome. So far, we've been talking about biohacking largely as improvement. But keep in mind that it is also about something much more radical, which is transcending typical human limitations. It is about achieving superhuman powers, superhuman performance, whether that's about vision, cognition, or just physical strength. And I just wanna point out that, for example, the people who are putting contacts in their eyes as well as photosynthesizers. The thing is that they already have perfectly normal vision, and so they're doing all of these interventions without any therapeutic or medical need, which raises a lot of ethical questions about who should be doing this and under what circumstances.
Ellie: 47:58
Yeah. This is a really good point. And I wanna mention that on the point of biohacking being about becoming superhuman, There's a dissertation that's recently been turned into a book by Mirjam Grewe-Salfeld. To my knowledge, the first academic book written on biohacking as such. And I have to say, I apologies to Grewe-Salfeld on this because We only became aware of the book after it was a bit too late to read it for the purposes of this episode. So I was only able to look at a little bit of it. But if you're interested in looking at this more, I think this would be a really great place to start because like I said, it's, to my knowledge, the only academic book so far on biohacking. And Griffith Sahlfeld talks quite a bit about Dave Asprey and notes specifically that his model of biohacking is about trying to become superhuman. So even though, technically, these interventions that you're mentioning are not therapeutic, they speak to broader social trends about the desire for optimization as well as the fact that we, especially as Americans, are so dissatisfied with the medical system that we need to take to our own research. So there's this rise of citizen science in the biohacking movement, which I think stems from the strange conglomeration of the horrible medical system that we have in the US with all of the inequalities that pertain to it, and the fact that the US is a very wealthy country. So people have a lot of people have the means to experiment on themselves in these much more invasive ways.
David: 49:29
Well, And I would add to that it also includes a kind of like libertarian attitude often about my body, my decision without thinking about
Ellie: 49:41
My eyes, my chlorine E6.
David: 49:45
Yeah. Without really thinking about the social meaning of these technologies or even broader political questions that might emerge about quality of access, so on and so forth. Aside from that, there is also a question here about who has medical expertise and authority because remember, many of these biohackers are, like, DIY people who are quite literally doing things in their basements or in their living rooms. Beyond that, there is also the issue of over whom does the state have regulatory power when it comes to medicine and technology. Should the state regulate this kind of individualized research. Because, typically, medical research when it's carried out with institutions and using federal funds and using human subjects, It's highly regulated, but biohacking occurs often in this liminal space between medicine and recreation,
Ellie: 50:43
Yeah.
David: 50:43
it's, legally speaking, very unclear what sorts of regulations apply. And I read a few articles that alluded to the fact that even biohackers themselves sometimes have this fantasy that they are operating in an unregulated libertarian space when in fact they're doing things that fall within the ambit, for example, of the FDA and they just don't know it. And so there's a lot of confusion about where authority begins and ends.
Ellie: 51:11
Yeah. And I wanna bring in here The example of Josiah Zayner, who's a biophysicist who made the headlines in twenty seventeen because he tried to edit his genome live on stage at a conference by injecting a syringe full of the gene editing tool CRISPR into his arm at this conference while live streaming the whole thing on Facebook.
David: 51:35
Oh,
Ellie: 51:35
The reason I mentioned him is because he wants everyone to have access to this gene editing tool. So I wanna play a clip from the video where he talks about this. So Josiah is selling these cheap gene editing tools that people can use on frogs with the idea that they'll train themselves on frogs and be able to use it on themselves. And the key point is that he wants everyone to have equal access to this. David, what are your thoughts from this excerpt of the interview.
David: 53:16
First question that emerges for me as somebody who works on animal ethics is, research has to go through ethics review when it uses non-human animals. I suspect that's not happening in any of these cases.
Ellie: 53:31
You're just buying frogs and you're buying the kit, David. Simple as that.
