0:03

Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from

0:05

house stop works dot com.

0:15

Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert

0:17

Lamb and I am Christian Seger. Hey,

0:19

Robert, I got a question for you. Let's

0:22

say you want to pick up a paper clip, but

0:24

it's just it's giving you a really hard time. You know how sometimes

0:26

paper clips it's difficult to get

0:28

your fingers around them and pick them up off of the surface

0:31

they're on. What is paper

0:34

What a paper clips? You know,

0:36

the little metal, metal

0:39

bendy things. Yes.

0:42

So, so now let me ask you this.

0:44

You're having a hard time picking up this paper clip. Would

0:47

you cut your finger open, put

0:49

a magnet in there, suitre it back

0:51

up to make it easier to pick up

0:54

that paper clip? Probably not, because that that

0:56

does not sound like I'm making the process any easier.

0:58

Yeah, but it is kind of in human nature,

1:01

the same way that we we try and vacuum

1:03

up something, and if the vacuum cleaner is

1:05

not picking it up, we will pick the object up, look

1:07

at it, and then place it back on the carpet and then give

1:10

it another go with the vacuum. Right. Yeah,

1:12

technology must succeed. It is

1:14

kind of like that. Yeah, so, uh,

1:17

that's what we're talking about today at its very

1:19

basic form. We're gonna be talking

1:21

about bio hacking in

1:23

the present on the road to transhumanism.

1:26

Will explain what all that means. That might have just been a bunch

1:28

of gibberish to you just now if you're unfamiliar

1:31

with these movements, But that's a real thing. People

1:33

are really implanting magnets

1:36

in their fingers, uh, and

1:38

they pick up paper clips and bottle caps with them.

1:40

But that's not really just why they're doing it. We'll

1:42

we'll talk about more about that later. Yeah,

1:44

we're gonna we're gonna look at some individuals

1:46

who are either in some cases pioneers

1:49

of trans humanism, innovators who are

1:52

going out there hacking their

1:54

bodies U upgrading

1:56

their bodies with technology, as

1:58

well as individuals for kind of harbingers

2:01

or even profits of trans humanism who

2:03

were who were engaging in these

2:05

acts, uh, to sort

2:07

of comment on where we are and where we can go

2:09

with our technology. And along the way, we're also going

2:12

to define what trans humanism is,

2:14

discuss some of the different approaches

2:16

to trans humanism, the different uh,

2:19

philosophies and mindsets that

2:21

that entail it, as well as us

2:24

a general proposed checklist

2:26

for how we might know when we

2:28

have become trans human as

2:31

a society exactly. Yeah, And

2:33

so you know, I think a lot of you out there.

2:36

Again, like if you haven't heard of this before, you've

2:38

probably got some pop culture touchstones,

2:40

and I'm sure Robert and I are going to be referring back

2:42

to throughout the episode. But like, for me,

2:45

the first one I think of is American

2:48

Mary, the horror movie which

2:51

you've seen right by the SOSCA

2:53

sisters, in which you know there's

2:55

a lot of body modification going on, but

2:57

the body modification is sort of leading

2:59

to ard something more than

3:01

human. Right. Also, I

3:04

mentioned this, uh in our Summer

3:06

Reading episode. The graphic novel Junction True

3:09

is about stuff like this. Warren

3:11

ellis a lot of his comics and prose

3:14

work is based on this stuff like Black

3:16

Summer, dr Sleepless Desolation

3:18

Jones, and especially trans

3:21

Metropolitan are about uh, sort

3:23

of moving towards a trans humanist future

3:25

and what the ethical I guess conflicts

3:28

and repercussions of that would be. And then

3:30

for me, there's this game

3:32

it's a role playing game called The Clips Phase,

3:35

and I have been in love with it since

3:37

I first read the book of it, and

3:39

I actually played it one time with Joe McCormick,

3:41

our host. Yeah. Uh, and basically

3:44

the ideas you build your sort of trans humanist

3:47

character that exists in a far

3:49

future along the lines

3:51

of the philosophies

3:53

that we're going to present today. Yeah,

3:56

well, yeah, this is of course, so this idea of just upgrading

3:59

the body with grenetic parts. You do see

4:01

this in a number of different role

4:03

playing scenarios. There's all

4:05

video games where you're kind if you need to upgrade

4:07

your character, well, get a chip for this, which exactly.

4:10

Yeah. Yeah, like Fallout. I play Fallout

4:12

a lot, and there's plenty of bio

4:15

hacking that goes on in that, and BioShock

4:19

is essentially a bio hacking game. But

4:23

those are science fiction. Today,

4:25

we're gonna really try to focus in on

4:28

the reality of this stuff. What's actually

4:31

going on, how close are we to doing this,

4:33

what are the current benefits of it?

4:36

Yeah, the science fiction examples

4:38

are our key two because those serve, as

4:41

you know, it's kind of avatars of what is possible.

4:43

Yeah, and Uh. And in any

4:46

of these ideas we discussed here today, they're not They're

4:48

not too far removed from the sci fi

4:50

visions that at least partially inspire

4:52

them. Yeah, I agree. Uh. And I want

4:54

to kick things off with a quote that I found

4:56

during the research, which is from

4:59

a pretty well known own bio hacker who goes by

5:01

the name anonym Uh.

5:03

And she says, bodily health

5:05

takes a big f off second

5:08

seat to curiosity when she's

5:10

referring to her own bio

5:12

hacking. We're gonna talk a lot more about

5:14

her own biohacking, but this is the kind of

5:16

philosophical ethos we're talking about

5:18

here. Very d I y approach,

5:21

and they're less worried about their health and

5:23

more about sort of the innovation, the

5:26

curiosity. Yeah, claiming

5:29

their body saying this is this is my form,

5:31

and if I want to augment it, if I want to upgrade

5:33

it, that is what I'm going to do. Health

5:36

come second. Yep. So Okay,

5:39

you're out there saying I don't know what you guys are talking

5:41

about at all. What is trans

5:43

humanism? Well, the basic premises

5:45

something like this, right, we can improve

5:48

being humans through

5:51

technology and science, and

5:53

we're basically taking evolution into our

5:55

own hands. Now, those of you've listened

5:57

to our episode on the philosophy

5:59

of cyborg ism, Uh, this

6:01

is gonna sound familiar, right if there they

6:04

touch on each other. There's a nice big ven diagram

6:06

of trans humanism and cyborgs. Yeah,

6:09

I mean a lot of it touches into this area to

6:11

where you know, essentially human

6:13

evolution has has has

6:15

long been altered or

6:17

even stunted by our culture,

6:20

by by just the way that we live as individuals.

6:23

Now natural selection doesn't quite

6:25

work the same way anymore. So this

6:27

is the idea that the next phase of human

6:29

evolution is one of

6:32

largely self guided technological

6:34

scientific achievement. Now

6:37

it is. We'll discuss exactly

6:39

how that breaks down. Varies greatly, and

6:41

it runs the gamut from like fully

6:44

semi androids, cybernetic

6:47

futuristic beings, uh

6:49

you know that are essential essentially like technological

6:52

angelic beings too, more

6:55

sort of near future

6:57

but sometimes lofty ideas about

7:00

just simply making society better,

7:02

making our world better, kind of going after that Star

7:04

Trek s Gene Roddenberry

7:07

inspired uh utopia

7:09

ideal. Yeah, And this is you know,

7:11

what. This is a good point where I want to throw out a plug for

7:13

you, which is that you

7:16

last week published a piece on how stuff Works

7:18

Now that was an experiment in

7:20

looking at a trans human cyborg

7:23

future, uh, specifically along

7:25

the lines of space travel, as we discussed in

7:27

our Cyborg episode, and it was called

7:29

Silba Dreams of Earth and it

7:32

was basically it was a great short story

7:34

about a trans

7:37

human or a post human I guess on

7:39

Jupiter, thinking about what

7:41

life was like on Earth. Oh yeah, well, thank

7:43

you. That one was a lot of fun to put together and definitely

7:46

uh I spun that off of ideas that

7:48

we discussed here on the podcast. Well,

7:50

I think if anybody who's listened to those

7:52

episodes or this episode and you like that stuff,

7:55

go check that out. Go look for Roberts

7:58

piece which the Silva Dreams of is the title

8:00

of the short story. What's the title of the article? That's

8:03

it's a question about what the

8:05

our trans human future like. I'll

8:07

make sure that we link to it on the landing page

8:09

for this Episodeah, you should, because it's great and

8:11

it's really connected to what we're doing here. Yeah.

8:13

The thought experiment thing is pretty interesting.

8:16

Um, Former co host Julie

8:18

Douglas also did one, and and

8:20

you've been invited to so I have. Yeah,

8:22

I haven't thought up of one yet. I think Julius

8:24

was something about like, what would life be like if we were

8:27

crawling all the time? Yeah, if we were still sort

8:29

of like quadrupeds. Yeah.

8:31

Yeah. So it's an interesting had some cool illustration,

8:34

So hopefully we'll see more and more of these

8:36

from members of the house. Stuff works. Yeah, I'm

8:38

gonna try to take a stab at it one of these days.

8:41

Uh. The thing about trans humanism, though, that I

8:43

want to go back to, this isn't exactly

8:46

new, right. For a long time,

8:48

people have sought out ways to change

8:51

their bodies, in particular extending

8:53

the human life. Right. We've talked about

8:56

this before with our episodes

8:58

on Egyptian burials or

9:00

just the practices. And they're trans

9:03

humanists though they're not just interested in

9:05

being immortal, that's part of

9:07

it. But what about

9:09

things like, for instance, adding technology

9:12

to your body so you have different senses, or

9:15

maybe learning how to be telepathic by

9:17

having science and technology connect you

9:19

to another human being. That's the kind

9:21

of stuff we're gonna be talking about today. Now

9:23

there's three categories, according to our House

9:25

Stuff Works article on trans humanism.

9:28

I think we're gonna see a little bit more than this today,

9:30

though, but help me out. There's the longevity

9:33

one, which we primarily see

9:35

nowadays through cryonics, the idea of

9:37

you know, freezing your body basically,

9:39

uh so after you die, so in a

9:41

far future where there's uh,

9:44

you know, technology that would be able to cure

9:46

whatever you've got, Well, I would say that's

9:48

that's one version. That's

9:50

certainly a lot of the word going into

9:52

this, Particularly the work of Aubrey de Gray,

9:55

revolves around this idea of that the death

9:58

is something we can we can get or come

10:00

to, right. We just have to take We have to take

10:02

death divided up into the various

10:05

uh approachable problems,

10:08

and then tackle each of those problems individually

10:11

in order to defeat

10:14

death. Sounds a little lofty, but at least prolonged

10:16

human life to where the average individual

10:18

will live at least a century. Yeah.

10:21

The second category is becoming

10:24

a what they call super well

10:26

being, and that's basically guaranteeing

10:29

that you have the best traits so that you feel

10:31

the best possible way that you can and you can

10:33

exist in the best way that you can within your

10:35

environment. This is an area where and arguably

10:39

there's a lot of scientific

10:42

arrogance here, because the idea here

10:44

is, hey, if you let science and technology

10:46

take care of it, we got your well being, you're

10:48

gonna be happy as if.

10:51

And I don't

10:53

want to totally discount that argument, but you really

10:55

get into this this clash between

10:58

science and every other discipline out there that

11:00

has some approach to human well being

11:02

in human happiness, be its spiritual

11:05

or philosophical or well,

11:09

that's gonna that's gonna go beyond sciences

11:11

team, right, so yeah, right, yeah,

11:14

uh. And then the third one would be super

11:16

intelligence, which I didn't find too many

11:18

examples of in the uh

11:21

the sort of practical examples that we're

11:23

encountering nowadays. But the idea here

11:25

is essentially, either through genetics

11:27

or technology, augmenting our brain so

11:30

we're smarter or have a capacity

11:32

for more memory. Right. Yeah, Well, I mean I would say

11:34

we're we're already seeing like

11:36

a soft shade of that in

11:39

terms of our just constant

11:42

use of cloud based devices

11:45

and constant wireless connection. Like

11:47

it's it's not a direct augmentation

11:49

of the brain, but we're we're

11:52

making sure that we're we're almost

11:54

painfully attached to the infinite

11:57

knowledge. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Right, Like when

11:59

we're watching a TV show and you're like, hmmm,

12:01

I don't know who that actor is, what other things has

12:03

he been in? Just whip out your phone. Right,

12:06

less than five minutes you figured it out. Yeah,

12:08

not knowing is no longer acceptable.

