Biohacking and the Road to Transhumanism

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from house stop
works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I am
Christian Seger. Hey, Robert, I got a question for you.
Let's say you want to pick up a paper clip,

(00:24):
but it's just it's giving you a really hard time.
You know how sometimes paper clips it's difficult to get
your fingers around them and pick them up off of
the surface they're on. What is paper What a paper clips?
You know, the little metal, metal bendy things. Yes. So,
so now let me ask you this. You're having a

(00:44):
hard time picking up this paper clip. Would you cut
your finger open, put a magnet in there, suitre it
back up to make it easier to pick up that
paper clip? Probably not, because that that does not sound
like I'm making the process any easier. Yeah, but it
is kind of in human nature, the same way that
we we try and vacuum up something, and if the
vacuum cleaner is not picking it up, we will pick

(01:06):
the object up, look at it, and then place it
back on the carpet and then give it another go
with the vacuum. Right. Yeah, technology must succeed. It is
kind of like that. Yeah, so, uh, that's what we're
talking about today at its very basic form. We're gonna
be talking about bio hacking in the present on the
road to transhumanism. Will explain what all that means. That

(01:27):
might have just been a bunch of gibberish to you
just now if you're unfamiliar with these movements, But that's
a real thing. People are really implanting magnets in their fingers, uh,
and they pick up paper clips and bottle caps with them.
But that's not really just why they're doing it. We'll
we'll talk about more about that later. Yeah, we're gonna
we're gonna look at some individuals who are either in

(01:47):
some cases pioneers of trans humanism, innovators who are going
out there hacking their bodies U upgrading their bodies with technology,
as well as individuals for kind of harbingers or even
profits of trans humanism who were who were engaging in
these acts, uh, to sort of comment on where we

(02:08):
are and where we can go with our technology. And
along the way, we're also going to define what trans
humanism is, discuss some of the different approaches to trans humanism,
the different uh, philosophies and mindsets that that entail it,
as well as us a general proposed checklist for how
we might know when we have become trans human as

(02:31):
a society exactly. Yeah, And so you know, I think
a lot of you out there. Again, like if you
haven't heard of this before, you've probably got some pop
culture touchstones, and I'm sure Robert and I are going
to be referring back to throughout the episode. But like,
for me, the first one I think of is American Mary,
the horror movie which you've seen right by the SOSCA sisters,

(02:54):
in which you know there's a lot of body modification
going on, but the body modification is sort of leading
to ard something more than human. Right. Also, I mentioned this,
uh in our Summer Reading episode. The graphic novel Junction
True is about stuff like this. Warren ellis a lot
of his comics and prose work is based on this

(03:15):
stuff like Black Summer, dr Sleepless Desolation Jones, and especially
trans Metropolitan are about uh, sort of moving towards a
trans humanist future and what the ethical I guess conflicts
and repercussions of that would be. And then for me,
there's this game it's a role playing game called The
Clips Phase, and I have been in love with it

(03:37):
since I first read the book of it, and I
actually played it one time with Joe McCormick, our host. Yeah. Uh,
and basically the ideas you build your sort of trans
humanist character that exists in a far future along the
lines of the philosophies that we're going to present today. Yeah, well, yeah,
this is of course, so this idea of just upgrading

(03:59):
the body with grenetic parts. You do see this in
a number of different role playing scenarios. There's all video
games where you're kind if you need to upgrade your character, well,
get a chip for this, which exactly. Yeah. Yeah, like Fallout.
I play Fallout a lot, and there's plenty of bio
hacking that goes on in that, and BioShock is essentially

(04:20):
a bio hacking game. But those are science fiction. Today,
we're gonna really try to focus in on the reality
of this stuff. What's actually going on, how close are
we to doing this, what are the current benefits of it? Yeah,
the science fiction examples are our key two because those serve,
as you know, it's kind of avatars of what is possible. Yeah,

(04:44):
and Uh. And in any of these ideas we discussed
here today, they're not They're not too far removed from
the sci fi visions that at least partially inspire them. Yeah,
I agree. Uh. And I want to kick things off
with a quote that I found during the research, which
is from a pretty well known own bio hacker who
goes by the name anonym Uh. And she says, bodily

(05:05):
health takes a big f off second seat to curiosity
when she's referring to her own bio hacking. We're gonna
talk a lot more about her own biohacking, but this
is the kind of philosophical ethos we're talking about here.
Very d I y approach, and they're less worried about
their health and more about sort of the innovation, the curiosity. Yeah,

(05:28):
claiming their body saying this is this is my form,
and if I want to augment it, if I want
to upgrade it, that is what I'm going to do.
Health come second. Yep. So Okay, you're out there saying
I don't know what you guys are talking about at all.
What is trans humanism? Well, the basic premises something like this, right,
we can improve being humans through technology and science, and

(05:53):
we're basically taking evolution into our own hands. Now, those
of you've listened to our episode on the philosophy of
cyborg ism, Uh, this is gonna sound familiar, right if
there they touch on each other. There's a nice big
ven diagram of trans humanism and cyborgs. Yeah, I mean
a lot of it touches into this area to where
you know, essentially human evolution has has has long been

(06:16):
altered or even stunted by our culture, by by just
the way that we live as individuals. Now natural selection
doesn't quite work the same way anymore. So this is
the idea that the next phase of human evolution is
one of largely self guided technological scientific achievement. Now it is.

(06:38):
We'll discuss exactly how that breaks down. Varies greatly, and
it runs the gamut from like fully semi androids, cybernetic
futuristic beings, uh you know that are essential essentially like
technological angelic beings too, more sort of near future but

(06:58):
sometimes lofty ideas about just simply making society better, making
our world better, kind of going after that Star Trek
s Gene Roddenberry inspired uh utopia ideal. Yeah, And this
is you know, what. This is a good point where
I want to throw out a plug for you, which
is that you last week published a piece on how
stuff Works Now that was an experiment in looking at

(07:21):
a trans human cyborg future, uh, specifically along the lines
of space travel, as we discussed in our Cyborg episode,
and it was called Silba Dreams of Earth and it
was basically it was a great short story about a
trans human or a post human I guess on Jupiter,
thinking about what life was like on Earth. Oh yeah, well,

(07:43):
thank you. That one was a lot of fun to
put together and definitely uh I spun that off of
ideas that we discussed here on the podcast. Well, I
think if anybody who's listened to those episodes or this
episode and you like that stuff, go check that out.
Go look for Roberts piece which the Silva Dreams of
is the title of the short story. What's the title
of the article? That's it's a question about what the

(08:05):
our trans human future like. I'll make sure that we
link to it on the landing page for this Episodeah,
you should, because it's great and it's really connected to
what we're doing here. Yeah. The thought experiment thing is
pretty interesting. Um, Former co host Julie Douglas also did one,
and and you've been invited to so I have. Yeah,
I haven't thought up of one yet. I think Julius
was something about like, what would life be like if

(08:26):
we were crawling all the time? Yeah, if we were
still sort of like quadrupeds. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an
interesting had some cool illustration, So hopefully we'll see more
and more of these from members of the house. Stuff works. Yeah,
I'm gonna try to take a stab at it one
of these days. Uh. The thing about trans humanism, though,
that I want to go back to, this isn't exactly new, right.

(08:46):
For a long time, people have sought out ways to
change their bodies, in particular extending the human life. Right.
We've talked about this before with our episodes on Egyptian
burials or just the practices. And they're trans humanists though
they're not just interested in being immortal, that's part of it.

(09:08):
But what about things like, for instance, adding technology to
your body so you have different senses, or maybe learning
how to be telepathic by having science and technology connect
you to another human being. That's the kind of stuff
we're gonna be talking about today. Now there's three categories,
according to our House Stuff Works article on trans humanism.
I think we're gonna see a little bit more than

(09:30):
this today, though, but help me out. There's the longevity one,
which we primarily see nowadays through cryonics, the idea of
you know, freezing your body basically, uh so after you die,
so in a far future where there's uh, you know,
technology that would be able to cure whatever you've got, Well,
I would say that's that's one version. That's certainly a

(09:51):
lot of the word going into this, Particularly the work
of Aubrey de Gray, revolves around this idea of that
the death is something we can we can get or
come to, right. We just have to take We have
to take death divided up into the various uh approachable problems,
and then tackle each of those problems individually in order
to defeat death. Sounds a little lofty, but at least

(10:15):
prolonged human life to where the average individual will live
at least a century. Yeah. The second category is becoming
a what they call super well being, and that's basically
guaranteeing that you have the best traits so that you
feel the best possible way that you can and you
can exist in the best way that you can within
your environment. This is an area where and arguably there's

(10:39):
a lot of scientific arrogance here, because the idea here is, hey,
if you let science and technology take care of it,
we got your well being, you're gonna be happy as if.
And I don't want to totally discount that argument, but
you really get into this this clash between science and
every other discipline out there that has some approach to

(11:02):
human well being in human happiness, be its spiritual or
philosophical or well, that's gonna that's gonna go beyond sciences team, right,
so yeah, right, yeah, uh. And then the third one
would be super intelligence, which I didn't find too many
examples of in the uh the sort of practical examples

(11:23):
that we're encountering nowadays. But the idea here is essentially,
either through genetics or technology, augmenting our brain so we're
smarter or have a capacity for more memory. Right. Yeah, Well,
I mean I would say we're we're already seeing like
a soft shade of that in terms of our just
constant use of cloud based devices and constant wireless connection.