David: 53:35
Yeah. You're, like, having the Amazon person deliver live frogs and something that you inject them with. And that's a basic point. That just happens to be close to my research interest and to my moral convictions. But even beyond that, I think that it's really interesting that so much biohacking rhetoric turns on the notion of self experimentation. Here, we're, like, maybe finding the most perverse version of the montane.
Ellie: 53:59
I do not think Montaigne would approve, guys.
David: 54:02
Again, but why not? But where why not? Where is that line? And yes, right now, most people who do biohacking, especially using genetic technology, do it on themselves. The question is, what would stop somebody from using it on somebody else? So if I buy this is a horrific scenario, but what if I am I just decide, oh, I read that David Asprey taped the mouth of his daughter. Why can't I do genetic engineering or genetic interventions into my daughter or my son or my nephew
Ellie: 54:33
I don't Dave Asprey went into his daughter's room and taped her mouth while she was asleep. I think he was like, hey. I know about this biohack. Wanna try it? And then she consented to it, but I hear your point.
David: 54:44
Yeah. What if I tell, hey, kid. You wanna biohack your genes. I have this thing that you just inject, and so it really raises significant questions. And I think most biohackers are operating under the myth that biohackers themselves are, like, the good guys who are fighting the battle against some big pharma and the state. So there is also a conspiratorial thinking that is at work here that just makes my hairs bristle a little bit. The hairs in the back of my neck just go up.
Ellie: 55:13
Definitely, and certainly, that fantasy of control rears its head. I wanna defend my interpretation of Montaigne here because Montaigne says in the same essay, It is from my experience that I affirm human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the most certain fact in the school of the world. So even though Montaigne thinks that self experimentation is about trying to gain knowledge, which he thinks is distinct from the kind of knowledge that we gain through reason. He nonetheless is not saying the goal is perfect optimization and full knowledge and control. It's we gotta recognize our own ignorance here. And I think it's interesting that Zayner is positioning this in the sense of we shouldn't be worried about the effects this could have as much as we should be worried about the effects that not doing this and not having access for everybody to this could have. It's an effective rhetorical device, But I think also a pretty troubling one because it bypasses not only that ethics board reviewing whether you can, use frogs as patients or even yourself as a patient, but also other questions about what is actually the benefit of It's like one of our friends who we had as an Overthink guest in the past, Joel Reynolds, who's a scholar of disability studies, has been extraordinarily critical of the rise of CRISPR gene editing technology. And it seems far from obvious to me that we should just all have access to these gene editing technologies. Although I will say, if I could hack my own genetics to get rid of a predisposition towards Alzheimer's, I would do it in a second.
David: 56:51
Yeah. But it would you be able to guarantee this goes back to my point about trade offs? Would you be able to guarantee that in knocking out a part of your genome, you wouldn't be knocking out something else? And because gene networks are so hypercomplex from a mathematical perspective. You would I don't know that there aren't many things that are like a one to one correlation between this gene and only this one trait. It's usually a question of clusters and probability. So there is a lot of blurry, vague risks that are hard to quantify. But The risks of making this technology accessible to people, I think, are very concrete even though this guy, Josiah Zayner, wants to brush them aside. And I'm here thinking about an article that came out in 2019 in the journal Science entitled regulating genetic biohacking, where the authors point out that in recent years, even the FBI has gotten in involved in the biohacking movement or has become rather concerned about the rise of biohacking because there is such a close link between biohacking and bioterrorism. If yoU just use biohacking technologies with the intent to harm other people, it very easily gets classified as bioterrorism. And the fact that these are, like, mailed to your door for under thirty dollars only highlights the danger that we're facing.
Ellie: 58:16
Yeah. And as much as I think it's beautiful that humans have this passion for self experimentation. And I also think we need to be really careful anytime that gets enlisted in a fantasy of transcending our own biology. That to me is not a new scientific progressive way forward. It's the resurgence of troublesome and long standing metaphysical views about human nature.
David: 58:42
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