12:10

Ye used to. There was a day when you're when you were like,

12:12

Hey, I wonder who that that character actor is? He

12:15

just didn't know you

12:17

you you could maybe go research it tomorrow,

12:19

but right now, just or you talk to other human

12:21

beings about it. Hey, who's that guy that's

12:24

on that Pete Holmes has a really good bit about

12:26

this. Uh, we're basically like

12:28

we've we're losing like our social connections

12:30

because phones. Yeah, yeah, he does have a great

12:32

bit on this. I've heard I've heard that bit.

12:35

Um. But so a lot of

12:37

people equate transhumanism

12:39

with the singularity, right that eventually

12:42

it's going to lead to the singularity. And but what we

12:45

what we mean by that is the point where artificial

12:47

intelligence surpasses the abilities

12:50

of biological intelligence. Now, I

12:52

would say the research that we did

12:54

today it's not going to take us too far down that

12:56

path. That's another episode for another time.

12:58

Yeah. That that that this singularity is

13:00

definitely a transition point and into an entirely

13:03

different mode of existing. So

13:05

let's talk about, uh,

13:08

what there's different types of trans

13:10

humanism. Let's let's sort of just like upfront,

13:13

established the philosophies. And

13:16

you found a great piece from Omni

13:18

magazine in a twenty sixteen article

13:21

called trans Humanism Sexual Identity.

13:23

Let's start there. Yeah, this puts a

13:25

cool little article and towards the end of it, they

13:27

did a great job of just laying out some of these different

13:30

approaches to it um, which which

13:32

serves as a nice sort of starting point for exploring

13:34

some of them, and and just you know, briefly

13:37

explaining the other ones. Um. First

13:39

up, democratic trans humanism.

13:41

This is trans humanism for the people, for the

13:43

species, the idea that only

13:45

when you can you apply this to everyone at every

13:47

socio and socioeconomic level,

13:50

will we really be able to evolve or elevate

13:52

the human race. And

13:54

uh, and I find this one interesting because on

13:56

one level, it's the most reasonable incarnation

13:59

on the list. It's the Bernie Sanders

14:02

trans humanist movement. Yeah, yeah, because

14:04

like you can't. How can we say that we've evolve

14:06

the human species if we're ultimately talking about

14:08

just one class. Yeah, exactly.

14:10

And that's where this thing often goes, right,

14:12

is like, well, is only the are

14:15

the one percent going to be the only ones who can afford

14:17

this kind of trans human

14:20

operation, whereas like bio hacking

14:22

is primarily about just like d I Y

14:25

do it in your garage, your kitchen or whatever and

14:27

literally cut yourself up and jam stuff

14:29

into your body. Yeah. So yeah,

14:32

this is the idea that you can't you leave

14:34

no humans behind if we're going to evolve as a species,

14:36

We're gonna involve as a species. But

14:38

it also there's a little bit of Western

14:41

arrogance to it as well. And I heard

14:43

Terry Gross on NPR Fresh Air

14:46

interview Donald g McNeil

14:48

Jr. Author of Zeka The Emerging

14:51

Epidemic, and he

14:53

discussed, you know, the various countermeat

14:55

measures of delaying sexual reproduction

14:57

in Zeka danger zones as to have

15:00

avoid the threat to newborns. Yeah. Right,

15:02

it's a big topic of conversation right now. Yeah.

15:04

But but as he pointed out, this sort of effort

15:07

in developing nations often comes across as

15:09

white people a world away telling Africans

15:11

or Asians not to have babies,

15:14

and they even they even avoid some of

15:16

the loaded language by referring

15:18

to it as spacing out births

15:20

rather than talking about birth control.

15:23

Yeah. I think I don't know if we've talked about

15:25

this on the show, or maybe we just talked about it in the office

15:28

one time. But the idea that because of the ZA

15:30

epidemic and ideas of spacing out

15:32

births like this, that there will be like

15:35

huge gaps in classes

15:38

in various schools down

15:40

the road in the future because, for instance,

15:42

like a year or two will have gone by where

15:45

no babies or less babies were

15:47

born, right, Um,

15:49

and what kind of impact does that have on a

15:51

society going forward? Yeah?

15:53

Indeed, um. But but then

15:55

certainly that the transhumanist angle here is,

15:58

you know, do you end up go walking

16:00

into all these places around the world and saying, hey, everybody,

16:03

this is what it means to be human. Now you need to upgrade

16:07

fingers. Yeah, so it's you're kind

16:09

of danny if you do dander. If you don't, right, if you leave

16:11

everybody behind, that's bad. But if

16:13

you if you offer it to everybody

16:16

in a little too insistent about it. Then that's a that's

16:18

also a little less shady. Okay,

16:22

the next version, we have a libertarian

16:24

trans humanism, and this is trans

16:27

human for every Humanism for everybody,

16:29

but without government getting involved.

16:32

And this, for all intents and purposes, seems

16:34

to be the style of trans humanism represented

16:36

by the United States trans Humanist Party,

16:39

who currently has a US

16:42

presidential hopeful in the form

16:44

of of Zoltan. Yeah,

16:47

and in fact, Zoltan wrote

16:50

me on Twitter last night to let me

16:52

know that he was willing to help us out with this episode.

16:54

Unfortunately I received it too late

16:56

into the research game, but maybe in a future episode

16:59

we can consult with Zultan. I didn't

17:01

know what it was at first because I just

17:03

randomly tweeted something about, oh, I'm researching

17:06

bio hacking and trans humanism and I gotta

17:08

ping, like midnight last

17:10

night or something, and it was from him or

17:12

whoever is running his account. It was basically like,

17:14

if you've got any questions, come to me. Yeah.

17:17

It's uh. It should

17:19

come as no surprise to anyone out there. This election

17:22

cycle has a lot of there's a lot of noise and

17:24

it's easy for some of the other

17:27

candidates to become lost in that noise. Yeah,

17:29

but I think it would be interesting, uh you know, potentially

17:32

in a future scenario for the show

17:34

where we might have Zultan on or we might talk

17:36

to him and get some of his input on stuff

17:38

like this. Yeah, because a lot of these movements, to one

17:40

of the like the really cool things about them is that they're

17:43

they're very pro science, they're

17:45

very pro technology, and that you

17:47

know what what whatever the other

17:50

lofty ideas involved there are,

17:52

there is a definite pro science agenda. And

17:55

similar to the libertarian trans humanism,

17:57

there's also an arco

17:59

trans minism. This is like the

18:01

stronger anti capitalist, anti state

18:04

trans humanist movement. Uh. These individuals

18:06

believe that in the wake of these

18:08

advances that we're unleashing,

18:10

society is going to find a democratic form

18:13

without the need of government or massive corporations.

18:16

This is like almost exactly how that game

18:18

Eclipse phase breaks down. There's

18:20

like different factions that you can be a part of.

18:23

Everybody's trans human in it, but almost all

18:25

of the factions line up with these factions

18:27

we're talking about here right now. Like there's

18:29

an anarcho one. There's a corporate

18:32

one. There's uh one

18:34

that's we have extropianism down here,

18:36

there's an extropianism faction. Yeah,

18:38

so it's basically like within the game, you

18:41

have to choose what your character is. Sort of philosophy

18:43

about being trans human and modifying

18:45

their body is are there is there are there

18:47

any groups that just have no part of

18:49

trans humanism at all? Uh No,

18:52

you're I don't think that there's a way

18:54

for you in the game to just have a like

18:56

straight up human body, because the whole

18:58

idea is that, um, we've

19:01

gotten past the singularity in the game,

19:03

and you can upload your mind into

19:05

any kind of body and then modify

19:07

that body. In fact, like some of the characters are

19:09

uplifted animals in human

19:12

bodies or vice versa, human

19:14

minds uplifted into animal

19:16

bodies, Like you can be like an octopus

19:18

with like cybernetic augmentations,

19:20

but you're human mind. That reminds

19:23

me a lot of Banks. If there's

19:25

an engine, I think it's heavily

19:27

inspired by his work. Yeah, you should

19:29

totally check this out. It's right up your alley. The

19:31

religious question, though, um came up

19:34

because it reminded me in um

19:36

Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon series.

19:39

His world involves that just an

19:42

extreme use of this re sleeving

19:44

of human consciousness. That's exactly

19:46

what they call it in the game sleeving.

19:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I I can't recommend

19:50

this game enough. I mean, it's really smartly done. It's

19:52

I mean, if you're out there and you're like, I don't

19:54

care about game like role playing games, and that's

19:57

cool, but I haven't even other than that one

19:59

time with Joe played it. But just reading

20:01

the book is fascinating because it presents

20:03

all this stuff we're talking about here and then sort

20:05

of like science fiction visions

20:09

for where we could go down the road with trans humanism.

20:11

Interesting. Yeah, Now Morgan,

20:13

in his world, certain religious groups,

20:16

such as I think specifically there's a branch of Catholics,

20:19

do not engage in this trans humanist

20:21

re sleeving. Okay, so they're all in their

20:23

original but they're all in their original bodies, and they're just

20:26

kind of set apart from sort of you

20:28

know, almost like normal humans,

20:30

and that all these strange new

20:32

approaches to humanity. There's some kind

20:34

of thing in the game's world in

20:37

which there was like an apocalyptic event on

20:39

Earth that prevents you from

20:41

basically being born with a regular old human

20:44

body. Um, I think because

20:46

a I got out of control and it was like a terminator

20:49

type skyp. Yeah. Well, speaking

20:51

of religion and trans humanism, there are religious

20:54

trans humanists. Essentially, these are non

20:56

atheistic trans humanists to see trans

20:59

humanist ideas it's fully compatible with their

21:01

religious views. Two interesting

21:03

examples. One in particular, since we've been we've

21:05

recently spoke about about

21:08

Mormons space. There

21:11

is a Mormon trans Humanist Association

21:13

fascinating and it is quote the world's

21:16

largest advocacy network for ethical

21:18

use of technology and religion to expand

21:20

human abilities. There. I would

21:23

never have thought that, but that's fascinating. Yeah,

21:25

there's I was really hope to ask. I have a I

21:27

have a friend, UM whose Mormon and lives

21:29

out in Utah and is really kind of progressive

21:32

in his Mormon views. I'll have to ask him if he's familiar

21:35

with this. Yeah, I kind of want to check in with a

21:37

couple of my old Mormon

21:39

friends who I know. They're both UM, both

21:42

definitely into science, both science

21:44

UM advocates, but UM,

21:47

this particular Mormon take on trans

21:49

humanism it also entails

21:51

something they call transfigurism uh

21:55

and this is This is from their website. Transfigurism

21:57

is religious trans humanism ex amplified

22:00

by synchronization of

22:03

Mormonism and trans humanism. The

22:05

term transfigurism denotes advocacy

22:07

for change in form and alludes

22:09

to sacred stories from many religious

22:11

traditions. Uh. And they

22:13

refer to uh uh, the Universal

22:15

Form of Christiana and Hinduism, the

22:18

Radiant Face of Moses and Judaism,

22:20

and several other incarnations and other faiths.