(11:47):
Like it's it's not a direct augmentation of the brain,
but we're we're making sure that we're we're almost painfully
attached to the infinite knowledge. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Right, Like
when we're watching a TV show and you're like, hmmm,
I don't know who that actor is, what other things
has he been in? Just whip out your phone. Right,
less than five minutes you figured it out. Yeah, not

(12:08):
knowing is no longer acceptable. Ye used to. There was
a day when you're when you were like, Hey, I
wonder who that that character actor is? He just didn't
know you you you could maybe go research it tomorrow,
but right now, just or you talk to other human
beings about it. Hey, who's that guy that's on that
Pete Holmes has a really good bit about this. Uh,
we're basically like we've we're losing like our social connections

(12:30):
because phones. Yeah, yeah, he does have a great bit
on this. I've heard I've heard that bit. Um. But
so a lot of people equate transhumanism with the singularity,
right that eventually it's going to lead to the singularity.
And but what we what we mean by that is
the point where artificial intelligence surpasses the abilities of biological intelligence. Now,

(12:52):
I would say the research that we did today it's
not going to take us too far down that path.
That's another episode for another time. Yeah. That that that
this singularity is definitely a transition point and into an
entirely different mode of existing. So let's talk about, uh,
what there's different types of trans humanism. Let's let's sort
of just like upfront, established the philosophies. And you found

(13:16):
a great piece from Omni magazine in a twenty sixteen
article called trans Humanism Sexual Identity. Let's start there. Yeah,
this puts a cool little article and towards the end
of it, they did a great job of just laying
out some of these different approaches to it um, which
which serves as a nice sort of starting point for
exploring some of them, and and just you know, briefly

(13:37):
explaining the other ones. Um. First up, democratic trans humanism.
This is trans humanism for the people, for the species,
the idea that only when you can you apply this
to everyone at every socio and socioeconomic level, will we
really be able to evolve or elevate the human race.
And uh, and I find this one interesting because on
one level, it's the most reasonable incarnation on the list.

(14:00):
It's the Bernie Sanders trans humanist movement. Yeah, yeah, because
like you can't. How can we say that we've evolve
the human species if we're ultimately talking about just one class. Yeah, exactly.
And that's where this thing often goes, right, is like, well,
is only the are the one percent going to be
the only ones who can afford this kind of trans
human operation, whereas like bio hacking is primarily about just

(14:24):
like d I Y do it in your garage, your
kitchen or whatever and literally cut yourself up and jam
stuff into your body. Yeah. So yeah, this is the
idea that you can't you leave no humans behind if
we're going to evolve as a species, We're gonna involve
as a species. But it also there's a little bit
of Western arrogance to it as well. And I heard
Terry Gross on NPR Fresh Air interview Donald g McNeil Jr.

(14:48):
Author of Zeka The Emerging Epidemic, and he discussed, you know,
the various countermeat measures of delaying sexual reproduction in Zeka
danger zones as to have avoid the threat to newborns. Yeah. Right,
it's a big topic of conversation right now. Yeah. But
but as he pointed out, this sort of effort in
developing nations often comes across as white people a world

(15:10):
away telling Africans or Asians not to have babies, and
they even they even avoid some of the loaded language
by referring to it as spacing out births rather than
talking about birth control. Yeah. I think I don't know
if we've talked about this on the show, or maybe
we just talked about it in the office one time.
But the idea that because of the ZA epidemic and

(15:31):
ideas of spacing out births like this, that there will
be like huge gaps in classes in various schools down
the road in the future because, for instance, like a
year or two will have gone by where no babies
or less babies were born, right, Um, and what kind
of impact does that have on a society going forward? Yeah? Indeed, um.

(15:54):
But but then certainly that the transhumanist angle here is,
you know, do you end up go walking into all
these places around the world and saying, hey, everybody, this
is what it means to be human. Now you need
to upgrade fingers. Yeah, so it's you're kind of danny
if you do dander. If you don't, right, if you
leave everybody behind, that's bad. But if you if you

(16:15):
offer it to everybody in a little too insistent about it.
Then that's a that's also a little less shady. Okay,
the next version, we have a libertarian trans humanism, and
this is trans human for every Humanism for everybody, but
without government getting involved. And this, for all intents and purposes,
seems to be the style of trans humanism represented by

(16:36):
the United States trans Humanist Party, who currently has a
US presidential hopeful in the form of of Zoltan. Yeah,
and in fact, Zoltan wrote me on Twitter last night
to let me know that he was willing to help
us out with this episode. Unfortunately I received it too

(16:56):
late into the research game, but maybe in a future
episode we can consult with Zultan. I didn't know what
it was at first because I just randomly tweeted something about, oh,
I'm researching bio hacking and trans humanism and I gotta ping,
like midnight last night or something, and it was from
him or whoever is running his account. It was basically like,
if you've got any questions, come to me. Yeah. It's uh.

(17:19):
It should come as no surprise to anyone out there.
This election cycle has a lot of there's a lot
of noise and it's easy for some of the other
candidates to become lost in that noise. Yeah, but I
think it would be interesting, uh you know, potentially in
a future scenario for the show where we might have
Zultan on or we might talk to him and get
some of his input on stuff like this. Yeah, because
a lot of these movements, to one of the like

(17:41):
the really cool things about them is that they're they're
very pro science, they're very pro technology, and that you
know what what whatever the other lofty ideas involved there are,
there is a definite pro science agenda. And similar to
the libertarian trans humanism, there's also an arco trans minism.
This is like the stronger anti capitalist, anti state trans

(18:04):
humanist movement. Uh. These individuals believe that in the wake
of these advances that we're unleashing, society is going to
find a democratic form without the need of government or
massive corporations. This is like almost exactly how that game
Eclipse phase breaks down. There's like different factions that you
can be a part of. Everybody's trans human in it,

(18:24):
but almost all of the factions line up with these
factions we're talking about here right now. Like there's an
anarcho one. There's a corporate one. There's uh one that's
we have extropianism down here, there's an extropianism faction. Yeah,
so it's basically like within the game, you have to
choose what your character is. Sort of philosophy about being
trans human and modifying their body is are there is

(18:47):
there are there any groups that just have no part
of trans humanism at all? Uh No, you're I don't
think that there's a way for you in the game
to just have a like straight up human body, because
the whole idea is that, um, we've gotten past the
singularity in the game, and you can upload your mind
into any kind of body and then modify that body.

(19:08):
In fact, like some of the characters are uplifted animals
in human bodies or vice versa, human minds uplifted into
animal bodies, Like you can be like an octopus with
like cybernetic augmentations, but you're human mind. That reminds me
a lot of Banks. If there's an engine, I think
it's heavily inspired by his work. Yeah, you should totally

(19:29):
check this out. It's right up your alley. The religious question, though,
um came up because it reminded me in um Richard K.
Morgan's Altered Carbon series. His world involves that just an
extreme use of this re sleeving of human consciousness. That's
exactly what they call it in the game sleeving. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I I can't recommend this game enough. I mean, it's

(19:51):
really smartly done. It's I mean, if you're out there
and you're like, I don't care about game like role
playing games, and that's cool, but I haven't even other
than that one time with Joe played it. But just
reading the book is fascinating because it presents all this
stuff we're talking about here and then sort of like
science fiction visions for where we could go down the
road with trans humanism. Interesting. Yeah, Now Morgan, in his world,

(20:14):
certain religious groups, such as I think specifically there's a
branch of Catholics, do not engage in this trans humanist
re sleeving. Okay, so they're all in their original but
they're all in their original bodies, and they're just kind
of set apart from sort of you know, almost like
normal humans, and that all these strange new approaches to humanity.
There's some kind of thing in the game's world in

(20:37):
which there was like an apocalyptic event on Earth that
prevents you from basically being born with a regular old
human body. Um, I think because a I got out
of control and it was like a terminator type skyp. Yeah. Well,
speaking of religion and trans humanism, there are religious trans humanists. Essentially,
these are non atheistic trans humanists to see trans humanist

(20:59):
ideas it's fully compatible with their religious views. Two interesting examples.
One in particular, since we've been we've recently spoke about
about Mormons space. There is a Mormon trans Humanist Association
fascinating and it is quote the world's largest advocacy network
for ethical use of technology and religion to expand human abilities. There.