22:23

So I found that one interesting. There's also this Christian

22:26

trans Humanist Association and

22:28

they have a number of tenants

22:30

here that are interesting. Include the idea that God's

22:33

mission involves the transformation and renewal

22:36

of crenate creation, um,

22:38

growth and progress along every dimension

22:40

of humanity. Uh, science and

22:42

technology as a tangible expression

22:45

of of the God given impulse to

22:47

explore and discover. Yeah, well

22:50

that's interesting because that is something that comes

22:52

up over and over again, regardless of whether

22:54

it's connected to religion or not. But that's

22:56

that's really what's given as like the ethical

22:58

motivation for a lot of bio hacking. Yeah,

23:01

so I wanted to touch on those because you see far

23:03

more of the of the

23:05

secular body hacking and a secular

23:08

trans humanism, so it's interesting to look at a religious

23:10

spin on it. Yeah, I can't imagine. One of

23:12

the things I was thinking about, like while we were doing

23:14

this research was sitting down

23:17

at my grandmother's house at the kitchen table

23:19

and just like having a conversation with some coffee

23:22

and being like, hey, did you know grant

23:24

me that there's people who cut their fingers

23:27

open and her magnuts in there, and just

23:29

having her My grandmother's reaction would

23:31

just be like oh my, you know. But

23:33

but like trying to explain to her and then

23:35

adding into it because you know she's a practicing

23:38

Christian, well there's a Christian element to

23:40

this too, and explaining that to her as

23:42

well. It would be a weird conversation

23:44

for sure, But I might try to have it someday. Well

23:48

I'm gonna try and blow through some of these other

23:50

ones just to give everyone a basic idea

23:52

here. But essentially you have you have hedonistic

23:55

trans humanists to just want to figure

23:57

out how to eliminate the pain and folk

24:00

is on the good stuff. You have survivalist

24:02

transhumanists that are that are hyper

24:04

focused on the idea of longevity. And

24:06

then there are singularitarianists and

24:09

their ideas that technological singularities

24:11

coming. The machines are gonna outpace this. Let's

24:13

get ready, it's inevitable. Yeah, all we can do is prepare

24:15

ourselves and try and steer the course. Cosmism

24:20

is on here too, and that's actually something that I've

24:23

been thinking about proposing that we do for

24:25

a future episode. I

24:27

know that there was some kind of cosmism

24:29

that was working its way around Russian science

24:32

thought earlier in the century

24:34

that might be fun to explore. Yeah, this there's

24:37

that. This is a slightly different

24:39

thing that arises from the work

24:42

of AI researcher Hugo did

24:44

Garis, and he's

24:46

a very interesting dude and of himself.

24:49

I mean, he's retired now, but he predicted

24:51

a war against machines that were resulting

24:54

numerous mega deaths, like essentially matrix

24:57

kind of world. Okay, Yeah, So he has this,

25:00

he has this whole philosophy uh

25:03

laying out and it involves this idea

25:06

that um that you're gonna have the cosmists

25:08

and you're gonna have the terrans who oppose

25:11

uh, you know, upgrading humans

25:13

and becoming this this trans human force

25:15

and essentially the trans humanists are

25:17

going to have to leave the planet and the others are gonna have

25:19

to stay. Um people a little

25:21

more complicated than that, but that's sort of the basics.

25:24

Well, that sounds like something that might be worth

25:26

revisiting in the future. And if anybody out there

25:28

knows more about that too, because I found when

25:30

just doing kind of basic research on it, it wasn't

25:33

widely available. Um,

25:35

let us know, stuff to blow your mind at

25:37

how stuff works? Sorry, uh,

25:40

blow the mind at how stuff works dot com?

25:43

Uh, and let us know if you've got some opinions on that. Yeah.

25:45

So those are some of the basic philosophies floating

25:48

around in the heads of individuals who start

25:50

down this trans humanist path and

25:52

get into this body modification,

25:55

bio hacking realm.

25:57

So this all brings up a question that I

25:59

want opposed. Maybe it's not one that we answer

26:02

now. It might just be a rhetorical question or's

26:04

something to think about as we go through the rest of the episode.

26:06

With all these types of trans humanism,

26:09

regardless of its religious or philosophical

26:11

or whatever, is it ethical

26:14

and so. And the

26:16

reason why I ask is because there are some people

26:19

who compare trans humanism

26:22

to eugenics as being

26:24

some kind of division between

26:26

superior and inferior

26:29

versions of humanity, where one person

26:31

is superior to another. And I guess

26:33

that's something that we should consider as we're going

26:35

forward. Um,

26:37

and and especially in the case of like you

26:39

know, like we're saying, like, if there's like a I

26:42

guess, like a capitalist faction of trans humanists

26:45

and only the rich have access to

26:49

biomodifications that prolong

26:51

their life, is that ethical? I

26:54

think there's a strong argument that it's not. I mean,

26:56

you can already look at at

26:58

the highest level of medical

27:01

care is essentially a

27:03

transhumanist endeavor, and

27:05

it is not available to everyone. So

27:08

it's kind of uh, it wasn't that sort of the

27:10

premise behind Elysium, that movie,

27:13

the Neil blom Camp movie. Oh yeah, yeah, with

27:15

the rich people in Orbit and everyone else

27:17

is on Earth. Yeah, and like they didn't always

27:19

have access. The people on Earth did always have access

27:21

to like the medical benefits that they had. What

27:24

was there, Like there's like some kind of machine that you could just

27:26

climb in and wold like cure cancer or something. Yeah,

27:28

and that's what I think the whole plot was based on. There was

27:30

an interesting film, a bit a bit heavy handed.

27:32

Yeah, and it also kind of like went off

27:34

the rails a little bit, but I kind of like it. I know most

27:36

people were upset by it after blomb

27:38

Camp's work on District nine, but I thought it was okay. Yeah,

27:41

I think he He even admits though that he

27:44

he would have he wished he could have

27:46

had more time writing it than he

27:48

wasn't able to get the script exactly where he wanted

27:50

it, but it's still a wonderful world. I'd

27:52

love to see him potentially revisited even

27:54

Yeah, yeah, that would be interesting. So

27:56

we're getting into body modification

27:59

bio acting, and I do want to just

28:01

just briefly mentioned that when you look at

28:03

ways that we have we have always

28:06

altered the human form, you can sort of

28:08

look at three basic areas.

28:10

They're sort of symbolic um

28:13

body modification figuring in terms of,

28:15

you know, stuff that's even superficial, like altering

28:17

one's hair, altering one's nails, and

28:19

then getting into the you know,

28:21

tattoos and other things that are more permanent

28:24

but still you're not altering um the

28:27

form too much. Then

28:29

you have things that are certainly altering the form

28:31

more, and then things that are actually altering the

28:33

functionality of the human body. And

28:36

that's where we we really see some of

28:38

the more interesting examples of

28:40

modern body modification with the trans

28:42

humanist spent. Yeah. So, like examples of

28:44

altering the form would be like subdermal

28:46

or transdermal implants, which we

28:49

have a really great article on how stuff works

28:51

about in our team put together this fascinating

28:54

infographic on how the whole like surgical

28:57

process works. But again,

28:59

that's not sort of evolving you into

29:01

another stage of humanity's enhancing

29:04

you. Yeah, but like even even wearing

29:06

clothes is a is a body modification

29:09

and an enhancement of who

29:11

you are. You are your physical manifestation.

29:14

But it's certainly it's not necessarily changing

29:17

the form or changing the function. And what we're

29:19

basically going to be talking about here for

29:21

the rest of the episode is bio

29:24

hacking. Uh. And it's called

29:26

that for a reason because it's the d I

29:28

Y version. You get out your own tools

29:31

and upgrade your body yourself. Bio

29:33

hackers ask why should we wait for the

29:35

industry or for the government to catch up to

29:37

our way of thinking. Let's democratize

29:40

science and do this to ourselves.

29:42

Right, And we're already seeing versions

29:44

of this, from everything to people

29:46

wearing smart watches and other wearable

29:49

devices to the really

29:51

extreme stuff that we're gonna talk about today.

29:54

The inspiration, as with many

29:56

of the philosophies that Robert just mentioned,

29:58

is basically to create and discover. It's

30:00

that human urge to continuously

30:03

innovate. And we're gonna talk about people

30:05

like Kevin Warwick and left anonem

30:07

that I mentioned earlier. These are

30:10

well known bio hackers, but there are also

30:12

community labs that work on this stuff

30:14

too. They're basically either doing

30:16

this in their kitchen or in some kind

30:18

of body parlor. Uh, and they're working

30:21

together as a community to share their information

30:23

and their resources. Some are

30:25

building wearables that they hope that they'll eventually

30:28

implant. Right. So, for instance, like, there's

30:30

a hat out there that electrically stimulates

30:32

the prefrontal cortex that you can wear.

30:34

But what if you took that the step further and

30:36

you were able to install that into your head.

30:39

Uh. There's an anklet that vibrates

30:41

in the direction of due north. And

30:44

I know from the research that anonem

30:46

is actually one of the people who's talking about actually

30:49

building that and putting it in her knee so

30:52

that her knee will be able to tell her

30:54

where due north is would be helpful if you get

30:56

lost a lot, I would assume, yeah,

30:59

uh, other dabblings that we're not going to go into

31:01

full depth here on our for instance,

31:04

modifying mouth bacteria so that it

31:06

eats plaque and instead recalcifies

31:09

our gums, or inserting organisms

31:11

into our water that detect arsenic

31:14

or bacteria that you eat

31:16

that kill tumor cells. Okay,

31:19

so these are all things that are on the table. Yeah.

31:21

I mean when you get into the synthetic biology realm,

31:24

which I think we touched on some of these previous did Yeah,

31:26

that's entirely different sphere

31:29

of trans humanist body improvement.

31:32

It takes place at the smallest level, and it's all

31:34

possible because the tools are getting

31:36

cheaper and more accessible. Think

31:38

of it like this. Instead of having a local

31:40

bike coop where you all get together

31:43

and you work on your bicycles together and make

31:45

sure that you know share resources,

31:47

these folks are having a

31:49

local biohacker coop where they're sharing

31:51

resources and information on how to do this

31:53

stuff safely. Uh, and what

31:55

they're getting out of it, and and we're

31:58

gonna we're gonna dive into all of But

32:00

remember this is also sidestepping

32:03

academia in a big way. It's getting

32:05

rid of the stuffy methodology for a

32:07

faster but also riskier application.

32:10

There are there's dangers here

32:12

when you when you're just like cutting yourself open and shoving

32:14

stuff in your body. Yeah, I mean this is self experimentation

32:17

and and mad science if it is

32:19

yeah, uh and and I'm going to just

32:22

throw this out there, especially

32:24

going back to the idea of the government getting

32:26

involved. I'd say we're one major

32:29

accident away from

32:31

this getting a lot of attention from the media

32:34

and the government getting involved and regulating

32:37

what you can do with your body in terms of technology

32:39

or certainly you're one new story

32:42

about this is what the kids are doing

32:44

exactly? Yeah, oh yeah, always

32:46

think of the children. If if if kids

32:49

start doing this, then there's gonna be a lot

32:51

of scrutiny on it. Then what happens

32:53

does it go underground? I mean it's already

32:55

a subculture, but like does it become like an

32:57

illegal underground where people are modifying

33:00

our bodies secretly. I don't know, but

33:02

we'll have to keep an eye out for it. Yeah.

33:05

And by the way, I want to add this too, because

33:07

of the efforts of body modifiers, transdermal

33:10

implants now have impacts on

33:12

our medicine. Uh. There

33:15

are examples where you can use them

33:17

to create chemotherapy ports

33:19

that run directly into your veins while

33:22

you're getting cancer treatment. Uh. There's

33:24

also transdermal

33:26

implants that are anchored directly into bone

33:29

for prosthetic limbs. And some scientists

33:31

are even looking into animal horns

33:33

as natural transdermals that can

33:36

be inserted and they won't be rejected

33:38

by the body because of infection. And that's

33:40

something we're gonna talk about a lot

33:43

more when we get into the specifics

33:45

here. Yes, stell Arc this is

33:47

this is the guy that I've been fascinated with for for

33:50

years, and certainly he's been he's been around

33:52

for quite a while. He was born in forty

33:54

six and had his name legally

33:57

changed to Stollac in nine two. He

33:59

is a performance artist and Australian

34:02

performance artist and you have

34:05

probably seen images

34:07

of one project or another of his over

34:09

the years, because they often are

34:11

extreme enough to capture mainstream

34:13

media. I mean, I did

34:16

not know his name, but I knew about the ear Thing,

34:18

and I think, well, go

34:21

on ahead. I think he's had some influence on our pop culture

34:23

too. Yeah, he uh, I mean, the guy

34:26

is essentially feels like he stepped

34:28

out of William Gibson novel

34:31

because if you if you see an

34:33

interview with him and hear him talk about his work, he is

34:35

a like a very thick Australian accent

34:38

that it feels like it would be more in keeping

34:41

with just almost like a backwoodsie

34:43

like down to earth kind of guy, especially

34:47

now as an older, older man. He might

34:50

seem just like it was just an older Australian

34:52

dude. And I think didn't didn't Motherboard do like

34:54

a documentary on him or something like that? Pervice.

34:57

Yeah, so if you really want to see him in action, you can

34:59

probab watch that. Yeah. Yeah, he's and

35:02

uh he comes off pretty uh pretty

35:04

down to earth even in one off

35:06

in one of these interviews, he's also hooked up to a large

35:08

mechanical spider body because

35:11

he's also been and he's long been

35:13

involved with some pretty extreme stuff.