(21:22):
I would never have thought that, but that's fascinating. Yeah,
there's I was really hope to ask. I have a
I have a friend, UM whose Mormon and lives out
in Utah and is really kind of progressive in his
Mormon views. I'll have to ask him if he's familiar
with this. Yeah, I kind of want to check in
with a couple of my old Mormon friends who I know.
They're both UM, both definitely into science, both science UM advocates,

(21:45):
but UM, this particular Mormon take on trans humanism it
also entails something they call transfigurism uh and this is
This is from their website. Transfigurism is religious trans humanism
ex amplified by synchronization of Mormonism and trans humanism. The
term transfigurism denotes advocacy for change in form and alludes

(22:09):
to sacred stories from many religious traditions. Uh. And they
refer to uh uh, the Universal Form of Christiana and Hinduism,
the Radiant Face of Moses and Judaism, and several other
incarnations and other faiths. So I found that one interesting.
There's also this Christian trans Humanist Association and they have
a number of tenants here that are interesting. Include the

(22:31):
idea that God's mission involves the transformation and renewal of
crenate creation, um, growth and progress along every dimension of humanity. Uh,
science and technology as a tangible expression of of the
God given impulse to explore and discover. Yeah, well that's
interesting because that is something that comes up over and

(22:52):
over again, regardless of whether it's connected to religion or not.
But that's that's really what's given as like the ethical
motivation for a lot of bio hacking. Yeah, so I
wanted to touch on those because you see far more
of the of the secular body hacking and a secular
trans humanism, so it's interesting to look at a religious
spin on it. Yeah, I can't imagine. One of the

(23:12):
things I was thinking about, like while we were doing
this research was sitting down at my grandmother's house at
the kitchen table and just like having a conversation with
some coffee and being like, hey, did you know grant
me that there's people who cut their fingers open and
her magnuts in there, and just having her My grandmother's
reaction would just be like oh my, you know. But

(23:33):
but like trying to explain to her and then adding
into it because you know she's a practicing Christian, well
there's a Christian element to this too, and explaining that
to her as well. It would be a weird conversation
for sure, But I might try to have it someday.
Well I'm gonna try and blow through some of these
other ones just to give everyone a basic idea here.
But essentially you have you have hedonistic trans humanists to

(23:56):
just want to figure out how to eliminate the pain
and folk is on the good stuff. You have survivalist
transhumanists that are that are hyper focused on the idea
of longevity. And then there are singularitarianists and their ideas
that technological singularities coming. The machines are gonna outpace this.
Let's get ready, it's inevitable. Yeah, all we can do
is prepare ourselves and try and steer the course. Cosmism

(24:20):
is on here too, and that's actually something that I've
been thinking about proposing that we do for a future episode.
I know that there was some kind of cosmism that
was working its way around Russian science thought earlier in
the century that might be fun to explore. Yeah, this
there's that. This is a slightly different thing that arises

(24:41):
from the work of AI researcher Hugo did Garis, and
he's a very interesting dude and of himself. I mean,
he's retired now, but he predicted a war against machines
that were resulting numerous mega deaths, like essentially matrix kind
of world. Okay, Yeah, So he has this, he has
this whole philosophy uh laying out and it involves this

(25:05):
idea that um that you're gonna have the cosmists and
you're gonna have the terrans who oppose uh, you know,
upgrading humans and becoming this this trans human force and
essentially the trans humanists are going to have to leave
the planet and the others are gonna have to stay.
Um people a little more complicated than that, but that's
sort of the basics. Well, that sounds like something that
might be worth revisiting in the future. And if anybody

(25:27):
out there knows more about that too, because I found
when just doing kind of basic research on it, it
wasn't widely available. Um, let us know, stuff to blow
your mind at how stuff works? Sorry, uh, blow the
mind at how stuff works dot com? Uh, and let
us know if you've got some opinions on that. Yeah.
So those are some of the basic philosophies floating around

(25:48):
in the heads of individuals who start down this trans
humanist path and get into this body modification, bio hacking realm.
So this all brings up a question that I want opposed.
Maybe it's not one that we answer now. It might
just be a rhetorical question or's something to think about
as we go through the rest of the episode. With
all these types of trans humanism, regardless of its religious

(26:11):
or philosophical or whatever, is it ethical and so. And
the reason why I ask is because there are some
people who compare trans humanism to eugenics as being some
kind of division between superior and inferior versions of humanity,
where one person is superior to another. And I guess

(26:33):
that's something that we should consider as we're going forward. Um,
and and especially in the case of like you know,
like we're saying, like, if there's like a I guess,
like a capitalist faction of trans humanists and only the
rich have access to biomodifications that prolong their life, is
that ethical? I think there's a strong argument that it's not.

(26:56):
I mean, you can already look at at the highest
level of medical care is essentially a transhumanist endeavor, and
it is not available to everyone. So it's kind of uh,
it wasn't that sort of the premise behind Elysium, that movie,
the Neil blom Camp movie. Oh yeah, yeah, with the
rich people in Orbit and everyone else is on Earth. Yeah,

(27:18):
and like they didn't always have access. The people on
Earth did always have access to like the medical benefits
that they had. What was there, Like there's like some
kind of machine that you could just climb in and
wold like cure cancer or something. Yeah, and that's what
I think the whole plot was based on. There was
an interesting film, a bit a bit heavy handed. Yeah,
and it also kind of like went off the rails
a little bit, but I kind of like it. I
know most people were upset by it after blomb Camp's

(27:39):
work on District nine, but I thought it was okay. Yeah,
I think he He even admits though that he he
would have he wished he could have had more time
writing it than he wasn't able to get the script
exactly where he wanted it, but it's still a wonderful world.
I'd love to see him potentially revisited even Yeah, yeah,
that would be interesting. So we're getting into body modification

(27:59):
bio acting, and I do want to just just briefly
mentioned that when you look at ways that we have
we have always altered the human form, you can sort
of look at three basic areas. They're sort of symbolic
um body modification figuring in terms of, you know, stuff
that's even superficial, like altering one's hair, altering one's nails,

(28:19):
and then getting into the you know, tattoos and other
things that are more permanent but still you're not altering
um the form too much. Then you have things that
are certainly altering the form more, and then things that
are actually altering the functionality of the human body. And
that's where we we really see some of the more
interesting examples of modern body modification with the trans humanist spent. Yeah. So,

(28:44):
like examples of altering the form would be like subdermal
or transdermal implants, which we have a really great article
on how stuff works about in our team put together
this fascinating infographic on how the whole like surgical process works.
But again, that's not sort of evolving you into another
stage of humanity's enhancing you. Yeah, but like even even

(29:06):
wearing clothes is a is a body modification and an
enhancement of who you are. You are your physical manifestation.
But it's certainly it's not necessarily changing the form or
changing the function. And what we're basically going to be
talking about here for the rest of the episode is
bio hacking. Uh. And it's called that for a reason

(29:27):
because it's the d I Y version. You get out
your own tools and upgrade your body yourself. Bio hackers
ask why should we wait for the industry or for
the government to catch up to our way of thinking.
Let's democratize science and do this to ourselves. Right, And
we're already seeing versions of this, from everything to people
wearing smart watches and other wearable devices to the really

(29:51):
extreme stuff that we're gonna talk about today. The inspiration,
as with many of the philosophies that Robert just mentioned,
is basically to create and discover. It's that human urge
to continuously innovate. And we're gonna talk about people like
Kevin Warwick and left anonem that I mentioned earlier. These
are well known bio hackers, but there are also community

(30:13):
labs that work on this stuff too. They're basically either
doing this in their kitchen or in some kind of
body parlor. Uh, and they're working together as a community
to share their information and their resources. Some are building
wearables that they hope that they'll eventually implant. Right. So,
for instance, like, there's a hat out there that electrically
stimulates the prefrontal cortex that you can wear. But what

(30:35):
if you took that the step further and you were
able to install that into your head. Uh. There's an
anklet that vibrates in the direction of due north. And
I know from the research that anonem is actually one
of the people who's talking about actually building that and
putting it in her knee so that her knee will
be able to tell her where due north is would

(30:55):
be helpful if you get lost a lot, I would assume, yeah, uh,
other dabblings that we're not going to go into full
depth here on our for instance, modifying mouth bacteria so
that it eats plaque and instead recalcifies our gums, or
inserting organisms into our water that detect arsenic or bacteria

(31:15):
that you eat that kill tumor cells. Okay, so these
are all things that are on the table. Yeah. I
mean when you get into the synthetic biology realm, which
I think we touched on some of these previous did Yeah,
that's entirely different sphere of trans humanist body improvement. It
takes place at the smallest level, and it's all possible
because the tools are getting cheaper and more accessible. Think

(31:38):
of it like this. Instead of having a local bike
coop where you all get together and you work on
your bicycles together and make sure that you know share resources,
these folks are having a local biohacker coop where they're
sharing resources and information on how to do this stuff safely. Uh,
and what they're getting out of it, and and we're
gonna we're gonna dive into all of But remember this

(32:01):
is also sidestepping academia in a big way. It's getting
rid of the stuffy methodology for a faster but also
riskier application. There are there's dangers here when you when
you're just like cutting yourself open and shoving stuff in
your body. Yeah, I mean this is self experimentation and
and mad science if it is yeah, uh and and
I'm going to just throw this out there, especially going

(32:24):
back to the idea of the government getting involved. I'd
say we're one major accident away from this getting a
lot of attention from the media and the government getting
involved and regulating what you can do with your body
in terms of technology or certainly you're one new story
about this is what the kids are doing exactly? Yeah,

(32:45):
oh yeah, always think of the children. If if if
kids start doing this, then there's gonna be a lot
of scrutiny on it. Then what happens does it go underground?
I mean it's already a subculture, but like does it
become like an illegal underground where people are modifying our
bodies secretly. I don't know, but we'll have to keep
an eye out for it. Yeah. And by the way,

(33:06):
I want to add this too, because of the efforts
of body modifiers, transdermal implants now have impacts on our medicine. Uh.
There are examples where you can use them to create
chemotherapy ports that run directly into your veins while you're
getting cancer treatment. Uh. There's also transdermal implants that are

(33:27):
anchored directly into bone for prosthetic limbs. And some scientists
are even looking into animal horns as natural transdermals that
can be inserted and they won't be rejected by the
body because of infection. And that's something we're gonna talk
about a lot more when we get into the specifics here. Yes,
stell Arc this is this is the guy that I've

(33:48):
been fascinated with for for years, and certainly he's been
he's been around for quite a while. He was born
in forty six and had his name legally changed to
Stollac in nine two. He is a performance artist and
Australian performance artist and you have probably seen images of
one project or another of his over the years, because

(34:10):
they often are extreme enough to capture mainstream media. I mean,
I did not know his name, but I knew about
the ear Thing, and I think, well, go on ahead.
I think he's had some influence on our pop culture too. Yeah,
he uh, I mean, the guy is essentially feels like
he stepped out of William Gibson novel because if you

(34:32):
if you see an interview with him and hear him
talk about his work, he is a like a very
thick Australian accent that it feels like it would be
more in keeping with just almost like a backwoodsie like
down to earth kind of guy, especially now as an older,
older man. He might seem just like it was just
an older Australian dude. And I think didn't didn't Motherboard

(34:54):
do like a documentary on him or something like that? Pervice. Yeah,
so if you really want to see him in action,
you can probab watch that. Yeah. Yeah, he's and uh
he comes off pretty uh pretty down to earth even
in one off in one of these interviews, he's also
hooked up to a large mechanical spider body because he's
also been and he's long been involved with some pretty

(35:14):
extreme stuff. Between between seventy six and eighty eight, he
completed twenty five different hook body Suspicion performances. So now
that seems to be kind of like the groundwork of
his body modification slash performance art world. Yeah, and this
is the one that I think, uh, I have to
imagine that the people who made that movie The Cell,

(35:36):
the character of Vincent Dinofrio must have been inspired by
a stell Arc in some way, because I don't know
if you remember, but he was hanging from hooks a
lot in that movie. That was like part of Oh yeah,
I forgot about that aspect of that. That movie is
pretty loaded with stimuli. Yeah. Um so, so from here
he engaged on a whole string of projects that involved

(35:58):
it basically came back to his is his thesis, right, yeah,
which is essentially, we're progressively extending ourselves into our environment
through technological artifacts. Sounds like trans humanism to me. Uh
So his argument is that we're making ourselves both cyborgs
and zombies by doing this. Yeah. So, so many of
these projects they're they're not necessarily about Hey, I'm doing

(36:19):
this thing with my body and technology that's useful but
it's more about a comment on what we are already
doing and what we will be doing. So just to
run through some of his projects here, he did the
third arm project. This was a grasping and risk rotating
mechanism with the rudimentary sense of touch that was attached
to him and activated by e MG from other body areas.

(36:44):
He uh, he had, he has this, He had his
stomach sculpture and this one I read almost killed him. Yeah,
there were this is certainly he's all about getting into
that area where health comes second to the art, to
the technology. But this was the thing that was into
scopic went down his throat into gopic cameras. It would
open up like a like a metallic flower and then

(37:05):
there would be a light and a lot of this
was you know, conceptual. You know that the stomach is
a dark, lightless place that with this technology there's light
and movement in there where otherwise there would not be
um And yeah, fortunately it did not kill him. There
was an exoskeleton project that he did and this involved

(37:25):
like these this large array of pneumatic spider like legs,
this big walking machine that that he kind of sat
in the middle of and allowed him to control the
machine through arm juicers. He essentially looked like a like
a spider man villain and yeah, very dark, thinking of
those what are the dn D monsters dried? Yeah, yeah,

(37:47):
that did look a lot like centaurs with spider bodies. Yeah.
He also did a few different performances fractal flesh, pink body,
and parasite and these explored involuntary and remote uh internet
choreography for the body with electrical stimulator stimulation of the muscle,
so essentially outsourcing his movements to direct control via the Internet. Um.

(38:10):
He did a project with his partner Nina Sellers where
they took essentially they took different biomaterials such as um,
subcutaneous fat, peripheral nerves extracted from both of their bodies,
put them in this uh, this slurry and this pressurized
tank and then it just kind of gets um blended

(38:31):
up periodically. Yeah. Um. And then what do they do
with it afterwards? Oh? You just you just kind of
look at it. Okay. I thought I was thinking it
would be like Ghostbusters too, where they like put it
into like those uh squirt guns maybe squirted on ghosts. Now,
I think this one was more about like like bodily identity,
and I would happened to be taken like this mass

(38:51):
is still human if it's just this Yeah, yeah, this
is this one was probably one of the more grotesque creations,
but it depends, like us, where you stand on his
most famous work the third year. So this and we
touched on this a little bit in a previous episode.
But this involved taking a bio compatible scaffolding surgically inserting

(39:13):
it into his left forearm. And this happened in two
thousand six, creating the shape of an ear, and then
over the in the years to follow, additional surgeries after
they found the surgeons willing to do it, uh to
to form this out even more. And I don't think
they still need to add an earlobe to it. Yeah,
and I think we should clarify here. He has just

(39:35):
added the shape of an ear to his arm. And
the way that we described va grown organs as being
sort of framed by scaffolds, this is not a functional
ear on his arm. No, it's it's not his actual ear,
but but creating the form of the ear on the arm.
And then the big plan is to have a microphone
in there that is connected to the Internet, so that

(39:56):
allows the ear to hear, so that you might be
able to say, go to his webs sight and then
listen through his artificial ear. It has not come to
fruition just yet. There was a previous attempt to install
the microphone and there was an infection and they kind
of had to scrap that. But my understanding is that
he's currently moving towards getting a second attempt and this

(40:20):
time hopefully it will stick. He needs to kickstart that.
I don't know if Australia. Yeah, surely he gets a
lot of he gets a lot of funding. Where is
he getting the funding from, like like like a private
equity or is it like from grants or something different?
Grants Like he's he's been the artist in residents at
various universities um so. And also I feel like maybe

(40:43):
he's like general generationally, maybe he's not as into the
kickstarter culture, but probably not, but I could see this
being a highly successful Kickstarter or they stellar Patreon account. Yeah,
you get to you get to listen to his ear
arm for an hour every day if you chip on
ten dollars a month. But it's it's an example of

(41:03):
how the project is a is commentary on where we
are with the technology, how interconnected we are, and what
are the you know, what are the limits of my
body as identity once we get all this technology involved.
So he's one of those those guys that just throughout
his career he has he has been kind of an avatar,
kind of a harbinger of trans humanism, exemplifying things that

(41:27):
are kind of scary and inhuman about what's possible, but
also highlighting where we are already. Yeah, so there's a
couple other bio artists that I want to cover before
we get into real like bio hackers. Stellarc is, you know,
essentially doing art with his body modification, but he's not
necessarily trying to take his body to like the next

(41:50):
level of human evolution. Uh. I guess you could say,
like the third arm might function that way, but but
having an ear on your arm isn't necessarily going to
give you that much of an advantage, right, He he
is an artist first and foremost. But there's this great
Ionine article on the topic, and so I just wanted
to cover a real quickly. A couple of these ones
that were listed in here. The first was Orlan, who

(42:12):
is a bioartist that uses cosmetic surgery to transform her
face into different forms with elements of famous paintings, So
that sounds interesting. There's Jennifer Genesis Briar p Oorridge, not Porridge.
This is a person who explores gender, occultism and sex work.
They did something called Project Pandrogeny with his wife, Lady

(42:36):
j where they tried to create an amalagam of their
two bodies together. They underwent breast implants and other physical
alterations to basically get closer to being the same being. Yeah,
she Lady Jay sadly died in two thousand seven, But
there's a very well received documentary came out in two
thousand and eleven called The Ballot of Genesis and Lady
j Um. If you want to know more about that project,

(43:00):
check that out. But Genesis po Orage in general is
a pretty important figure just in the history of industrial music.
If you're familiar with Robbing Gristle, Psyche tv um, just
a very influential artist. Okay. Eduardo cac was also listed there,
And this is a person who took the Book of Genesis,

(43:20):
translated it into Morris Code, and converted it into base
pairs of Genetics This sounds familiar because we talked about
showing that in one of our recent episodes, but not
with Genesis. It was a different book. Uh. Then they
implanted the genes into bacteria. He also created a green
fluorescent rabbit named Alba. Uh. And this is something we've
talked about on the show before too. If you take

(43:41):
the green fluorescent protein that's found in certain jellyfish and
you and plant it in other animals, it turns out
you can make them also biofluorescent. So we did that
to a rabbit. Natasha Vita Moore. Her best work is
Primo post Human, which shows a futuristic version of the
human form that is overcoming disease and aging. So kind

(44:01):
of more along those immortality lines of trans humanism. Uh.
She proposes, I don't believe that this is something that
was actually built. I think this is a sort of
sci fi proposal, an outer sheath of smart skin that
would be both It would have design and communication purposes.
It's also going to be engineered to self repair with nanobots,

(44:23):
both the epidermis and dermis, and it would tell the
brain the texture and tone of the surface required on it.
It would also alter your body's temperature, tell you the
percentage of toxins in your surrounding environment, and extract radiation
effects from the sun. Now this sounds like bio hacking
if it was real. Yes, though without knowing a lot

(44:45):
about the project, I have to say that a number
of the things that the second skin does the the
the actual skin already. So yeah, you're not getting any
superpowers from this one. Like it already self repairs, it
already absorbs energy from the sun. Um you know, it
already regulates my temperature. You get into problems when you
cover that up. But that's a separate tangent. Yep uh.