35:15

Between between seventy six and eighty

35:18

eight, he completed twenty five different

35:20

hook body Suspicion performances.

35:23

So now that seems to be kind of like the

35:25

groundwork of his body modification

35:27

slash performance art world.

35:30

Yeah, and this is the one that I think, uh,

35:33

I have to imagine that the people who made

35:35

that movie The Cell, the character of

35:37

Vincent Dinofrio must have been inspired

35:39

by a stell Arc in some way, because

35:41

I don't know if you remember, but he was hanging

35:44

from hooks a lot in that movie. That was like

35:46

part of Oh yeah, I forgot about that aspect

35:48

of that. That movie is pretty loaded with stimuli.

35:52

Yeah. Um so, so

35:54

from here he engaged on a whole string of

35:56

projects that involved it

35:58

basically came back to his is his thesis,

36:01

right, yeah, which is essentially,

36:03

we're progressively extending ourselves into our

36:06

environment through technological artifacts.

36:08

Sounds like trans humanism to me. Uh

36:10

So his argument is that we're making ourselves both

36:12

cyborgs and zombies by doing

36:14

this. Yeah. So, so many of these projects

36:16

they're they're not necessarily about Hey,

36:18

I'm doing this thing with my body and technology

36:21

that's useful but it's more about

36:23

a comment on what we are already doing

36:25

and what we will be doing. So just

36:28

to run through some of his projects here, he did

36:31

the third arm project. This was a grasping

36:33

and risk rotating mechanism with the rudimentary

36:36

sense of touch that was attached to

36:39

him and activated by e MG

36:41

from other body areas. He

36:44

uh, he had, he has this, He had his stomach sculpture

36:47

and this one I read almost killed him.

36:49

Yeah, there were this is certainly he's all

36:51

about getting into that area where health comes second

36:53

to the art, to the technology.

36:56

But this was the thing that was into scopic went

36:58

down his throat into gopic cameras.

37:01

It would open up like a like a metallic

37:04

flower and then there would be a light

37:06

and a lot of this was you know, conceptual. You

37:09

know that the stomach is a dark, lightless

37:11

place that with this technology

37:13

there's light and movement in there where

37:15

otherwise there would not be um

37:18

And yeah, fortunately it did not kill him. There

37:22

was an exoskeleton project

37:24

that he did and this involved like these this

37:27

large array of pneumatic

37:29

spider like legs,

37:32

this big walking machine that

37:34

that he kind of sat in the middle of and

37:37

allowed him to control the machine through arm juicers.

37:39

He essentially looked like a like a spider man villain

37:42

and yeah, very dark, thinking

37:44

of those what are the dn D monsters

37:46

dried? Yeah, yeah, that did look a lot like

37:49

centaurs with spider bodies. Yeah.

37:52

He also did a few different performances fractal flesh,

37:54

pink body, and parasite and these explored

37:57

involuntary and remote uh

37:59

internet choreography for the body

38:01

with electrical stimulator stimulation of the

38:04

muscle, so essentially outsourcing his movements

38:06

to direct control via the Internet.

38:09

Um. He did a project with his partner

38:12

Nina Sellers where they took essentially

38:15

they took different biomaterials

38:17

such as um, subcutaneous

38:20

fat, peripheral nerves extracted

38:22

from both of their bodies, put them in

38:24

this uh, this slurry and this pressurized

38:27

tank and then it just kind of gets um blended

38:31

up periodically. Yeah.

38:33

Um. And then what do they do with it afterwards?

38:36

Oh? You just you just kind of look at it. Okay.

38:38

I thought I was thinking it would be like Ghostbusters too,

38:41

where they like put it into like those uh squirt

38:43

guns maybe squirted on ghosts.

38:46

Now, I think this one was more about like like

38:48

bodily identity, and I would happened to be taken

38:51

like this mass is still human if

38:53

it's just this Yeah, yeah, this

38:55

is this one was probably one of the more grotesque

38:58

creations, but it depends, like us,

39:00

where you stand on his most famous

39:02

work the third year. So

39:04

this and we touched on this a little bit in

39:06

a previous episode. But this involved

39:09

taking a bio compatible scaffolding

39:12

surgically inserting it into his left

39:14

forearm. And this happened in two thousand six, creating

39:17

the shape of an ear, and

39:20

then over the in the years to

39:22

follow, additional surgeries

39:24

after they found the surgeons willing to do it, uh

39:27

to to form this out even more.

39:30

And I don't think they still need to add an earlobe

39:32

to it. Yeah, and I think we should clarify

39:34

here. He has just added the shape of an

39:36

ear to his arm. And the way that we described

39:39

va grown organs as being sort of framed

39:42

by scaffolds, this is not a functional ear

39:44

on his arm. No, it's it's not his actual

39:47

ear, but but creating the form of the ear

39:49

on the arm. And then the big plan is

39:51

to have a microphone in there that is

39:54

connected to the Internet, so that allows

39:57

the ear to hear, so that you might be able to

39:59

say, go to his webs sight and then listen

40:02

through his artificial

40:04

ear. It has not

40:06

come to fruition just yet. There was a previous

40:08

attempt to install the microphone

40:11

and there was an infection and they kind of had to

40:13

scrap that. But my understanding

40:15

is that he's currently moving towards

40:18

getting a second attempt and this time

40:20

hopefully it will stick. He

40:23

needs to kickstart that. I don't know if

40:25

Australia. Yeah, surely he

40:27

gets a lot of he gets a lot of funding.

40:29

Where is he getting the funding from, like like like

40:32

a private equity or is

40:34

it like from grants or something different?

40:36

Grants Like he's he's been the artist in residents

40:39

at various universities um

40:41

so. And also I feel like maybe he's

40:44

like general generationally, maybe he's not as into

40:46

the kickstarter culture, but probably not, but I

40:48

could see this being a highly successful

40:51

Kickstarter or

40:53

they stellar Patreon account. Yeah,

40:55

you get to you get to listen to his

40:58

ear arm for an hour every day if

41:00

you chip on ten dollars a month. But

41:02

it's it's an example of how the project is

41:05

a is commentary on where

41:07

we are with the technology, how interconnected

41:09

we are, and what are the you know, what

41:11

are the limits of my body

41:14

as identity once we get all this

41:16

technology involved. So he's one

41:18

of those those guys that just throughout his career

41:21

he has he has been kind of an avatar,

41:23

kind of a harbinger of trans humanism,

41:26

exemplifying things that are kind of scary

41:28

and inhuman about what's possible, but

41:30

also highlighting where we are already.

41:33

Yeah, so there's a couple other

41:35

bio artists that I want to cover before we

41:37

get into real like bio

41:40

hackers. Stellarc is,

41:42

you know, essentially doing art with

41:44

his body modification, but he's

41:47

not necessarily trying to take his body to

41:49

like the next level of human evolution.

41:52

Uh. I guess you could

41:54

say, like the third arm might function that way,

41:56

but but having an ear on your arm isn't

41:58

necessarily going to give you that much of an advantage,

42:01

right, He he is an artist first and

42:03

foremost. But there's this great Ionine article

42:06

on the topic, and so I just wanted to cover a real

42:08

quickly. A couple of these ones that were listed

42:10

in here. The first was Orlan, who

42:12

is a bioartist that uses cosmetic

42:14

surgery to transform her face into different

42:17

forms with elements of famous

42:20

paintings, So that sounds interesting.

42:22

There's Jennifer Genesis Briar

42:25

p Oorridge, not Porridge. This

42:28

is a person who explores gender, occultism

42:30

and sex work. They did something called

42:32

Project Pandrogeny with

42:35

his wife, Lady j where they tried

42:37

to create an amalagam of their two

42:39

bodies together. They underwent breast

42:41

implants and other physical alterations

42:43

to basically get closer to being the same

42:45

being. Yeah, she Lady Jay sadly

42:48

died in two thousand seven, But there's

42:50

a very well received documentary came

42:53

out in two thousand and eleven called The Ballot of Genesis

42:55

and Lady j Um. If you want

42:57

to know more about that project,

43:00

check that out. But Genesis po Orage

43:03

in general is a pretty important

43:05

figure just in the history of industrial music.

43:08

If you're familiar with Robbing Gristle, Psyche tv

43:11

um, just a very influential

43:13

artist. Okay. Eduardo

43:16

cac was also listed there, And this is a person

43:18

who took the Book of Genesis, translated

43:21

it into Morris Code, and converted it into

43:23

base pairs of Genetics This sounds familiar

43:25

because we talked about showing that in one of our

43:27

recent episodes, but not with Genesis. It was a different

43:30

book. Uh. Then they implanted

43:32

the genes into bacteria. He also

43:34

created a green fluorescent rabbit named

43:37

Alba. Uh. And this is something we've talked

43:39

about on the show before too. If you take the green

43:41

fluorescent protein that's found in certain jellyfish

43:44

and you and plant it in other animals, it

43:46

turns out you can make them also biofluorescent.

43:50

So we did that to a rabbit. Natasha

43:52

Vita Moore. Her best work

43:54

is Primo post Human, which

43:56

shows a futuristic version of the human form

43:59

that is overcoming disease and aging. So

44:01

kind of more along those immortality lines of

44:03

trans humanism. Uh. She proposes,

44:06

I don't believe that this is something that was actually

44:08

built. I think this is a sort of sci

44:11

fi proposal, an outer sheath

44:13

of smart skin that would be

44:15

both It would have design and communication

44:18

purposes. It's also going to be engineered

44:20

to self repair with nanobots,

44:23

both the epidermis and dermis, and

44:25

it would tell the brain the texture and

44:27

tone of the surface required on

44:30

it. It would also alter

44:32

your body's temperature, tell you the percentage

44:35

of toxins in your surrounding environment, and

44:37

extract radiation effects from the sun.

44:40

Now this sounds like bio hacking

44:42

if it was real. Yes, though without

44:45

knowing a lot about the project, I have to say that a

44:47

number of the things that the second skin does the

44:50

the the actual skin already. So

44:52

yeah, you're not getting any superpowers from this one.

44:54

Like it already self repairs, it already

44:57

absorbs energy from the sun. Um

45:00

you know, it already regulates my temperature.

45:03

You get into problems when you cover that up. But that's a separate

45:05

tangent. Yep uh. There's also

45:07

Micah Cardinas. In two thousand

45:09

and eight, she performed Becoming the

45:12

Dragon, which was a three hundred

45:14

and sixty five hour mixed reality

45:17

performance that took place in Second life.

45:19

That's why it was in two thousand and eight, because I don't think

45:21

much people many people would watch a performance

45:24

in second life. In sixteen, she

45:26

took the form of a dragon in there and basically

45:29

lived her life as a dragon in second life,

45:31

and that was part of it. So that's a it's a little

45:33

more virtual than of what a lot of these other

45:36

people are doing and The last one listed here is

45:38

Amy Mullins, who is a paralympian athlete.

45:41

She collaborated with a fashion designer

45:44

named Alexander McQueen project

45:46

and yeah he's great. Yeah, so he basically

45:49

built her. She she her

45:51

legs were amputated when she was one year old. Uh

45:53

so he built out hand carved

45:56

wooden prosthetics that had integral

45:58

boots connected to them and built those

46:00

out for her to pose in. So those

46:02

are the art versions of this. But

46:05

then we've got a whole another

46:07

group of trans human pioneers,

46:10

and these are the These are the bio hackers that are really

46:12

looking at ways to build things

46:14

into their bodies that give them

46:17

more than human perception would allow. So

46:19

functional trans humanism over symbolic

46:21

transhumanism exactly. Okay,

46:24

So let's start with probably one of the most

46:26

infamous bio hackers, known

46:28

as Captain Cyborg. His real name

46:30

is Kevin Warwick. Warwick

46:34

In launched the first

46:36

phase of what he called Project

46:38

Cyborg, and he designed and

46:41

r F implant to perform basic

46:43

tests like basically

46:46

use a signal to open remote controled

46:48

doors or control lights in his home. It's

46:51

basically like it sounds like he had nest in his arm

46:53

right like, Uh, he could send commands

46:55

to computers with it. Surgeons inserted

46:58

a glass capsule that contains several

47:00

microprocessors into his body. Phase

47:03

two of this project, Cyborg,

47:06

began in two thousand and two. Warwick

47:09

installed an array of electrodes directly

47:11

into his nervous system to monitor

47:14

the activity at his median nerve.