(45:07):
There's also Micah Cardinas. In two thousand and eight, she
performed Becoming the Dragon, which was a three hundred and
sixty five hour mixed reality performance that took place in
Second life. That's why it was in two thousand and eight,
because I don't think much people many people would watch
a performance in second life. In sixteen, she took the

(45:27):
form of a dragon in there and basically lived her
life as a dragon in second life, and that was
part of it. So that's a it's a little more
virtual than of what a lot of these other people
are doing and The last one listed here is Amy Mullins,
who is a paralympian athlete. She collaborated with a fashion
designer named Alexander McQueen project and yeah he's great. Yeah,

(45:48):
so he basically built her. She she her legs were
amputated when she was one year old. Uh so he
built out hand carved wooden prosthetics that had integral boots
connected to them and built those out for her to
pose in. So those are the art versions of this.
But then we've got a whole another group of trans

(46:09):
human pioneers, and these are the These are the bio
hackers that are really looking at ways to build things
into their bodies that give them more than human perception
would allow. So functional trans humanism over symbolic transhumanism exactly. Okay,
So let's start with probably one of the most infamous
bio hackers, known as Captain Cyborg. His real name is

(46:31):
Kevin Warwick. Warwick In launched the first phase of what
he called Project Cyborg, and he designed and r F
implant to perform basic tests like basically use a signal
to open remote controled doors or control lights in his home.
It's basically like it sounds like he had nest in

(46:52):
his arm right like, Uh, he could send commands to
computers with it. Surgeons inserted a glass capsule that contains
several microprocessors into his body. Phase two of this project, Cyborg,
began in two thousand and two. Warwick installed an array
of electrodes directly into his nervous system to monitor the

(47:14):
activity at his median nerve. As a result, he was
able to control a robotic arm with mental action alone.
He also implanted these in his his wife, Arena, and
he wanted to see if they could record their sensory
experiences together, including pain, pleasure, and sex. Uh. They didn't

(47:34):
reveal what the results of that were, but they could
correctly identify one another's nerve signals percent of the time.
So that's kind of interesting. Um, there's a lot of
interviews with this guy. He's all over the place. He's
a interesting figure. He's also pretty public about the work
that he's doing. And he said in a w magazine

(47:55):
interview that his primary interest was in this one so
he could come up with electric electronic procedures to combat
diseases like Parkinson's blindness, arthritis in schizophrenia. But too he
wanted to upgrade humans to be able to do pretty
much anything. Sounds like trans humanism to me. He's also
had some involvement in attempts to beat the Turing test.

(48:16):
You might remember this from a couple of years ago,
the infamous example where Eugene the computer program was basically
celebrated as having finally beaten the Touring test. If you're
unfamiliar with the Touring test, the idea is basically that
a computer program would be able to trick a human
into thinking they were talking to a human and not

(48:36):
a computer. So yeah, he was involved in that. Lately,
he's been talking about ways to increase the number of
neurons in the human brain because he thinks that our
brains are getting bored. Uh, and he wants to connect
brains and incubators to robots. He claims he's actually working
together with one of his students on a learning, living

(48:57):
brain that's connected to a robot body via bluetooth. So
that sounds fun. It sounds like uh. In Fallout, like
I was talking about earlier, there's these robots called robot brains,
and they're just these like kind of clunky, lunch box
looking robots. But there their CPU is a brain in
a job seeing. But now you don't have to have
the your brain in a jar on bot. Your your

(49:18):
RoboCop too can be empowered from the next ram. Yeah, exactly. UM.
There are others who have sort of sprung off of
Warwick's research. So, for instance, in two thousand four, there
was an experiment inspired by him to use electronic implants
to enable basic communication between two people's nervous systems. Brown

(49:40):
University also developed rechargeable neurotransmitters to communicate from human bodies
to external devices. They hope that this will allow humans
to communicate telepathically with multiple nervous systems. I can tell
you we're spoilers. We're gonna get into this later. That
has happened. Uh and and act Uh. It was a

(50:01):
team of international researchers who did this. They've built the
first human to human interface. And in front of us,
Robert and I have this and I suggest that you
go look it up. It was it's part of a
really good article on this that was on Extreme Tech
called the first human brain to brain interface has been created.
In the future, we will all be linked telepathically. UH.

(50:23):
And what we're looking at here is basically how it works. Um. So,
one researcher attached a brain computer interface to themselves and
they were in India and they were able to send
words into the brain of a researcher who was in France,
and that person was wearing a computer to brain interface.

(50:44):
So what we're talking about here is essentially telepathy. But
how does it work. It's not like you're hearing their
thoughts right, Basically, you're moving data. You're putting it into
someone else's brain. Uh. And the B c I uses
an electro and cephalogram. The c b I uses a
transcranial magnetic stimulation rig something that's very similar to the

(51:04):
transcranial magnetic stimulation that we've talked about on this show
and many other has to have worked shows before. It's
kind of an obsession around here. The idea of blasting
your brain with electricity to maybe get smarter kind of
works the same way the words getting coded into binary
they're transmitted and then translated back to the recipient's visual cortex.
They then see flashes of light uh, and it triggers

(51:28):
their body to produce phosphene that makes this light appear
to them. So basically, it's like Morris code, like this
flashing light that only your eyes see. So that's you know,
it sounds like, oh, well that's not that big of
a deal, but they're doing this from India to France.
It's kind of a big deal. Uh. It's basically brain
to brain Morse code essentially once they're translating it. Yeah,

(51:49):
and this is something that even in this this small example,
even in just the what's what's provable and doable today,
it it alters our perceptions of what it means to
be a singular human entity. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean
I think this is really where a lot of trans
humanists would like to see this go, right, is a uh,

(52:11):
it's using technology to be able to improve both our
senses but also our understandings of ourselves, uh, changing what
we mean by identity all that stuff. So certainly if
you're able to communicate with one another, even just through
Morris code without speaking, that would I would be a
step forward in that direction. Then we have a few

(52:35):
different versions of the eyeborg. Yeah. So the one I
read about was an artist named Neil Harbison, and he
went to the hospital and and basically said, hey, can
you help install this stuff in me. I'm color blind.
I want to be able to detect colors. So he
used this device called the eyeborg that translates colors into

(52:55):
vibrations in his skull that he can subsequently here. So
to me, sounds like trans human synastasia basically, yeah, taking
taking one form of sense day to transforming it into another,
enabling them to experience these colors through uh, through bone
conduction of sound waves. Yeah, but you have other eyeborg

(53:15):
applications here too. Well, yeah, there's there's one other main one,
and that's uh that has to do with this guy,
Rob Spence, Canadian film director, and he uh sustained permanent
damage to his right eye, and in two thousand nine
he hooked up with camera provider Omnivision as well as
a group of engineers, first ocularist Phil Bowen, then engineer

(53:38):
uh Coasta Grammatis, and then electrical engineer Martin Ling to
replace his prosthetic prosthetic eye with a functional digital video camera. Interesting,
I wonder if some of our guys here in our
video production team would be willing to do that, if
they're willing to give up an eye, and uh, they
have some talented individuals to because one of the problems
is then you have to try and fit everything in

(54:00):
to that eye ball um space. Yeah. Yeah, and it's
you know, it's it's fairly sounds like a cenobyte, Yeah,
one of those. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a task that
you have to you have to pull off without the
individual looking like a cinabyte. Yeah. Um, well, given and
harder with two thousand nine technology and technologies come along life. Yeah,

(54:21):
That's what I was gonna say, is like, given how
small the video cameras in our phones are nowadays, that's
that wouldn't be that hard. So he was able to
to do to do this, to replace his prosthetic eye
with a functional digital video camera uh, touted as quote
the world's first literal point of view, uh, including glancing
around and blinking. Wow. Yeah. And he's on Twitter, he's

(54:45):
uh you can follow his efforts here his ongoing efforts
with the with the ibor project. He's on Twitter as
Iyborg and his website is eyeborg project dot tv. Okay,
so I'm imagining he does like a lot of periscope events,
but on fortunately in his periscopes you can't see him.
You just see what he sees. Yeah. I mean, well,
there's something beautiful in the idea, right that you you

(55:07):
take this injury and then you turn it into something
that actually enables your passion, enables your career. Yeah, exactly,
And I think that that's a lot of what trans
humanists are looking to do, or bio hackers are looking
to do, you know, like especially like come up with
ways for the quote disabled to be able to operate
in almost uh enhanced fashion, right, Yeah, which brings us

(55:28):
to Jerry je Lava Uh, a finished software developer who
in two thousand nine lost half his index finger in
a motorcycle accident. So if he was working with the
with with doctors to get a prosthesis there, he did
what came natural, do you? Uh? You simply have a

(55:49):
USB drive there in the end of your your new
artificial finger, so you can just remove the cap from
the end of your finger and you have USB drives.
So he's got all of his data. I hope it's
a good USB drive though, like one of those ones
with a couple of gigs. It's not like one of
those cheap OH ones that have He's got like a
couple of MP three's in his finger. At the time

(56:10):
it was a two gigabyte storage drive. I can only
imagine being a software developer that he has he has
far more storage capacity now if he still has kept
with it, hopefully modifiable, and he can just keep putting
new ones in as the technology improves. Yeah, so then
you know, this is kind of neat. It's also kind
of it's it's kind of spy movief, the idea of

(56:35):
inserting your finger into a computer. Yeah. Yeah, And I
think also it's like the USB drive comes out because
because once you sort of break to break it down,
it's not very practical to just set there because he
only got one hand operate the mouse and the keyboard.
But I can only imagine it it played well at
parties and the bar trick like, hey, you want to

(56:56):
see my USB drive. Well, speaking of fingers and party tricks,
let's talk about subdermal magnetism. So this is what I
insinuated or implied at the beginning of the episode with
the idea of installing tiny magnets into your fingertips. Uh,
this is a thing that a lot of people have done.