47:16

As a result, he was able to control a

47:19

robotic arm with mental

47:21

action alone. He also implanted

47:23

these in his his wife,

47:26

Arena, and he wanted to see

47:28

if they could record their sensory experiences

47:31

together, including pain, pleasure, and

47:33

sex. Uh. They didn't reveal

47:35

what the results of that were, but they

47:38

could correctly identify one another's

47:40

nerve signals percent

47:42

of the time. So that's kind of interesting.

47:45

Um, there's a lot of interviews with this guy. He's

47:47

all over the place. He's a interesting

47:50

figure. He's also pretty public about the

47:52

work that he's doing. And he said in

47:54

a w magazine interview that his primary

47:57

interest was in this one so he could come up

47:59

with electric electronic procedures

48:01

to combat diseases like Parkinson's

48:03

blindness, arthritis in schizophrenia. But

48:06

too he wanted to upgrade humans to be

48:08

able to do pretty much anything. Sounds like trans

48:10

humanism to me. He's

48:12

also had some involvement in attempts

48:15

to beat the Turing test. You might remember this

48:17

from a couple of years ago, the infamous example

48:19

where Eugene the computer program

48:22

was basically celebrated

48:24

as having finally beaten the Touring test. If

48:26

you're unfamiliar with the Touring test, the idea

48:29

is basically that a computer program would

48:31

be able to trick a human into

48:33

thinking they were talking to a human

48:36

and not a computer. So

48:39

yeah, he was involved in that. Lately,

48:42

he's been talking about ways to increase the number

48:44

of neurons in the human brain because he thinks

48:46

that our brains are getting bored. Uh,

48:49

and he wants to connect brains and incubators

48:52

to robots. He claims he's

48:54

actually working together with one of his students on a

48:56

learning, living brain that's connected to a robot

48:59

body via bluetooth. So

49:02

that sounds fun. It sounds like uh. In

49:04

Fallout, like I was talking about earlier, there's these robots

49:07

called robot brains, and they're just these like kind

49:09

of clunky, lunch box looking robots. But

49:11

there their CPU is a brain in a

49:13

job seeing. But now you don't have to have the your

49:16

brain in a jar on bot. Your

49:18

your RoboCop too can be empowered from

49:20

the next ram. Yeah, exactly. UM.

49:24

There are others who have sort

49:27

of sprung off of Warwick's

49:29

research. So, for instance, in two thousand four,

49:31

there was an experiment inspired by him

49:33

to use electronic implants to

49:36

enable basic communication between

49:38

two people's nervous systems. Brown

49:40

University also developed rechargeable

49:43

neurotransmitters to communicate

49:46

from human bodies to external devices.

49:48

They hope that this will allow humans to communicate

49:50

telepathically with multiple nervous

49:52

systems. I can tell you we're spoilers.

49:55

We're gonna get into this later. That has happened.

49:58

Uh and and act Uh. It

50:01

was a team of international researchers

50:03

who did this. They've built the first

50:06

human to human interface. And in front

50:08

of us, Robert and I have this and I suggest that you

50:10

go look it up. It was it's part of

50:12

a really good article on this that

50:15

was on Extreme Tech called

50:17

the first human brain to brain interface

50:19

has been created. In the future, we will

50:21

all be linked telepathically. UH.

50:23

And what we're looking at here is basically

50:26

how it works. Um. So,

50:29

one researcher attached a

50:31

brain computer interface to themselves

50:34

and they were in India and they

50:36

were able to send words into the

50:38

brain of a researcher who was in France,

50:40

and that person was wearing a computer to

50:42

brain interface. So what we're

50:45

talking about here is essentially telepathy.

50:47

But how does it work. It's not like you're hearing

50:49

their thoughts right, Basically,

50:51

you're moving data. You're putting it into someone else's

50:54

brain. Uh. And the B c I uses

50:56

an electro and cephalogram. The

50:58

c b I uses a transcranial

51:01

magnetic stimulation rig something that's

51:03

very similar to the transcranial

51:05

magnetic stimulation that we've talked about on

51:07

this show and many other has to have worked shows

51:09

before. It's kind of an obsession around here. The

51:12

idea of blasting your brain with electricity to maybe

51:14

get smarter kind of works the same way

51:16

the words getting coded into binary they're

51:19

transmitted and then translated back

51:21

to the recipient's visual cortex.

51:24

They then see flashes of light

51:27

uh, and it triggers their body to produce

51:29

phosphene that makes this light appear to

51:31

them. So basically, it's like Morris code,

51:34

like this flashing light that only your eyes

51:36

see. So that's you know, it sounds

51:38

like, oh, well that's not that big of a deal, but they're

51:40

doing this from India to France. It's kind of

51:42

a big deal. Uh. It's

51:45

basically brain to brain Morse code essentially

51:47

once they're translating it. Yeah, and this is

51:49

something that even in this this small

51:52

example, even in just the what's

51:54

what's provable and doable today, it

51:57

it alters our perceptions of what it

51:59

means to be a singular human

52:02

entity. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean

52:04

I think this is really where a

52:06

lot of trans humanists would like to see this

52:08

go, right, is a uh,

52:11

it's using technology to be able to

52:14

improve both our senses but also our understandings

52:16

of ourselves, uh, changing

52:20

what we mean by identity all

52:22

that stuff. So certainly

52:25

if you're able to communicate with one another, even

52:27

just through Morris code without speaking, that would

52:30

I would be a step forward in that direction.

52:33

Then we have a few different versions

52:36

of the eyeborg. Yeah.

52:38

So the one I read about was an artist

52:40

named Neil Harbison, and

52:43

he went to the hospital and and basically

52:45

said, hey, can you help install this stuff in me. I'm

52:47

color blind. I want to be able to detect

52:50

colors. So he used this device called

52:52

the eyeborg that translates

52:54

colors into vibrations in his skull

52:57

that he can subsequently here. So

52:59

to me, sounds like trans human synastasia

53:02

basically, yeah, taking taking

53:04

one form of sense day to transforming it into another,

53:07

enabling them to experience these

53:09

colors through uh, through

53:11

bone conduction of sound waves.

53:13

Yeah, but you have other eyeborg applications

53:16

here too. Well, yeah, there's there's one

53:18

other main one, and that's uh that has to do

53:20

with this guy, Rob Spence, Canadian

53:22

film director, and he uh

53:25

sustained permanent damage to his right eye,

53:27

and in two thousand nine he hooked up with camera

53:30

provider Omnivision as

53:32

well as a group of engineers, first ocularist

53:35

Phil Bowen, then engineer

53:38

uh Coasta Grammatis, and then electrical

53:40

engineer Martin Ling to replace

53:43

his prosthetic prosthetic eye with a

53:45

functional digital video camera.

53:48

Interesting, I wonder if some of our guys here

53:50

in our video production team would be willing to do that,

53:52

if they're willing to give up an eye, and uh, they

53:54

have some talented individuals to because

53:57

one of the problems is then you have to try and fit everything

53:59

in to that eye ball um

54:03

space. Yeah. Yeah, and it's you know, it's

54:05

it's fairly sounds like a cenobyte,

54:07

Yeah, one of those. Yeah.

54:11

Yeah, it's it's a task that you have to

54:13

you have to pull off without the individual looking

54:16

like a cinabyte. Yeah. Um, well, given

54:18

and harder with two thousand nine technology and technologies

54:20

come along life. Yeah, That's what I was gonna say, is like, given

54:22

how small the video cameras in our phones are

54:25

nowadays, that's that wouldn't be that hard. So

54:28

he was able to to do to

54:30

do this, to replace his prosthetic eye with

54:32

a functional digital video camera uh,

54:35

touted as quote the world's first literal

54:38

point of view, uh, including

54:40

glancing around and blinking. Wow.

54:43

Yeah. And he's on Twitter, he's

54:45

uh you can follow his efforts here

54:47

his ongoing efforts with the with the ibor

54:50

project. He's on Twitter as Iyborg

54:52

and his website is eyeborg

54:54

project dot tv. Okay, so

54:56

I'm imagining he does like a lot of periscope

54:58

events, but on fortunately in his periscopes

55:01

you can't see him. You just see what he sees.

55:04

Yeah. I mean, well, there's something beautiful in the idea,

55:06

right that you you take this injury and

55:08

then you turn it into something that actually

55:11

enables your passion, enables your career.

55:13

Yeah, exactly, And I think that that's a lot

55:15

of what trans humanists are looking to do,

55:17

or bio hackers are looking to do, you know, like especially

55:20

like come up with ways for the

55:22

quote disabled to be able to operate

55:24

in almost uh enhanced

55:27

fashion, right, Yeah, which brings us to Jerry

55:29

je Lava Uh, a

55:33

finished software developer who in two thousand

55:35

nine lost half his index

55:37

finger in a motorcycle accident. So

55:40

if he was working with the with

55:42

with doctors to get a prosthesis

55:45

there, he did what came natural,

55:47

do you? Uh? You simply have a USB

55:49

drive there in the end of your your new

55:52

artificial finger, so you can just remove

55:54

the cap from the end of your finger

55:57

and you have USB drives. So he's got all of his data.

55:59

I hope it's a good USB drive though,

56:01

like one of those ones with a couple of gigs. It's not like

56:03

one of those cheap OH ones that have He's

56:07

got like a couple of MP three's in his finger. At

56:10

the time it was a two gigabyte

56:13

storage drive. I can only imagine

56:15

being a software developer that he has he

56:18

has far more storage capacity now

56:20

if he still has kept with it, hopefully

56:23

modifiable, and he can just keep putting new ones

56:25

in as the technology improves. Yeah, so

56:28

then you know, this is kind of neat. It's also kind of it's

56:32

it's kind of spy movief, the

56:35

idea of inserting your finger into a computer.

56:37

Yeah. Yeah, And I think also it's

56:39

like the USB drive comes out because

56:42

because once you sort of break to break it down, it's

56:44

not very practical to just set

56:46

there because he only got one hand operate

56:49

the mouse and the keyboard. But

56:51

I can only imagine it it played well at parties

56:54

and the bar trick like, hey, you want

56:56

to see my USB drive. Well,

56:58

speaking of fingers and party tricks, let's

57:01

talk about subdermal magnetism.

57:04

So this is what I insinuated or

57:06

implied at the beginning of the episode with

57:09

the idea of installing tiny magnets

57:12

into your fingertips. Uh, this is

57:14

a thing that a lot of people have done. The

57:17

magnets are coated with materials I

57:19

couldn't exactly figure out what the materials

57:21

were that they're coated with. But this seems to be a

57:23

common thing so that the magnets aren't

57:25

rejected by your body. And the hackers

57:28

say that this provides them with a sixth

57:31

sense that allows them to feel magnetic

57:33

fields. It creates basically

57:36

sensations in their fingertips. Uh.

57:39

And as I said at the top of the episode,

57:41

you can pick up paper clips and bottle caps

57:43

basically. Um. And I

57:45

do find the paper clip thing hilarious

57:47

because such an outdated

57:50

thing for trans human is to be messing well.

57:52

And one of the guys was even saying that, like,

57:54

I think his broke, like

57:57

the magnet itself like broke apart in his finger,

57:59

and then the mag pieces kind of came

58:02

back together again naturally over time, but the

58:04

magnetism was weaker. He's

58:06

like, I can only pick up small paper clips

58:09

now. I used to be able to pick up large paper clips,

58:11

but no longer. But

58:13

there is something else to this. It's not just the

58:15

paper clips. They're really interested in the sensory stuff.

58:18

But big warning right up front,

58:20

do not do this and then climb into

58:22

an m r I machine, because it will rip the

58:25

magnets right out of your fingers. Also,

58:27

airport security is problematic. If you're

58:29

walking through airport security and you've got magnets

58:32

built into your figer fingers, it's going to mess

58:34

things up. Yeah. Trying to explain to the t s A. Agents

58:36

that you are a trans human um and

58:38

you have magnets and plant in your body, I

58:41

can only imagine that's just gonna lead to more delays.

58:43

Absolutely, So I

58:46

pulled up a couple of different articles on this that we're interesting.

58:48

Gizmotos really covered it in depth.