(57:17):
The magnets are coated with materials I couldn't exactly figure
out what the materials were that they're coated with. But
this seems to be a common thing so that the
magnets aren't rejected by your body. And the hackers say
that this provides them with a sixth sense that allows
them to feel magnetic fields. It creates basically sensations in

(57:37):
their fingertips. Uh. And as I said at the top
of the episode, you can pick up paper clips and
bottle caps basically. Um. And I do find the paper
clip thing hilarious because such an outdated thing for trans
human is to be messing well. And one of the
guys was even saying that, like, I think his broke,
like the magnet itself like broke apart in his finger,

(57:59):
and then the mag pieces kind of came back together
again naturally over time, but the magnetism was weaker. He's like,
I can only pick up small paper clips now. I
used to be able to pick up large paper clips,
but no longer. But there is something else to this.
It's not just the paper clips. They're really interested in
the sensory stuff. But big warning right up front, do

(58:21):
not do this and then climb into an m r
I machine, because it will rip the magnets right out
of your fingers. Also, airport security is problematic. If you're
walking through airport security and you've got magnets built into
your figer fingers, it's going to mess things up. Yeah.
Trying to explain to the t s A. Agents that
you are a trans human um and you have magnets
and plant in your body, I can only imagine that's

(58:42):
just gonna lead to more delays. Absolutely, So I pulled
up a couple of different articles on this that we're interesting.
Gizmotos really covered it in depth. They actually had a
piece by Dan Berg on Gizmoto where he shared his
experience of having one of these implanted into his pinky finger.
He was initially wary after seeing the early prototypes and

(59:03):
what they did when they broke down and corroded inside
somebody's finger. He goes through the procedure pretty clearly, he says,
and this is a direct quote from him. My finger
was marked in two places where the magnet was going
to go, as well as the incision spot around a
quarter to a half an inch away from the final
resting spot for the magnet. His body modifier then made

(59:24):
the incision with a scalpel, used a tissue elevator to
separate that tissue, slid the magnet into place, and sealed
the incision with surgical glue. Next, a bit of tissue
compression went on. They wrapped his finger up and he
was on his way. He said it took fifteen to
twenty minutes total. However, it took him months before his

(59:44):
finger regained full sensation. But he was noticing vibrations from
magnetic fields, primarily in cash registers, microwaves, and laptop fans.
He also noticed that when he handled other magnets, the
magnet in his finger would flip uncomfortably. He said. It
wasn't painful, but it was uncomfortable. Uh. He said this

(01:00:05):
especially happened with the speakers and his iPad because those
are magnetized. Uh. Over the years, he noted too, that
the magnet in his finger has lost strength. Huh. You
gotta have a certain amount of confidence in what you're
doing too. Yeah, I I definitely think so. I can't
imagine doing this myself. Um, it sounds intriguing the idea

(01:00:27):
of having the sort of magnetic sense, but I don't
know that I would want to go through the process. Uh.
Then Ionine and Gizmodo. They also talked with Eric Boyd
who's at hack Lab in Toronto, which is one of
these bio hacking sort of community centers, and he says,
you know, he clarifies, this is more about sensory augmentation.
It's not about the party tricks of pick picking up
paper clips. It's useful for people, especially who work with

(01:00:50):
electronics because they can feel the difference between live and
dead wires. He mentions a group called Grindhouse wet Wear
that I'm going to come back to later. Uh, there
were working on a device called bottle nose that fits
over your finger if you've got one of these magnetic implants,
and it augments the experience further. It could, for instance,
since infrared, it can also transmit information through vibrations, or

(01:01:14):
it could be used to measure distances as a ranging device.
It's supposedly safest if you're going to get the magnetic
implementation to do so on your ring finger, on your
non dominant hand, because it is quote your least useful finger.
So apparently, like if you have to choose, like if
you're in like a game throne situation and somebody's gonna

(01:01:35):
cut off one of your fingers. If you have to choose,
the ring finger on your least dominant hand is the
best one to go because it has the least to
do with gripping action. Interesting. So, but you also have
to be careful that this is not placed between uh,
your touch surface and the bone, because if you're like

(01:01:55):
in an emergency situation where like, let's say you fell
off of something, you have to grip it really hard, right,
it would crush the magnet, So it's usually embedded on
the inside corner of the finger. Also note that the
body artists who performed this, they're not allowed to use
anesthesia because they don't have licensing for that. So it's
real painful. Uh. And the basically all they can do

(01:02:19):
is put your hand in ice water to numb it.
It takes some say less than ten minutes, and damn
earlier said fifteen to twenty. So we're talking to some
real cowboy trans humanism here, Like you put a stick
between your teeth and staring into the campfire bite not
a bullet, yea yeah. And they use standard neodymium magnets

(01:02:39):
for this. Uh. What you need to do though, there's
the whole biocoding thing and that's you know, as we've
talked about with background organs and organ transplants and all
that stuff, your body rejects foreign material, so you need
this biocoding to help it keep that from happening. You
definitely don't want this to fail and you don't want
the magnet to shatter, otherwise you're gonna end up with

(01:02:59):
head V metals exposed to the inside of your body.
One other thing to note, the magnets are too small
to wipe out at hard drive, so don't worry about
that if you're planning on getting this done. Yeah, that
would be because that would be especially problematic. Give finger
on this hand, as the usped of a divide finger
on this hand is a powerful magnet, and you do,

(01:03:20):
like the small wonder thing or sorry not small wonder
out of this world. You touch the two fingers together
and you raise all the information off your USB drive. UH.
The other reason why people are doing this in their
fingertips is because it's one of the areas in our
bodies where we have the highest nerve density. UH. The
movement of the magnet there in response to e M fields. Basically,

(01:03:41):
it stimulates the somati sensory receptors in your fingertip. These
are the same ones that are responsible for us to
perceive pressure, temperature, and pain. Now grindhouse wetwear that I
mentioned earlier. They've also inserted something called Circadia into one
of their members. It's a biosensor that accumulates weeks of
body to amperature data and sends it to a smartphone

(01:04:02):
via Bluetooth data. The idea is basically that eventually we'll
have something like this that will give us biometric data,
like quantify what's going on in our real time evaluation
of what our body is doing. That is a very
useful trans humanist daema. Yeah, it's sort of like a
fitbit in your body, but with more application. So many
of the problems that arise with our health you don't

(01:04:25):
have like real time knowledge of, but you find out
months down the line, maybe years down the line, far
past to the point of easy intervention. So the biometric
possibilities of trans humanism I think are some of the
most exciting and most most useful. Yeah, it makes me
think back to like it's very easy to sort of
dismiss this stuff and just be like, oh, whatever, this

(01:04:47):
is like this crazy subculture. But like again, like think
about like the transdermal how transdermal implants ended up becoming
useful for chemotherapy. Right, so there are are some applications
here that are going to, you know, spring out of
this that I think we're gonna start seeing in medicine
in the future. All Right. That brings us to who

(01:05:09):
left anonym who I started off the episode quoting, Uh.
She is a Berlin based Scottish d I Y bio
hacker uh. And there is an interview with her and
Wired magazine that just gave me kind of an overview
that I want to present to you all. She does
most of her work in her own apartment, sterilizing her
equipment with vodka. This definitely sounds like a Saska Sisters

(01:05:32):
style bio hack. It hurts a lot, she says, and
she's also passed out before while she's been doing this. Uh.
It's the kind of d I Y body hacking that
is referred to as grinding when you're just and this
is not to be confused with grinder, the social media
application for dating. This is grinding, as in like you're

(01:05:53):
in your kitchen with a scalpel and uh some something
to separate the flesh out, so you and put devices
into your body on your own. She does all her
own surgeries with a scalpel. She does have a spot
or there with her in case she passes out. She
once tried to implant a temperature sensor transdermally that would
show varying brightness under her skin to indicate what the

(01:06:17):
temperature was. But this was a total disaster. She didn't
buy a proof it right away, so she ended up
in the hospital, and she's ended up in the hospital
several times because of bad implement implementations. Her implants have
actually rusted under her skin, and her surgeries have turned septic.
She did the whole magnets in the fingers thing too,

(01:06:39):
except she didn't want to go through the effort of
paying a body artist to do it. She thought that
was too expensive. So what she did was she coded
the magnets in suguru, which is like a silicon putty,
is my understanding. Or sometimes she just uses hot gun glue.
She said something to the effect of like, you wouldn't
believe how many things I've put in my body that
are covered in gun glue. Uh, And she inserted the

(01:07:04):
magnets into all of her fingertips, and she said, well,
that only costs twenty pounds, so she got the magnets.
I mean, I don't know if she's like ordering these
on eBay or Amazon or whatever. She just gets the magnets,
some hot gun glue and a knife and vodka and
just did it herself. Now, I imagine a number of
people are thinking right now, this sounds an awful lot
like mental illness. And maybe. But but I do want

(01:07:27):
to remind everyone of the old adage, if I'm repeating
it correctly here, that the pioneers are often massacred and
it's settlers that profit. So we're definitely talking about pioneers here.
Oftentimes pioneers don't have the best outcome. These are the
individuals that are trying new things, going into new places,

(01:07:49):
and it's gonna be the people that come after them.
They're gonna have the easier time of it and maybe
actually benefit um in a larger sense from the from
the advancements. Yeah, this is true and left anonym I mean,
I can tell you she gives a lot of lectures
about this stuff, so she's treated seriously. A lot of
people invite her to come and speak about her experiences
and how they've gone. But you know, uh, this is

(01:08:11):
the more brutal side of bio hacking for sure. At
the time that the article was written, which was in
two thousand and ten, she was talking about installing a
compass chip and a power coil and her left knee
so she could sense magnetic north. And I mentioned earlier
the device that you would wear. It was a wearable
that would do the same thing. She wanted it in
her body. Okay, here's uh so that's that's an individual.