58:51

They actually had a piece by Dan Berg

58:54

on Gizmoto where he shared his

58:56

experience of having one of these implanted

58:58

into his pinky finger. He was initially

59:01

wary after seeing the early prototypes

59:03

and what they did when they broke down and corroded

59:06

inside somebody's finger. He goes

59:08

through the procedure pretty clearly, he says, and

59:10

this is a direct quote from him. My finger

59:12

was marked in two places where the magnet

59:14

was going to go, as well as the incision

59:17

spot around a quarter to a half an inch

59:19

away from the final resting spot for the

59:21

magnet. His body

59:23

modifier then made the incision with a scalpel,

59:26

used a tissue elevator to separate

59:28

that tissue, slid the magnet into

59:30

place, and sealed the incision with surgical

59:33

glue. Next, a bit of tissue

59:35

compression went on. They wrapped his

59:37

finger up and he was on his way. He said

59:39

it took fifteen to twenty minutes total. However,

59:42

it took him months before his

59:44

finger regained full sensation. But

59:47

he was noticing vibrations from magnetic

59:49

fields, primarily in cash registers,

59:52

microwaves, and laptop fans.

59:55

He also noticed that when he handled other magnets,

59:58

the magnet in his finger would flip

1:00:01

uncomfortably. He said. It wasn't

1:00:03

painful, but it was uncomfortable. Uh.

1:00:05

He said this especially happened with the speakers

1:00:07

and his iPad because those are magnetized.

1:00:10

Uh. Over the years, he noted too,

1:00:12

that the magnet in his finger has lost strength.

1:00:15

Huh. You gotta have a certain amount

1:00:17

of confidence in what you're doing too. Yeah,

1:00:21

I I definitely think so. I can't

1:00:24

imagine doing this myself. Um, it sounds

1:00:26

intriguing the idea of having the sort of magnetic

1:00:29

sense, but I don't know that I would want to go through the process.

1:00:32

Uh. Then Ionine and Gizmodo. They

1:00:34

also talked with Eric Boyd who's at hack

1:00:37

Lab in Toronto, which is one of these bio hacking

1:00:39

sort of community centers, and he says,

1:00:42

you know, he clarifies, this is more about sensory augmentation.

1:00:44

It's not about the party tricks of pick picking up

1:00:46

paper clips. It's useful for people,

1:00:49

especially who work with electronics because they

1:00:51

can feel the difference between live and dead

1:00:53

wires. He mentions a group called

1:00:55

Grindhouse wet Wear that I'm going to come back to later.

1:00:58

Uh, there were working on a device

1:01:00

called bottle nose that fits over your

1:01:02

finger if you've got one of these magnetic implants,

1:01:05

and it augments the experience further. It

1:01:07

could, for instance, since infrared,

1:01:10

it can also transmit information through

1:01:12

vibrations, or it could be used

1:01:14

to measure distances as a ranging

1:01:17

device. It's supposedly

1:01:20

safest if you're going to get the magnetic implementation

1:01:23

to do so on your ring finger, on your

1:01:25

non dominant hand, because it

1:01:28

is quote your least useful finger. So

1:01:30

apparently, like if you have to choose, like if

1:01:32

you're in like a game throne situation and

1:01:34

somebody's gonna cut off one of your fingers. If you have to

1:01:36

choose, the ring finger on your least

1:01:39

dominant hand is the best one to go because

1:01:41

it has the least to do with gripping

1:01:44

action. Interesting. So,

1:01:47

but you also have to be careful that this

1:01:49

is not placed between uh,

1:01:52

your touch surface and the bone,

1:01:54

because if you're like in an emergency situation

1:01:56

where like, let's say you fell off of something, you

1:01:58

have to grip it really hard, right, it would

1:02:01

crush the magnet, So it's

1:02:03

usually embedded on the inside

1:02:06

corner of the finger. Also

1:02:08

note that the body artists who performed

1:02:10

this, they're not allowed to use anesthesia because

1:02:12

they don't have licensing for that. So

1:02:15

it's real painful. Uh. And the

1:02:18

basically all they can do is put your hand

1:02:20

in ice water to numb it. It takes

1:02:23

some say less than ten minutes, and damn earlier

1:02:26

said fifteen to twenty. So we're talking to some real

1:02:28

cowboy trans humanism here, Like you put a

1:02:30

stick between your teeth and staring into

1:02:32

the campfire bite not a bullet, yea yeah.

1:02:36

And they use standard neodymium

1:02:38

magnets for this. Uh. What

1:02:41

you need to do though, there's the whole biocoding thing

1:02:43

and that's you know, as we've talked about with background

1:02:45

organs and organ transplants and all that stuff,

1:02:48

your body rejects foreign material,

1:02:50

so you need this biocoding to help it keep

1:02:52

that from happening. You definitely don't

1:02:54

want this to fail and you don't want

1:02:57

the magnet to shatter, otherwise you're gonna

1:02:59

end up with head V metals exposed to the inside

1:03:02

of your body. One other

1:03:04

thing to note, the magnets are too small

1:03:06

to wipe out at hard drive, so don't worry about

1:03:08

that if you're planning on getting this done. Yeah,

1:03:10

that would be because that would be especially problematic.

1:03:13

Give finger on this hand, as the usped

1:03:16

of a divide finger on this hand is

1:03:18

a powerful magnet, and you do,

1:03:20

like the small wonder thing or sorry not small

1:03:22

wonder out of this world. You touch the two fingers

1:03:24

together and you raise all the information off your USB

1:03:27

drive. UH. The

1:03:29

other reason why people are doing this in their fingertips

1:03:32

is because it's one of the areas in our bodies where

1:03:34

we have the highest nerve density. UH.

1:03:36

The movement of the magnet there

1:03:38

in response to e M fields. Basically,

1:03:41

it stimulates the somati sensory receptors

1:03:44

in your fingertip. These are the same ones

1:03:46

that are responsible for us to perceive pressure,

1:03:48

temperature, and pain. Now grindhouse

1:03:50

wetwear that I mentioned earlier. They've also

1:03:53

inserted something called Circadia

1:03:55

into one of their members. It's a biosensor

1:03:58

that accumulates weeks of body to amperature

1:04:00

data and sends it to a smartphone via

1:04:03

Bluetooth data. The idea is basically that

1:04:05

eventually we'll have something like this that will

1:04:08

give us biometric data, like quantify

1:04:10

what's going on in our real time evaluation

1:04:13

of what our body is doing. That is a very useful

1:04:17

trans humanist daema. Yeah, it's sort of like

1:04:19

a fitbit in your body, but with more application.

1:04:22

So many of the problems that arise with our

1:04:24

health you don't have like

1:04:26

real time knowledge of, but you find out

1:04:29

months down the line, maybe years down the line,

1:04:32

far past to the point of easy intervention.

1:04:35

So the biometric possibilities

1:04:37

of trans humanism I think are some of the most exciting

1:04:39

and most most useful. Yeah,

1:04:42

it makes me think back to like it's

1:04:44

very easy to sort of dismiss this stuff and just be

1:04:46

like, oh, whatever, this is like this crazy subculture.

1:04:49

But like again, like think about like

1:04:51

the transdermal how transdermal

1:04:54

implants ended up becoming useful

1:04:57

for chemotherapy. Right,

1:04:59

so there are are some applications here

1:05:01

that are going to, you know, spring out of this

1:05:03

that I think we're gonna start seeing in medicine in the

1:05:05

future. All Right. That

1:05:07

brings us to who left anonym who

1:05:10

I started off the episode quoting, Uh.

1:05:12

She is a Berlin based Scottish d I

1:05:14

Y bio hacker uh. And there

1:05:16

is an interview with her and Wired magazine

1:05:19

that just gave me kind of an overview that I want to present

1:05:21

to you all. She does

1:05:24

most of her work in her own apartment,

1:05:27

sterilizing her equipment with vodka.

1:05:29

This definitely sounds like a Saska Sisters

1:05:32

style bio hack. It

1:05:34

hurts a lot, she says, and she's also

1:05:37

passed out before while she's been doing this. Uh.

1:05:40

It's the kind of d I Y body hacking

1:05:43

that is referred to as grinding when you're

1:05:45

just and this is not to be confused

1:05:47

with grinder, the social media

1:05:49

application for dating. This

1:05:52

is grinding, as in like you're in your kitchen

1:05:54

with a scalpel and uh some

1:05:57

something to separate the flesh out, so you and

1:06:00

put devices into your body on your own. She

1:06:02

does all her own surgeries with a scalpel. She

1:06:05

does have a spot or there with her in case

1:06:07

she passes out. She once tried

1:06:09

to implant a temperature sensor transdermally

1:06:13

that would show varying brightness

1:06:15

under her skin to indicate what the temperature

1:06:18

was. But this was a total disaster.

1:06:21

She didn't buy a proof it right away, so she ended

1:06:23

up in the hospital, and she's ended up in the hospital

1:06:25

several times because of bad

1:06:28

implement implementations. Her

1:06:30

implants have actually rusted under her

1:06:32

skin, and her surgeries have turned

1:06:35

septic. She did

1:06:37

the whole magnets in the fingers thing too, except

1:06:40

she didn't want to go through the effort of paying a

1:06:42

body artist to do it. She thought

1:06:44

that was too expensive. So what she did was she coded

1:06:47

the magnets in suguru, which

1:06:49

is like a silicon putty, is my understanding.

1:06:52

Or sometimes she just uses hot gun

1:06:54

glue. She said something to the effect

1:06:56

of like, you wouldn't believe how many things I've put in my

1:06:58

body that are covered in gun glue. Uh,

1:07:01

And she inserted the

1:07:04

magnets into all of her fingertips,

1:07:06

and she said, well, that only costs twenty pounds,

1:07:08

so she got the magnets. I mean, I

1:07:10

don't know if she's like ordering these on eBay or Amazon

1:07:13

or whatever. She just gets the magnets, some hot

1:07:15

gun glue and a knife and vodka and

1:07:17

just did it herself. Now, I imagine

1:07:19

a number of people are thinking right now, this sounds

1:07:22

an awful lot like mental illness. And

1:07:25

maybe. But but I do want to remind everyone

1:07:28

of the old adage, if I'm

1:07:30

repeating it correctly here, that the pioneers

1:07:34

are often massacred and it's settlers

1:07:37

that profit. So we're definitely talking

1:07:39

about pioneers here. Oftentimes pioneers

1:07:42

don't have the best outcome. These are

1:07:44

the individuals that are trying new

1:07:47

things, going into new places, and

1:07:50

it's gonna be the people that come after them. They're

1:07:52

gonna have the easier time of it and maybe

1:07:54

actually benefit um

1:07:57

in a larger sense from the from

1:07:59

the advancements. Yeah, this is true and left

1:08:01

anonym I mean, I can tell you she gives a lot

1:08:03

of lectures about this stuff, so she's treated

1:08:05

seriously. A lot of people invite her to come and

1:08:07

speak about her experiences and how they've gone.

1:08:10

But you know, uh, this is the more brutal

1:08:12

side of bio hacking for sure. At

1:08:14

the time that the article was written,

1:08:16

which was in two thousand and ten, she was talking

1:08:18

about installing a compass chip and a power

1:08:21

coil and her left knee so she could sense

1:08:23

magnetic north. And I mentioned earlier

1:08:25

the device that you would wear. It was a wearable that

1:08:27

would do the same thing. She wanted it in her body.

1:08:30

Okay, here's uh so

1:08:32

that's that's an individual. But we got

1:08:35

another. Um, this is a really

1:08:37

good one. Uh. And it and it comes from

1:08:39

another sort of collective. It's mainly two guys.

1:08:41

They called themselves Science for the Masses. And you

1:08:44

may have heard of this story as it was making around.

1:08:46

This is the kind of thing that comes across

1:08:48

Robert and my desk on a Monday morning, and we wonder

1:08:50

do we write about this this week or is this is

1:08:53

this bogus? And it turned out it wasn't bogus.

1:08:56

Uh. They created night vision eye

1:08:58

drops uh, and they described

1:09:01

themselves as an independent bio hacking collective.

1:09:04

In their experiment experiment,

1:09:06

they used the chemical chlorine E

1:09:09

six, which is a relative of chlorophyll.

1:09:11

It's been used to try to treat cancer,

1:09:14

and it occurs naturally in deep sea

1:09:16

fish to enhance the light receptors

1:09:18

in their eyes. In cancer treatment,

1:09:20

it's used in combination with energy

1:09:23

from low powered light sources to

1:09:25

destroy cancerous cells by inducing

1:09:28

apoptosis, which we've talked about on the

1:09:30

show before as such, if

1:09:32

you're gonna put this stuff in your eyes, you

1:09:34

really want to stay away from bright or

1:09:37

ambient daylight because it could harm your

1:09:39

eyes cells and cause permanent damage.

1:09:42

Their idea came from the work of a guy named

1:09:44

Ilias Washington who's at Columbia

1:09:46

University, and he wanted to test this chlorophyll

1:09:49

derivative to make proteins in our

1:09:51

eyes respond to red light instead

1:09:54

of green light. He tested it on

1:09:56

mice. What he didn't tell other people was

1:09:58

he also tested it on him self and he didn't

1:10:00

report the results. Uh.

1:10:03

They were inspired by this. They were also inspired

1:10:05

by an experiment that was a patent

1:10:08

that was filed by Totada our Shanta

1:10:11

is a Georgian doctor who lost his license

1:10:13

for medical fraud. Dr Nick, Yes,

1:10:16

it does sound like him, doesn't it. Um.

1:10:20

What they did was, they said, well, like many bio

1:10:23

hackers. Well, we can't get you know, actual

1:10:25

academic approval for this, so we're intested

1:10:28

in ourselves. So Gabriel A. Chinia,

1:10:30

I believe is how it's pronounced. He was the subject

1:10:33

and his co conspirator Jeffrey Tibbitts was

1:10:35

the one who applied it. They put fifty

1:10:37

micro leaders of the C six, together

1:10:39

with sailing and insulin, into his eyes

1:10:42

with a drip. Within an hour, it

1:10:44

interacted with the photo receptors

1:10:46

in his eyes. He could distinguish

1:10:49

images and symbols beyond fifty

1:10:51

meters in the darkness. He was also

1:10:53

able to identify people up to fifty

1:10:56

meters away in the dark. The effect

1:10:58

did wear off after some time, however,

1:11:01

uh and I should also mention like he had

1:11:04

to wear these sort of eerie

1:11:06

looking demonic black contact

1:11:08

lenses over his eyes while

1:11:10

he was doing this, So when you see pictures

1:11:12

of this, you'll see a guy with just completely black

1:11:15

eyes. That's not because of the stuff they put

1:11:17

in his eyes. Is because of the lenses he was wearing for protection.

1:11:21

The idea of the insulin being in there, well,

1:11:23

that was to allow absorption of the chemical

1:11:25

CE six into his eye. They also

1:11:27

used a chemical called d M s OH to

1:11:30

increase the permeability of the cellular

1:11:33

membrane, basically to allow the free passage

1:11:35

of the chemicals into his eye. Uh.

1:11:37

There is a high risk of cellular

1:11:40

toxicity here though, especially if

1:11:42

you're gonna the d M s O. It allows

1:11:44

that chemical into your eye, but it also allows outside

1:11:46

contaminants that could be absorbed with the

1:11:48

chemical, so it should be totally handled with

1:11:51

caution. This is this is not uh,

1:11:53

don't do this at home. Yeah, this is some pretty

1:11:55

heavy biohacking here. This is incredible,

1:11:58

and especially because that stuff can all so be absorbed

1:12:00

through your skin. From their site,

1:12:03

uh itself, from Science for the Masses site,

1:12:05

they have a review on the whole experiment

1:12:07

and this is what they said. First of all, I want

1:12:09

to just say it's really cool. The research that they did

1:12:12

is all under the Creative Commons license, so anybody

1:12:14

can go look it up and they can see exactly what they did

1:12:17

and follow their notes. Uh. They

1:12:19

provide a disclaimer right at the top, and

1:12:22

they say increased light amplification

1:12:25

may have adverse effects on the cellular

1:12:27

structure of the eye. So some materials

1:12:30

in this mixture should not be used

1:12:33

on animals or humans, and that

1:12:35

there had been previous research in the patent

1:12:37

I mentioned earlier that claimed the mixture

1:12:39

would absorb to the retina increased vision

1:12:41

in low light. So basically,

1:12:44

here's how they did it. They pinned open his eyes

1:12:46

like clockwork orange style with a speculum

1:12:49

and had a micropipette

1:12:51

to slowly add the solution to

1:12:54

his conjunctival sac Then

1:12:56

they placed the black Sclero

1:12:59

lens as I mentioned earlier, into each

1:13:01

eye. Then on top of that, they

1:13:03

gave him sunglasses. All this was to reduce

1:13:05

the potential light that was entering his eye because

1:13:07

they didn't want this stuff to start destroying the cells in

1:13:09

his eyeball. His eyesight

1:13:12

returned normal by morning. Twenty

1:13:14

days later they checked him out. There were no noticeable

1:13:17

effects. Okay, so he's okay for

1:13:19

future research. What they want to do is they

1:13:21

want to take a gans filled stimulator

1:13:24

and an electro electro

1:13:26

tinograph to measure how

1:13:28

much electrical stimulation the eyes

1:13:31

actually receiving during this kind of experiment.

1:13:34

They want basically quantifiable numbers

1:13:36

so that they can measure the ranges of vision

1:13:38

that are being amplified. So this,

1:13:40

I mean, this is this is bio

1:13:43

hacking to the extreme. Right. They're giving us superpowers.

1:13:46

You're giving what indungeons

1:13:48

and dragons would be called low light vision, uh

1:13:51

to a human being and then having

1:13:53

to wear the the the black contact

1:13:55

lens is the sunglasses, essentially wearing

1:13:57

sunglasses at night to keep track of the vision.

1:14:00

Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Uh.

1:14:02

These guys have since like broken up their collective.

1:14:05

Licinia has worked in a handful of molecular

1:14:08

biology labs tibots as a registered

1:14:10

nurse. These guys are professor professionals.

1:14:13

Other bio hacking groups have tried this experiment

1:14:15

as well, but no one has the money for

1:14:18

testing it on a large scale. This is one of the things that

1:14:20

people don't talk about with bio hacking is that

1:14:22

because it's not through a big institution

1:14:25

like a company or a university,

1:14:27

there's no money at hand, especially

1:14:30

for the proper legal ramifications

1:14:32

that might come if you run clinical trials on

1:14:34

people as volunteers. Uh. And

1:14:37

look, the National Institute of Health is

1:14:39

not likely to fund somebody who's just going to drop

1:14:41

chemicals into a humans eyeball for night vision,

1:14:44

right, Um, but what about other

1:14:46

people who might fund this, so they

1:14:48

said, uh, these are the guys who perform

1:14:50

the experiment. They actually said military

1:14:53

contractors got in touch with them afterward,

1:14:55

and we're interested in it. They also said a voting

1:14:57

magazine contracted them and said

1:14:59

that could have applications for sailors

1:15:02

who were working at night and instead

1:15:04

of having to put on like heavy goggles or

1:15:06

machinery or whatever so they could see at night,

1:15:08

they could use this night vision stuff.

1:15:11

And if you happen to have a very

1:15:14

spacious basement with a pit in

1:15:16

it, you know, it's just a no brainer, perfect

1:15:19

way to test it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, as long as there's

1:15:21

lotion in the pit as well. Um Lacinia

1:15:25

when he was interviewed by Gizmoto, he said,

1:15:28

let's be fair here, it's kind

1:15:30

of crap science. So he's

1:15:32

not, you know, fooled in anything

1:15:34

like thinking that they've made some big headway,

1:15:37

other than you know, they basically took

1:15:39

what an academic wrote down in a paper and

1:15:41

just did it in their garage. It sounds

1:15:43

like um. They also wanted

1:15:45

to clarify for the media they didn't inject

1:15:48

this stuff into his eye. They used eye droppers

1:15:51

to put it in his eye. So

1:15:53

there's some problems here as well too, right, Like,

1:15:55

so the biohacking thing kind of gets around

1:15:58

the I guess pure you nature

1:16:01

of academic papers in that, Like there's

1:16:03

no way to really follow up on this, right,

1:16:05

Like what if he already had better than average night

1:16:07

vision, or what if it was a placebo

1:16:10

effect that was taking place and they didn't have a control

1:16:12

group in place to sort of measure it against you, Like,

1:16:14

if I go to these to these extremes

1:16:18

to improve my night vision, I'm

1:16:20

gonna kind of want my night vision

1:16:22

to be improved, and that's gonna

1:16:24

potentially have an effect on my perception

1:16:27

exactly right. All right,

1:16:29

One more totally crazy one. Have you heard

1:16:31

of aquaman crystals? Who I

1:16:33

have? Not a synti street drug? Yeah, man,

1:16:36

everybody's doing it. No. Aquaman

1:16:38

crystals came out of a study

1:16:41

at the University of Southern Denmark.

1:16:44

They discovered a crystalline substance.

1:16:46

This is actually one that's not really bio hacking. It happened

1:16:49

at an university. They

1:16:51

discovered a crystalline substance that absorbs

1:16:53

and stores huge amounts of oxygen.

1:16:56

Now these are synthetic, but they're derived from cobalt

1:16:59

to lifeen oxygen from both air and

1:17:02

water, and they might let people

1:17:04

breathe underwater. It hasn't been tested

1:17:07

yet, but it could also help people who need

1:17:10

like an oxygen tank, for instance, if they have lung

1:17:12

ailments. So you should have a small Yeah, I do

1:17:14

remember when this research came out. I I'm not mistaken.

1:17:17

This is the one to where the other sensational

1:17:20

spin on it was that you could suck all the oxygen out

1:17:22

of a room with a bingo that actually comes

1:17:24

up right in the next notes Motherboard

1:17:27

cover it, and they said, if you use ten

1:17:29

liters of this stuff, which is called crystalline

1:17:31

cobalt salt, it can draw twenty

1:17:34

one of the air out of a room like

1:17:36

instantly. Uh. It binds

1:17:38

basically to individual oxygen

1:17:41

molecules and it works like artificial

1:17:43

hemoglobin. So the idea here

1:17:46

is that it would be able to operate indefinitely.

1:17:48

UH. The oxygen would bind to the iron

1:17:51

in your blood, it would also bind to the metal

1:17:53

cobalt that are in the crystals and then just sort

1:17:55

of replenish itself. Um.

1:17:58

And according to them, they say a few

1:18:00

grains contain enough oxygen for

1:18:02

one breath and since it continually resupplies

1:18:05

itself, a diver needing

1:18:07

oxygen would only need a few of these grains.

1:18:10

So this is like something out of the ABYSS, right. I think

1:18:12

in the Abyss they use liquid oxygen, but sort

1:18:14

of like you would inhale a couple of these

1:18:16

grains and then you can just breathe underwater indefinitely.

1:18:19

Yeah, just the micro micronization

1:18:22

of existing technology. Yeah, exactly,

1:18:25

So another potential medical application

1:18:27

there. All right, So we've

1:18:29

talked about sort of the trans humanist dreams,

1:18:32

we've talked about some of these biohecking realities.

1:18:35

We've talked about the the Harbingers, uh,

1:18:38

and the Pioneers. You're probably

1:18:40

wondering, well, how do we know when we get there? How do we know

1:18:42

who we've actually achieved trans

1:18:44

humanism? I mean, needless to say, if

1:18:47

we if we reach the point where we have these like really

1:18:50

crazy out there sci fi incarnations

1:18:53

of human existence, yeah, we're

1:18:55

trans human at that point. But but what

1:18:57

actually has to take place? Yeah? I mean Google

1:18:59

glasses and trans humanism right

1:19:01

now, you can't check it off the list just because you have some

1:19:03

Google Yeah. Well, uh,

1:19:06

as with everything trans human it's kind of in the

1:19:08

eye or the bionic eye of the beholder.

1:19:11

But bio ethicist Kyle mckinrick

1:19:14

weighed in on this in two thousand eleven and

1:19:16

Discover magazine piece that he did, and

1:19:18

he was basically expanding

1:19:20

some previous comments where people

1:19:22

would ask him, well, how are we going to know? What are the what

1:19:25

are the qualifications for transhumanist

1:19:28

evolution? This is a great article, by the way,

1:19:30

I really liked his tones, right,

1:19:33

he had some funny bits in there. So

1:19:36

these are his seven qualifiers. First

1:19:38

of all, prosthetics are are

1:19:40

preferred. This is the basic idea that you're

1:19:42

going to get to the point where not only is a prosthetic

1:19:45

limb as good as the limb

1:19:47

you're replacing, not only is a synthetic organ

1:19:49

of that grown organ or an artificial organ

1:19:52

as good as the original, but it's actually an improvement.