(01:08:34):
But we got another. Um, this is a really good one. Uh.
And it and it comes from another sort of collective.
It's mainly two guys. They called themselves Science for the Masses.
And you may have heard of this story as it
was making around. This is the kind of thing that
comes across Robert and my desk on a Monday morning,
and we wonder do we write about this this week
or is this is this bogus? And it turned out

(01:08:55):
it wasn't bogus. Uh. They created night vision eye drops uh,
and they described themselves as an independent bio hacking collective.
In their experiment experiment, they used the chemical chlorine E six,
which is a relative of chlorophyll. It's been used to
try to treat cancer, and it occurs naturally in deep

(01:09:16):
sea fish to enhance the light receptors in their eyes.
In cancer treatment, it's used in combination with energy from
low powered light sources to destroy cancerous cells by inducing apoptosis,
which we've talked about on the show before as such,
if you're gonna put this stuff in your eyes, you
really want to stay away from bright or ambient daylight

(01:09:38):
because it could harm your eyes cells and cause permanent damage.
Their idea came from the work of a guy named
Ilias Washington who's at Columbia University, and he wanted to
test this chlorophyll derivative to make proteins in our eyes
respond to red light instead of green light. He tested
it on mice. What he didn't tell other people was

(01:09:58):
he also tested it on him self and he didn't
report the results. Uh. They were inspired by this. They
were also inspired by an experiment that was a patent
that was filed by Totada our Shanta is a Georgian
doctor who lost his license for medical fraud. Dr Nick, Yes,
it does sound like him, doesn't it. Um. What they

(01:10:21):
did was, they said, well, like many bio hackers. Well,
we can't get you know, actual academic approval for this,
so we're intested in ourselves. So Gabriel A. Chinia, I
believe is how it's pronounced. He was the subject and
his co conspirator Jeffrey Tibbitts was the one who applied it.
They put fifty micro leaders of the C six, together
with sailing and insulin, into his eyes with a drip.

(01:10:43):
Within an hour, it interacted with the photo receptors in
his eyes. He could distinguish images and symbols beyond fifty
meters in the darkness. He was also able to identify
people up to fifty meters away in the dark. The
effect did wear off after some time, however, uh and
I should also mention like he had to wear these

(01:11:05):
sort of eerie looking demonic black contact lenses over his
eyes while he was doing this, So when you see
pictures of this, you'll see a guy with just completely
black eyes. That's not because of the stuff they put
in his eyes. Is because of the lenses he was
wearing for protection. The idea of the insulin being in there, well,
that was to allow absorption of the chemical CE six

(01:11:26):
into his eye. They also used a chemical called d
M s OH to increase the permeability of the cellular membrane,
basically to allow the free passage of the chemicals into
his eye. Uh. There is a high risk of cellular
toxicity here though, especially if you're gonna the d M
s O. It allows that chemical into your eye, but
it also allows outside contaminants that could be absorbed with

(01:11:48):
the chemical, so it should be totally handled with caution.
This is this is not uh, don't do this at home. Yeah,
this is some pretty heavy biohacking here. This is incredible,
and especially because that stuff can all so be absorbed
through your skin. From their site, uh itself, from Science
for the Masses site, they have a review on the
whole experiment and this is what they said. First of all,

(01:12:09):
I want to just say it's really cool. The research
that they did is all under the Creative Commons license,
so anybody can go look it up and they can
see exactly what they did and follow their notes. Uh.
They provide a disclaimer right at the top, and they
say increased light amplification may have adverse effects on the
cellular structure of the eye. So some materials in this

(01:12:31):
mixture should not be used on animals or humans, and
that there had been previous research in the patent I
mentioned earlier that claimed the mixture would absorb to the
retina increased vision in low light. So basically, here's how
they did it. They pinned open his eyes like clockwork
orange style with a speculum and had a micropipette to

(01:12:52):
slowly add the solution to his conjunctival sac Then they
placed the black Sclero lens as I mentioned earlier, into
each eye. Then on top of that, they gave him sunglasses.
All this was to reduce the potential light that was
entering his eye because they didn't want this stuff to
start destroying the cells in his eyeball. His eyesight returned

(01:13:12):
normal by morning. Twenty days later they checked him out.
There were no noticeable effects. Okay, so he's okay for
future research. What they want to do is they want
to take a gans filled stimulator and an electro electro
tinograph to measure how much electrical stimulation the eyes actually
receiving during this kind of experiment. They want basically quantifiable

(01:13:35):
numbers so that they can measure the ranges of vision
that are being amplified. So this, I mean, this is
this is bio hacking to the extreme. Right. They're giving
us superpowers. You're giving what indungeons and dragons would be
called low light vision, uh to a human being and
then having to wear the the the black contact lens

(01:13:56):
is the sunglasses, essentially wearing sunglasses at night to keep
track of the vision. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Uh. These
guys have since like broken up their collective. Licinia has
worked in a handful of molecular biology labs tibots as
a registered nurse. These guys are professor professionals. Other bio
hacking groups have tried this experiment as well, but no

(01:14:16):
one has the money for testing it on a large scale.
This is one of the things that people don't talk
about with bio hacking is that because it's not through
a big institution like a company or a university, there's
no money at hand, especially for the proper legal ramifications
that might come if you run clinical trials on people
as volunteers. Uh. And look, the National Institute of Health

(01:14:39):
is not likely to fund somebody who's just going to
drop chemicals into a humans eyeball for night vision, right, Um,
but what about other people who might fund this, so
they said, uh, these are the guys who perform the experiment.
They actually said military contractors got in touch with them afterward,
and we're interested in it. They also said a voting
magazine contracted them and said that could have applications for

(01:15:01):
sailors who were working at night and instead of having
to put on like heavy goggles or machinery or whatever
so they could see at night, they could use this
night vision stuff. And if you happen to have a
very spacious basement with a pit in it, you know,
it's just a no brainer, perfect way to test it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
as long as there's lotion in the pit as well.

(01:15:23):
Um Lacinia when he was interviewed by Gizmoto, he said,
let's be fair here, it's kind of crap science. So
he's not, you know, fooled in anything like thinking that
they've made some big headway, other than you know, they
basically took what an academic wrote down in a paper
and just did it in their garage. It sounds like um.

(01:15:45):
They also wanted to clarify for the media they didn't
inject this stuff into his eye. They used eye droppers
to put it in his eye. So there's some problems
here as well too, right, Like, so the biohacking thing
kind of gets around the I guess pure you nature
of academic papers in that, Like there's no way to
really follow up on this, right, Like what if he

(01:16:06):
already had better than average night vision, or what if
it was a placebo effect that was taking place and
they didn't have a control group in place to sort
of measure it against you, Like, if I go to
these to these extremes to improve my night vision, I'm
gonna kind of want my night vision to be improved,
and that's gonna potentially have an effect on my perception

(01:16:27):
exactly right. All right, One more totally crazy one. Have
you heard of aquaman crystals? Who I have? Not a
synti street drug? Yeah, man, everybody's doing it. No. Aquaman
crystals came out of a study at the University of
Southern Denmark. They discovered a crystalline substance. This is actually

(01:16:47):
one that's not really bio hacking. It happened at an university.
They discovered a crystalline substance that absorbs and stores huge
amounts of oxygen. Now these are synthetic, but they're derived
from cobalt to lifeen oxygen from both air and water,
and they might let people breathe underwater. It hasn't been
tested yet, but it could also help people who need

(01:17:10):
like an oxygen tank, for instance, if they have lung ailments.
So you should have a small Yeah, I do remember
when this research came out. I I'm not mistaken. This
is the one to where the other sensational spin on
it was that you could suck all the oxygen out
of a room with a bingo that actually comes up
right in the next notes Motherboard cover it, and they said,
if you use ten liters of this stuff, which is

(01:17:31):
called crystalline cobalt salt, it can draw twenty one of
the air out of a room like instantly. Uh. It
binds basically to individual oxygen molecules and it works like
artificial hemoglobin. So the idea here is that it would
be able to operate indefinitely. UH. The oxygen would bind
to the iron in your blood, it would also bind

(01:17:52):
to the metal cobalt that are in the crystals and
then just sort of replenish itself. Um. And according to them,
they say a few grains contain enough oxygen for one
breath and since it continually resupplies itself, a diver needing
oxygen would only need a few of these grains. So
this is like something out of the ABYSS, right. I
think in the Abyss they use liquid oxygen, but sort

(01:18:14):
of like you would inhale a couple of these grains
and then you can just breathe underwater indefinitely. Yeah, just
the micro micronization of existing technology. Yeah, exactly, So another
potential medical application there. All right, So we've talked about
sort of the trans humanist dreams, we've talked about some
of these biohecking realities. We've talked about the the Harbingers, uh,

(01:18:38):
and the Pioneers. You're probably wondering, well, how do we
know when we get there? How do we know who
we've actually achieved trans humanism? I mean, needless to say,
if we if we reach the point where we have
these like really crazy out there sci fi incarnations of
human existence, yeah, we're trans human at that point. But
but what actually has to take place? Yeah? I mean

(01:18:59):
Google glasses and trans humanism right now, you can't check
it off the list just because you have some Google Yeah. Well, uh,
as with everything trans human it's kind of in the
eye or the bionic eye of the beholder. But bio
ethicist Kyle mckinrick weighed in on this in two thousand
eleven and Discover magazine piece that he did, and he
was basically expanding some previous comments where people would ask him, well,