1:19:55

Obviously, we're

1:19:57

a bit far away from that being a reality.

1:20:00

Yeah, but but I'm just thinking, like

1:20:02

man, like every week, I feel like stories

1:20:04

just pop in more and more and more about prosthetic

1:20:06

limb enhancements and b c

1:20:09

I s being used to control prosthetic limbs.

1:20:11

Yeah, and they're if you're selective in

1:20:13

how you judge it. Certainly we have

1:20:16

examples of say, you know, runners with artificial

1:20:18

legs that are able to perform to you

1:20:20

know, a high level. Uh. So,

1:20:23

depending on how you look at it, Yes, prosthetic limbs

1:20:25

are getting you know, crazy

1:20:27

good at at replicator or sometimes

1:20:29

even exceeding normal perform performance.

1:20:32

But across the board when it comes to

1:20:34

performance, uh, you know, the

1:20:36

sensory realm uh, there's still a lot

1:20:38

of room for improvement. So we can't check

1:20:41

that one off just yet. The next one better

1:20:43

brains. This is the idea that beyond

1:20:46

coffee, beyond taking

1:20:48

whatever brain enhancement drugs are available, this

1:20:51

would be the use of of of

1:20:53

neural implants, of cybernetic enhancements

1:20:56

to upgrade the human

1:20:58

mind. And it would have to be a situation where

1:21:01

we wouldn't worry about brain doping.

1:21:03

This would just be the natural thing

1:21:06

to do with the available technology. And this is

1:21:08

why so many people get excited about a transcranial

1:21:11

direct stimulation that I mentioned earlier, that

1:21:13

the possibility of that being the avenue for

1:21:15

this. Yeah. So we're seeing some promising

1:21:17

developments here, but we're still not quite

1:21:19

there. Right Next, artificial assistance

1:21:22

this would be ubiquitous use of AI

1:21:24

and augmented reality in our daily life.

1:21:27

I have to say, I feel like

1:21:29

we're very close in this one, because I'm

1:21:31

constantly having to drive places where

1:21:34

I put my my phone up there I use

1:21:36

Ways or another map based program,

1:21:39

and it's thinking for me, and

1:21:41

it's displaying a version

1:21:43

of reality that I'm depending

1:21:45

on to get somewhere in real life. Oh yeah,

1:21:48

totally same for me. Like I have gotten

1:21:50

horrible, especially since moving to the city of

1:21:52

Atlanta at like learning

1:21:56

my way around the city on my

1:21:58

own because I rely on Google Maps

1:22:00

or whatever to tell me how to get there. Uh

1:22:03

maybe if I do it like repeatedly over and over

1:22:05

again, it sort of works out that way. But if it's

1:22:07

a location that I've never been to before,

1:22:10

I don't retain that information because why why

1:22:12

would I? Yeah, it's it's the natural part

1:22:15

of our our cognitive economy

1:22:17

is that is that if you can outsource

1:22:20

something to another person or another thing another source,

1:22:22

your brain does it because it has

1:22:24

a tight ship to maintain. So think

1:22:26

about Ways and which I think Google

1:22:28

bought Ways and incorporated into Google Maps

1:22:30

to it also tells you information

1:22:33

about traffic patterns that you wouldn't

1:22:35

be able to experience through your regular senses.

1:22:38

You wouldn't be able to see that far down the road to

1:22:40

know that there's a roadblock, So you have sort

1:22:42

of superhuman information in a matter of speaking.

1:22:45

Ways in these other programs, are

1:22:47

are are getting us close to checking off

1:22:50

this artificial assistance uh um

1:22:52

qualifier, but also playing into

1:22:55

the better brain idea because we are you

1:22:57

know, augmenting our our neural

1:23:00

ability, are cognitive abilities via this

1:23:02

external device and its properties.

1:23:05

Absolutely. The next one, number

1:23:07

four on this list is amazing average

1:23:09

age, longer life from everyone,

1:23:11

with a roughly hundred and twenty year average

1:23:14

lifespan for humans. So

1:23:17

we have a long ways to go in this one, but when

1:23:20

you start breaking down uh

1:23:23

death mortality into

1:23:26

smaller winnable battles, it does

1:23:28

seem more and more likely we could get to that point.

1:23:31

Uh. The next one is responsible reproduction.

1:23:34

So this one is very interesting and

1:23:37

gets into some of that the potentially

1:23:40

problem problematic um. You know, Western

1:23:43

rich people telling developing nations not

1:23:45

to have babies, so sort of this uh

1:23:47

the borderline ethics of like is

1:23:49

this like eugenics talking about superior

1:23:52

humans versus inferiors. So in

1:23:54

this scenario, mccentrick

1:23:56

is saying that we would we need to all start

1:23:59

treating human reproduction and or

1:24:01

parenting as an act to be undertaken by choice

1:24:04

and uh and responsibly, rather

1:24:07

than as a mere biological occurrence.

1:24:09

Uh. The obvious benefits here are, you know,

1:24:12

global population woes, swelling

1:24:15

of orphanages, many a troubled home

1:24:17

life. Um. Because

1:24:20

I mean, seriously, what what sort of selfish moron

1:24:23

is going to thank him or herself futuristic

1:24:25

and evolved with the robot eyes if

1:24:28

they're still blind to social horrors that

1:24:31

arguably stem from all these overpopulation

1:24:34

woes and unwanted birth. So

1:24:36

that's like sort of taking the bio hacking thing

1:24:39

to like the larger

1:24:41

scale, like um

1:24:44

population hacking. Yeah. Really,

1:24:46

And if you think of human

1:24:49

the human population is kind of the meta

1:24:51

organism. It's saying, not only am I gonna let's

1:24:53

let's not only take control of the individual

1:24:56

organism, let's take control of the meta organism,

1:24:58

its form, it's function, and let's streamline

1:25:01

it as well. But then how

1:25:03

do you get into that scenario without getting

1:25:05

into eugenics, without getting into imperialist

1:25:08

um, you know, dog Yeah, absolutely,

1:25:11

it's it sounds very like a dangerous

1:25:13

road to go down. But it also reminds me. I see

1:25:15

this on Facebook all the time. Uh.

1:25:18

I have friends who don't have kids, and they'll say

1:25:21

something along the lines of, you know, you

1:25:23

have to have a license to drive a car, you should probably

1:25:25

have to have a license to have a kid. Um,

1:25:28

And this is basically that, right. Yeah,

1:25:30

So there's plenty of plenty of room for argument

1:25:33

and hurt feelings and strong emotions

1:25:35

on this one. And speaking of which number

1:25:38

six, um Munkinstrick refers

1:25:40

to as my body, my choice. So

1:25:42

obviously you need to own your body in

1:25:44

order to augment it. That means voluntary

1:25:47

self surgery, ownership of

1:25:49

what your body does and how it's defined.

1:25:51

And this is really getting into the regulation

1:25:54

aspect of like whether or not the government's going

1:25:56

to get involved. Yeah, because think

1:25:58

about, you know, to any degrees

1:26:00

in different countries, how much control

1:26:03

the and the government already has over

1:26:05

your body and what say you have

1:26:08

already concerning your body. So this gets

1:26:10

into everything from sexuality to reproduction

1:26:13

to abortion, physical augmentation. Um.

1:26:16

Some of the limits than the natural

1:26:18

progression of this too is going to go down to the vaccination

1:26:21

route. Yeah, indeed, I mean that's that's

1:26:23

another another um, you

1:26:25

know, face of this problem. Um.

1:26:29

I mean on the surgery side, we see this a lot too.

1:26:31

We see individuals who want something dramatic

1:26:33

but they can't go to just

1:26:36

a normal surgeon to get it done. Um

1:26:39

and no anesthesia. Right. It

1:26:41

reminds me a lot of the work of plastic surgeon

1:26:43

Joe Um Rosen, who have brought up

1:26:46

on here before. This guy is

1:26:49

a huge advocate of like let people

1:26:51

be what they want to be through plastic surgery.

1:26:53

Plastic surgery allows to change the body and

1:26:56

therefore change the sof you want to be a tiger,

1:26:58

right, Like the isn't that one of them? The Tigerman

1:27:01

is like the big body modifier. I

1:27:03

think he might have passed away actually, but you know

1:27:05

what I'm talking about, right, Like he like modified,

1:27:07

so he had fangs and cat eyes and kind of um

1:27:11

stripes on his skin. Yeah. One of the examples

1:27:13

that Rosen always brings up is why is it okay

1:27:15

for someone to walk in and say I want bigger

1:27:18

breaths and they can make that happen. But

1:27:20

if you say you want blue nipples, that's

1:27:22

too far for some reason, you know why, So

1:27:25

we have to That's that's another hurdle

1:27:27

to really embracing

1:27:30

this trans human um notion.

1:27:34

And then finally, the seventh caveat

1:27:36

on Kyle mcintrick's list is person

1:27:39

not people. So this is the idea that we're

1:27:42

gonna have to depend more on concepts of personhood

1:27:44

rather than mere human rights. So

1:27:46

we're talking grill as, dolphins, robots, computer

1:27:49

aies, because if we're gonna step beyond and

1:27:51

outside of the traditional human experience,

1:27:54

we need to, you know, have rights

1:27:56

and stuff. We new humans need to

1:27:58

be people to even if they have thumb drives

1:28:01

and wings. This is what

1:28:04

that Eclipse Phase game is all about. And

1:28:06

so I think it's I think it's a really interesting,

1:28:09

like it's interesting is a game, but it's also just like

1:28:11

an interesting like site to go to and kind

1:28:13

of read through what they're working on

1:28:15

there for their fictional reality, just because

1:28:18

like it's addressing questions like

1:28:20

this and saying like, well, okay, if we uh,

1:28:23

if we take a gorilla or a dolphin and

1:28:26

we give it uh an enhanced

1:28:29

intelligence and then we upload it into

1:28:31

a human body, does it have rights?

1:28:34

Interesting? Wow, that's now

1:28:36

I'm just trying to imagine that the dolphin

1:28:39

human gorilla

1:28:42

hybrid body. Oh yeah, there's all kinds

1:28:44

of weird ways to go with it. But I mean

1:28:48

some of it's science fiction. But as we revealed

1:28:50

here today, I mean we're on our way towards

1:28:52

this stuff. Yeah, I mean, like all great science

1:28:54

fiction, science fiction, echoes, the the

1:28:57

the are contemporary fears, hopes,

1:29:01

uh, and dreams concerning our

1:29:03

current technology are current science. All

1:29:06

right, So that about wraps it up. But

1:29:09

I want to know from you guys out

1:29:11

there, talk to us right

1:29:14

into us. Let us know, would

1:29:16

you do some of these things? Would you put magnets

1:29:19

in your fingertips? Or would you drop night

1:29:21

vision goo into your eyeballs?

1:29:24

Uh? You know? Or

1:29:26

would you like a hook up some sensors

1:29:29

to your body so you could feel your wife's

1:29:31

sensation of pleasure and pain? Are

1:29:33

those things that you would be interested in? And also, here's

1:29:36

the thing that I want to know, what did we miss?

1:29:38

Because there is this whole bio

1:29:40

hacker community out there that like

1:29:43

we barely scratched the surface of, and

1:29:45

I'm sure there's lots of cool stuff going on

1:29:47

out there that if you're a bio hacker and you're

1:29:49

out there listening, You're like, oh, these guys they

1:29:51

don't know a bunch of squares. They

1:29:54

completely missed all this cool

1:29:56

stuff. But let us know right into us,

1:29:58

tell us what you just finished under your forearm

1:30:00

or your yeah

1:30:03

yeah. So what are the ways to do

1:30:05

that? Well, you can start with social media. We're on

1:30:07

Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, we're on Instagram.

1:30:10

On all of those we are blow the Mind.

1:30:13

You can also visit us at our mothership

1:30:16

stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's

1:30:18

where you're gonna find all of our podcasts,

1:30:20

all of our videos, the articles

1:30:22

and galleries and lists and all that stuff

1:30:25

that we put together. And then

1:30:27

there's the final place, the final frontier,

1:30:30

where you can write to us. And what's that, Robert,

1:30:32

that's right. You can always send us an email

1:30:34

at blow the Mind at how stuff works

1:30:36

dot com. Well

1:30:46

more on this and thousands of other topics How

1:30:49

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1:30:59

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