(01:19:23):
how are we going to know? What are the what
are the qualifications for transhumanist evolution? This is a great article,
by the way, I really liked his tones, right, he
had some funny bits in there. So these are his
seven qualifiers. First of all, prosthetics are are preferred. This
is the basic idea that you're going to get to
the point where not only is a prosthetic limb as

(01:19:46):
good as the limb you're replacing, not only is a
synthetic organ of that grown organ or an artificial organ
as good as the original, but it's actually an improvement. Obviously,
we're a bit far away from that being a reality. Yeah,
but but I'm just thinking, like man, like every week,
I feel like stories just pop in more and more
and more about prosthetic limb enhancements and b c I

(01:20:09):
s being used to control prosthetic limbs. Yeah, and they're
if you're selective in how you judge it. Certainly we
have examples of say, you know, runners with artificial legs
that are able to perform to you know, a high level. Uh. So,
depending on how you look at it, Yes, prosthetic limbs
are getting you know, crazy good at at replicator or

(01:20:29):
sometimes even exceeding normal perform performance. But across the board
when it comes to performance, uh, you know, the sensory
realm uh, there's still a lot of room for improvement.
So we can't check that one off just yet. The
next one better brains. This is the idea that beyond coffee,
beyond taking whatever brain enhancement drugs are available, this would

(01:20:51):
be the use of of of neural implants, of cybernetic
enhancements to upgrade the human mind. And it would have
to be a situation where we wouldn't worry about brain doping.
This would just be the natural thing to do with
the available technology. And this is why so many people
get excited about a transcranial direct stimulation that I mentioned earlier,

(01:21:13):
that the possibility of that being the avenue for this. Yeah.
So we're seeing some promising developments here, but we're still
not quite there. Right Next, artificial assistance this would be
ubiquitous use of AI and augmented reality in our daily life.
I have to say, I feel like we're very close
in this one, because I'm constantly having to drive places

(01:21:33):
where I put my my phone up there I use
Ways or another map based program, and it's thinking for me,
and it's displaying a version of reality that I'm depending
on to get somewhere in real life. Oh yeah, totally
same for me. Like I have gotten horrible, especially since
moving to the city of Atlanta at like learning my

(01:21:56):
way around the city on my own because I rely
on Google Maps or whatever to tell me how to
get there. Uh maybe if I do it like repeatedly
over and over again, it sort of works out that way.
But if it's a location that I've never been to before,
I don't retain that information because why why would I? Yeah,
it's it's the natural part of our our cognitive economy

(01:22:17):
is that is that if you can outsource something to
another person or another thing another source, your brain does
it because it has a tight ship to maintain. So
think about Ways and which I think Google bought Ways
and incorporated into Google Maps to it also tells you
information about traffic patterns that you wouldn't be able to
experience through your regular senses. You wouldn't be able to

(01:22:38):
see that far down the road to know that there's
a roadblock, So you have sort of superhuman information in
a matter of speaking. Ways in these other programs, are
are are getting us close to checking off this artificial
assistance uh um qualifier, but also playing into the better
brain idea because we are you know, augmenting our our

(01:22:59):
neural ability, are cognitive abilities via this external device and
its properties. Absolutely. The next one, number four on this
list is amazing average age, longer life from everyone, with
a roughly hundred and twenty year average lifespan for humans.
So we have a long ways to go in this one,
but when you start breaking down uh death mortality into

(01:23:26):
smaller winnable battles, it does seem more and more likely
we could get to that point. Uh. The next one
is responsible reproduction. So this one is very interesting and
gets into some of that the potentially problem problematic um.
You know, Western rich people telling developing nations not to
have babies, so sort of this uh the borderline ethics

(01:23:49):
of like is this like eugenics talking about superior humans
versus inferiors. So in this scenario, mccentrick is saying that
we would we need to all start treating human reproduction
and or parenting as an act to be undertaken by
choice and uh and responsibly, rather than as a mere
biological occurrence. Uh. The obvious benefits here are, you know,

(01:24:12):
global population woes, swelling of orphanages, many a troubled home life. Um.
Because I mean, seriously, what what sort of selfish moron
is going to thank him or herself futuristic and evolved
with the robot eyes if they're still blind to social
horrors that arguably stem from all these overpopulation woes and

(01:24:35):
unwanted birth. So that's like sort of taking the bio
hacking thing to like the larger scale, like um population hacking. Yeah. Really,
And if you think of human the human population is
kind of the meta organism. It's saying, not only am
I gonna let's let's not only take control of the

(01:24:55):
individual organism, let's take control of the meta organism, its form,
it's function, and let's streamline it as well. But then
how do you get into that scenario without getting into eugenics,
without getting into imperialist um, you know, dog Yeah, absolutely,
it's it sounds very like a dangerous road to go down.
But it also reminds me. I see this on Facebook

(01:25:16):
all the time. Uh. I have friends who don't have kids,
and they'll say something along the lines of, you know,
you have to have a license to drive a car,
you should probably have to have a license to have
a kid. Um, And this is basically that, right. Yeah,
So there's plenty of plenty of room for argument and
hurt feelings and strong emotions on this one. And speaking

(01:25:37):
of which number six, um Munkinstrick refers to as my body,
my choice. So obviously you need to own your body
in order to augment it. That means voluntary self surgery,
ownership of what your body does and how it's defined.
And this is really getting into the regulation aspect of
like whether or not the government's going to get involved. Yeah,

(01:25:57):
because think about, you know, to any degrees in different countries,
how much control the and the government already has over
your body and what say you have already concerning your body.
So this gets into everything from sexuality to reproduction to abortion,
physical augmentation. Um. Some of the limits than the natural

(01:26:18):
progression of this too is going to go down to
the vaccination route. Yeah, indeed, I mean that's that's another
another um, you know, face of this problem. Um. I
mean on the surgery side, we see this a lot too.
We see individuals who want something dramatic but they can't
go to just a normal surgeon to get it done.
Um and no anesthesia. Right. It reminds me a lot

(01:26:42):
of the work of plastic surgeon Joe Um Rosen, who
have brought up on here before. This guy is a
huge advocate of like let people be what they want
to be through plastic surgery. Plastic surgery allows to change
the body and therefore change the sof you want to
be a tiger, right, Like the isn't that one of them?
The Tigerman is like the big body modifier. I think

(01:27:03):
he might have passed away actually, but you know what
I'm talking about, right, Like he like modified, so he
had fangs and cat eyes and kind of um stripes
on his skin. Yeah. One of the examples that Rosen
always brings up is why is it okay for someone
to walk in and say I want bigger breaths and
they can make that happen. But if you say you
want blue nipples, that's too far for some reason, you

(01:27:24):
know why, So we have to That's that's another hurdle
to really embracing this trans human um notion. And then finally,
the seventh caveat on Kyle mcintrick's list is person not people.
So this is the idea that we're gonna have to
depend more on concepts of personhood rather than mere human rights.

(01:27:46):
So we're talking grill as, dolphins, robots, computer aies, because
if we're gonna step beyond and outside of the traditional
human experience, we need to, you know, have rights and stuff.
We new humans need to be people to even if
they have thumb drives and wings. This is what that
Eclipse Phase game is all about. And so I think

(01:28:07):
it's I think it's a really interesting, like it's interesting
is a game, but it's also just like an interesting
like site to go to and kind of read through
what they're working on there for their fictional reality, just
because like it's addressing questions like this and saying like, well, okay,
if we uh, if we take a gorilla or a
dolphin and we give it uh an enhanced intelligence and

(01:28:29):
then we upload it into a human body, does it
have rights? Interesting? Wow, that's now I'm just trying to
imagine that the dolphin human gorilla hybrid body. Oh yeah,
there's all kinds of weird ways to go with it.
But I mean some of it's science fiction. But as
we revealed here today, I mean we're on our way

(01:28:52):
towards this stuff. Yeah, I mean, like all great science fiction,
science fiction, echoes, the the the are contemporary fears, hopes, uh,
and dreams concerning our current technology are current science. All right,
So that about wraps it up. But I want to
know from you guys out there, talk to us right

(01:29:14):
into us. Let us know, would you do some of
these things? Would you put magnets in your fingertips? Or
would you drop night vision goo into your eyeballs? Uh?
You know? Or would you like a hook up some
sensors to your body so you could feel your wife's
sensation of pleasure and pain? Are those things that you
would be interested in? And also, here's the thing that

(01:29:36):
I want to know, what did we miss? Because there
is this whole bio hacker community out there that like
we barely scratched the surface of, and I'm sure there's
lots of cool stuff going on out there that if
you're a bio hacker and you're out there listening, You're like, oh,
these guys they don't know a bunch of squares. They
completely missed all this cool stuff. But let us know

(01:29:57):
right into us, tell us what you just finished under
your forearm or your yeah yeah. So what are the
ways to do that? Well, you can start with social media.
We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, we're
on Instagram. On all of those we are blow the Mind.
You can also visit us at our mothership stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you're gonna find

(01:30:19):
all of our podcasts, all of our videos, the articles
and galleries and lists and all that stuff that we
put together. And then there's the final place, the final frontier,
where you can write to us. And what's that, Robert,
that's right. You can always send us an email at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Well

(01:30:46):
more on this and thousands of other topics How stuff
Works dot com. Little bit first

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Biohacking and the Road to Transhumanism